AmateurRadio.com

In case anyone has seen weird behavior in the RSS feeds or on the Web sites, let me explain:  I have renumbered episodes after #018.  Back then I recorded a couple of updates from OSCON 2010 and called them Episode #018A and Episode #019A.  Not long after that, the discrepancy in numbering started to eat at me.  Now a couple of years later, I have decided to do something about it.  All of the episodes have been renumbered, meaning that we’re a couple of episodes ahead of where we were.  This will probably cause a little bit of confusion in the short term but overall I am happy that it is done.  Nothing else has changed, just the numbering scheme. Thank you for your patience while we go through this brief transition period.

73 de Russ, Linux in the Ham Shack

Yesterday I had an email from Raspberry Pi saying that today there would be an announcement about the the keenly awaited device. Today I took a look at their website and found out that they are almost ready to ship the low cost ARM based devices that run a Linux called Fedora. the specs are available at both RS and Farnells, two component suppliers here in the UK.

In case you couldn’t wait to click through then blow are the specifications lifted straight from the RS website. From what I can gather there will be two variants, one called model A and the other called model B aptly enough. The difference being the addition of LAN and some other undisclosed features on the Model B.

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer board that plugs into a TV and a keyboard. It’s a miniature ARM-based PC which can be used for many of the things that a desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays High-Definition video.

Features

• Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
• GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
• GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
• 256MB RAM
• Boots from SD card, running the Fedora version of Linux
• 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
• HDMI socket
• USB 2.0 socket
• RCA video socket
• SD card socket
• Powered from microUSB socket
• 3.5mm audio out jack
• Header footprint for camera connection
• Size: 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm

Price £21.60

All this for just £21.60! I sound like an advert but if the blurb matches the ability to programme the little blighter (easily) then this must be a concern for the Arduino crowd. Before we all get too excited though the RS website allows you to register interest and you’ll be getting one each at first.

For reasons that will become clear in a future post or series of posts, we’ve been busy lately—don’t worry, it’s a good thing.  I did manage to sneak away from my regular (usually desk-bound analysis) work into the lab and tune-up an eBay-special cavity filter for 903 MHz with our new network analyzer.  It’s really amazing how you can dial these things in if you have the right tools.  This one is a 3-cavity filter about 10x8x3 cm.

Passband insertion loss is about 1.2 dB.  Harmonic rejection at 1.8 GHz is 70 dB down.  I’ll take it.

I also have some eBay-special helical filters that were advertised to be for 432 MHz.  So, I need to cobble up some carrier boards to try them out.  Another day, another project.

A good friend of mine passed away last week after a short illness. Mike Adams, WA2MWT, was a good friend and mentor, but just saying that doesn’t do Mike justice. You can (and should) read his obituary, or this nice article about him from the local paper  to get an idea of what kind of person Mike was, but I wanted to take a few minutes to share some of my personal memories of Mike.

I first met Mike about 12 years ago, right after I was first licensed as KC2FZT. I was encouraged by Joyce, KA2ANF, to attend a meeting of the local ham radio club, the 10-70 Repeater Association, but other than Joyce (who was one of the VEs who administered my exam), I really didn’t know anyone at the meeting. I wandered into the meeting and sat down, feeling a bit like a lost sheep, when Mike came up to me, introduced himself, and asked me to join him and a few others sitting together at a table near the back of the room. Mike helped “translate” some of what was going on and introduced me to others at the table, and generally made me feel welcome. Mike and I seemed to hit it off immediately. Actually, Mike seemed to hit it off with everyone immediately. To paraphrase my son Justin, KC2MCS, “Nobody ever had a bad thing to say about Mike. Everyone just liked him.”

As I found out, Mike was the Emergency Management Coordinator for the Borough of Ramsey, New Jersey, a town about 15 minutes away from where I lived. He was also a regular Net Control Station not only for the local NTS traffic net (NJVN/Late), but he also filled in on several other local area nets. I thought it might be interesting to get involved with NTS, but I didn’t really know how to get started and, like many other new hams, I was very “mic shy”. (As Mike explained to me, it’s “mic shy”, not “mike shy”.) Mike invited me to stop by the Ramsey Office of Emergency Management (OEM) headquarters (better known as the Emergency Operations Center, or EOC) and he’d show me how traffic handling was done.  (Traffic, in this context, has nothing to do with cars and roads, but rather with handling radiogram messages. While for the most part what’s done is for practice, it is a function of the Amateur Radio Service that has proven to be invaluable when other forms of communications are not functioning.) Mike patiently coached a very nervous me through my first NJVN/L check-in at the EOC, and kept on helping me until I was comfortable enough to eventually act as Net Control myself. Mike had a great way to put me at ease when I was nervous. In what became a running joke between us, he’d say “Don’t worry, we’ve all been there.”

Mike also introduced me to other public service aspects of ham radio. He got me involved with supporting numerous public service events, including bike tours and foot races. His encouragement helped me to decide to volunteer one year to support the NY City Marathon as a radio operator, which was an amazing experience.

Mike got me involved with Skywarn and ARES ®  and while I’m not as involved with either of those organizations as I was in the past, I glad that Mike gave me the push that I needed. He also encouraged me to become a member of the Ramsey OEM, which is a little unusual since I don’t live in Ramsey. Of course, I’m not the only one from out of town. Mike explained that one of the reasons why he recruited people from out of town was because that way there would always be someone unaffected by something that happened in the town available to provide assistance. Mike strongly believe that unless you were comfortable that you and your family were safe that you wouldn’t be able to effectively serve others. To that end, he made sure that we always remembered to “look out for number one”. It was that attitude that made me want to help, and I was honored a when I was made a Life Member of the Ramsey OEM a few years ago.

I will miss taking car trips with Mike out to Upton to attend the annual Skywarn coordinators meeting, the trip up to Newington to visit ARRL Headquarters, working with him during the Ramsey Run, the MS-100, and countless other public service events, and I will miss just sitting around the EOC talking with him. I will miss Mike’s sage advice, his wit, and his friendship.

Goodbye my friend.

Anyone looking at my blog could be forgiven for thinking that I had dropped off the face of the earth for a while, has nothing been happening in my world?

Well, the answer is that a LOT has been happening and all at once. My daytime job has become busier and there have been several non-radio projects at home that needed to be completed. All this has kept me away from Amateur Radio blogging even though I have spent more time on the computer than usual.

In between projects I did manage to stumble across this video of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper explaining just how “long” a nano-second is and what it looks like. This has relevance to radio as we’re usually well aware of frequency and wavelength but don’t usually spend too long thinking about speed.

I’ve been using WordPress for my weblog for years now and just turned on a mobile version of the blog. The WordPress plugin WPtouch makes this very easy to do. It took about 5 minutes to get it up and running.

The WPtouch plugin automatically detects when the user is browsing  with a smartphone and implements the mobile interface. The user has the option of turning the mobile presentation off.

Highly recommended!

73, Bob K0NR

For those who are following the progress of the ultra cheap pc proposed by Raspeberry Pi, I received this email this morning.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation will be making a big (and very positive) announcement that just might interest you at 0600h GMT on Wednesday 29 February 2012. Come to www.raspberrypi.org to find out what’s going on.

Eben Upton
Executive Director, Raspberry Pi Foundation

Perhaps they’ll be announcing pricing and delivery of what should be very useful lightweight PC’s (is that even the right way to describe them?)