AmateurRadio.com

I am abandoning the Propeller Beacon project. Sadly I am forced to accept that in my current state of health the construction of electronics is beyond my ability. All of my recent attempts have resulted in one problem or another due to stupid mistakes that I would never have made when I was well. It’s time to put the soldering iron away.

Yesterday I made up the LCD UI board for the Propeller. It seemed to go well. The instructions were good and I didn’t have any difficulty with the soldering. I thought I had finished, then realized that I had skipped a page and hadn’t soldered a connector to the LCD daughter board. That’s when I made a stupid mistake. I had soldered a male 2×8 header to the main board. Then I went and soldered another male header to the LCD board. And then I wondered what the four 1×4 female headers left over were for. Obviously they were meant to be soldered in two rows of two to make a 2×8 female header to mate with the male I originally installed. Bad words were said.

With the help of Olga I managed to get the header off. We heated all the pins using the soldering iron body which softened the plastic base until it could be pulled off. Then I removed the pins one at a time. I cleaned the holes using one of Olga’s sewing needles and installed the female headers I should have put in. All seemed well and no harm appeared to have been done apart from to my nerves and temper.

I powered up the Propeller board and loaded the LCD UI demo program. It seemed to work. I changed a few things in the program as an experiment. Then I found that the Propeller stopped responding to the buttons. After anything from a minute or so to a couple of seconds the program eventually crashed. Sometimes it would respond to a press of the reset button, sometimes it needed a power on/off. I restored the original unmodified demo program in case it was my changes that had messed things up. No such luck. Each attempt to run the program lasted for a shorter period eventually resulting in an unresponsive board. Sometimes a garbage character would appear on the LCD, sometimes it froze up blank.

I removed the LCD UI board from the main board and re-heated all the solder joints but it didn’t help. I can’t see anything wrong but there is just nothing I can do to make this board run reliably enough to use as a user interface. So it’s time to admit defeat and call it quits. As Olga said, a hobby is supposed to be fun, instead it is just making me stressed. I just wish I had more enthusiasm for operating radio instead of tinkering about.

A few hours ago, our cat Sadie passed away, peacefully in her sleep.

It’s never easy when a pet dies. Sadie’s passing was even tougher as she was the first addition to our family after Marianne and I married back in 1998.  Sadie was adopted and joined our family the very first week that we moved into our house that October.  I’ll never, ever forget when we met Sadie the first time.  We went to a pet store and she was in a crate where she was waiting to be adopted.  The lady from the store took her out of the crate and was going to hand her to me, when Sadie quite literally jumped out of her hands and into my arms.  Needless to say, it was love at first sight for both of us.

Until that point, I had always been a “dog person” and had never even considered having a cat.  Sadie was special.

She was estimated to be between 1 -2 years old at the time we adopted her.  I have no idea why she was let go, but she lived a happy 13+ years with us.  Over the past few years, she developed thyroid and liver problems.  Gradually she weakened to the point where she just gave out.

I love you Sadie. I am so glad that I was still able to hold you and pet you before you left us. I will miss you greatly.

Larry W2LJ

http://www.w1pid.com/dam/dam.html

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

For ages, I’d been intending to update my QRZ.COM biography! Finally got around to doing it this week. Hopefully it may even bring a few new viewers to the blog!

See the bio here

The picture is a little out of date. The HF rig is no longer in the lounge and sadly, Bitzy the cat is no longer with us – but it is a happy picture!

Back in 1987 I first operated from Gibraltar as ZB2/G4VXE and then the following year, as part of the Square Bashers DXpedition group we visited again, operating this time as ZB2IQ.

It was fun. therefore, to see this video from Ed, VA3ITA of his trip to Gibraltar, some of the sights and sounds (and the apes) as well as some operating on 50MHz. It’s quite a long video, but I enjoyed it!

Good also to see Ron ZB2B featured as part of the video!

This episode we left up to the listeners because we hadn’t had enough time to prepare some content for ourselves. While waiting for some input, Richard decided to give an impromptu review of the improvements in Gnome 3 and his assessment of the technology, and where he thinks it’s going from here. You might be surprised by his analysis.

After that, we had a request to discuss WINE in a little more depth than perhaps we had touched on in previous episodes. So we take a fairly broad view of the WINE project, how to use it for your applications, what its can and can’t do, and how it can benefit you.

As a quick reminder, Hamvention in Dayton is coming up quickly, from May 18-20. As always, if you can spare a few bucks, quid, euros, drachmas, or whatever currency you currently use to help send LHS out to Ohio for the weekend, we’d love to see everyone there. Any little bit will help.

Thank you to all of our listeners, as always. We couldn’t and wouldn’t do it without you!

73 de The LHS Guys

PI4H contest QTH with pyramid 80m antenna on the foreground

Well, I didn’t have much time to prepare for the PACC this year. A cold period is always a busy time at the job here. Besides that my mother-in-law had a computer that would not do what it should do. I’ve been busy with that too and it resulted in buying a new computer at the end. Probabely another case of a failing motherboard, a waste of time to fix it. I wish I had some time to work HK0NA on other bands, but it didn’t happen. I hope to check if everything is working and set-up the laptop with the latest version of N1MM at Saturday morning. Then I just go for it starting at 10m but not wasting time like last year if propagation is not good enough. I will participate in the low power single operator SSB section like last year, that’s max. 100W. The propagation doesn’t look good with low sunspots and a high A index, but it doesn’t matter as I am at my best then. I don’t have a good 10m antenna and with good propagation that would be a disadvantage. Last year most of my QSO’s were made on 40m and 80m although you need the higher bands for multipliers. Looking at my log from last year I made 552 QSOs with 122 Multipliers, that’s the score before correction. Most multipliers were made on 80m, 40m and 20m. So with bad propagation that will be the bands concentrating on. I had the opportunity to visit the PI4H contest QTH and made some pictures like last year. The guys were really enthousiastic and did made some improvement on the antennas for the contest. The only problem is that the rotor for the 10m beam doesn’t turn as it is probabely frozen. But overall I think they will improve their contest score of last year. Only 14 hours to go for the PACC start.