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AmateurRadio.com is offering a free prize drawing!

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With the help of our generous sponsor, KB3IFH QSL Cards, we’re holding a drawing for 1,000 free full-color photo QSL cards. This is a US$100 value.
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Last Saturday  the Ottawa Amateur Radio Digital Group had their first Ottawa D-STAR symposium at Carleton University.  As a co-organizer I may be a little biased but I think this was a great success.  Despite snow flurries in the morning, causing bad weather conditions for some driving in, the day went very smoothly.  We used the internet to the full, with one presentation coming in via Skype from the UK; wireless access was provided for delegates; we had live streaming of the presentations as well as running a DVAP dongle too.

We had a full room and the presentations were excellent.  The final list of presentations were as follows:

• Welcome, Logistics, Agenda – VA3STL
• Introductions – VE3CVG
• D-STAR Past, Present, Future – VE3EI
• The VA3ODG System  – What Is – VE3CVG
• Linking and Routing – VA3KA
• DVAPs, Dongles and HotSpots – M0GRU
• Lunch
• The Spaghetti Bowl  – VE3CVG
• Overview of Gateway Technologies – VE2BFW
• FREESTAR – VA3OMP
• ID1 and High Speed Data – VA3YH
• D-RATs Overview- VA3STL
• DPRS Overview – VA3YH
• The YMCA-YWCA – VE3CVG
• Plans: Almonte Amateur Radio Club – VE3UIX
• Discussion

The slides of the talks can be found at the West Carleton Amateur Radio Club website and there is a link to some recordings of the streaming.

Andrew, M0GRU, was the presenter from the UK and he was displayed on a large screen TV whilst he could see the delegates by two web-cams in the room.  We were lucky to be joined by Greg who had managed to fly back from Regina,SK the previous night.  It was also good to be joined by Andrew’s father Rob, VE3UIX, who gave an update on the Almonte, D-Star repeater project.  Eric, VE3EI, of Icom Canada travelled up from the Niagara region to give the first talk of the day and an excellent overview of D-STAR’s past and future (watch for the IC-9100 being available in December/January, but start saving the money!).

The symposium ran from 10am to 4pm and because of many questions and full presentations there was little time for discussion at the end.

Feedback so far has been good and so I am very pleased with a successful day.

Thanks have to go to my co-organizer, Rick, VE3CVG; the Ottawa Amateur Radio Digital Group; the Dept. of Electronics for kindly providing the facilities; the Carleton University Amateur Radio Club members for helping guide the attendees around the campus; Maurice-Andre, VE3VIG, who unfortunately could not attend  but did provide directions over the air to those that needed it; and of course all the presenters and participants.

I have assembled some of my tools for massaging logs for upload to the ARRL’s Logbook of the World (LoTW).  They’re written in perl and should run with just about any modern perl distribution, including that found on Macs and GNU/Linux distributions.

lotwtools-1.0.tar.gz

The principal features are:  conversion from TRLog log.dat and mangled Cabrillo files to ADIF and fixing hour offsets.

Only a few hours left to grab some great Cyber Monday deals on radio equipment:

Yaesu FT-2900R
$149.95 (Reg. $179.95)
HRO (http://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-010078)

Yaesu FT-60R
$174.95 (Reg. $199.95)
HRO (http://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-007323)

Yaesu FTM-350R
$399.95 (Reg. $569.95)
HRO (http://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-010405)

Icom IC-7000 w/ RMK-7000
$1098.49 (Reg. $1254.95)
HRO (http://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-008093)

Icom IC-7600
$3297.49 (Reg. $3749.95)
HRO (http://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-009884)

Icom IC-92AD
$469.95 (Reg. $559.95)
HRO (http://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-009325)

Join ARRL for 3 years and get your choice of the ARRL Operating Manual or the ARRL Antenna Book as a free gift. Use web code “LME” to take advantage of the offer.
http://www.arrl.org/join/lme

Know of any other great Cyber Monday deals for hams? Leave a comment and share!

I rolled over another year on the odometer of life last week and as is the custom around here, I received some gifts, several of which were radio-related.  The shirt is from my wife.  The Yamaha CM500 headset is from my parents.

Both of these came in good time since my “CW is the Real Thing” shirt is getting threadbare and my ProSet developed a bad spot in the cable in the past week.  I got to try them both out for a brief period at the W8AV multi-two operation in the CQ WW contest over the weekend.

The CM500 (the manufacturer page for these is gone, but you can get them from the usual places) came as highly recommended by the denizens of the Elecraft reflector via the PVRC reflector.  They’re pretty good headphones.  The sound is good and they have plenty of volume when driven by a TS-930.  The ear pads are a little thicker than those on the ProSet, which is good because after a few hours, my ears feel pinched by it.  The big downfall of the CM500 is that it feels a little bit like my head is in a vise when I wear them.  There may be an adjustment for that.

I was originally thinking that I should send the ProSet back to Heil to be refurbished.  But, the price is much higher than I remembered.  Fortunately, they stock parts for the old models.  So, I will be doing the refurbishing myself.

In WW news, I only operated for about two hours on Sunday afternoon at W8AV.  Goose replaced his big tower with a new one and the lower 40-meter antenna was not back up yet.  But, with a single 2-element Yagi at 140ish-feet and 1.5 kW from a homebrew 8877, I easily carved out a spot around 7064 kHz at 2000 UT and ran off a nice string of Europeans just as the band was opening.

I have just uploaded a minor update to the Windows version of KComm, my logging and digital modes program for Elecraft K2 and K3 transceivers. Version 1.91 now supports the ability to specify the receive and transmit sound devices using the device name rather than a number which Windows appeared to change at will.

I had been unable to find a way to get the sound card device names from Windows using Free Pascal and happened to mention this during a discussion in the Yahoo digital modes group about how so many sound card programs seemed to lose the sound card settings under newer versions of Windows. Patrick, F6CTE, who is the author of MultiPSK, very kindly responded with some Delphi Pascal code to list the installed sound devices. This has now been incorporated in KComm and makes sound card selection much easier – especially for me as I am always adding and removing USB audio devices on the shack computer which changes the numbering.

My grateful thanks to Patrick for his help with this little problem.

Episode 50: A milestone!

Announcements:

• Russ talks about his California trip: attending the Large Installation Systems Administration conference (LISA).
• The 50th episode is a milestone – Richard explains why. See also The Internet Archive.
• Lord Drachenblut reminds us of the upcoming Indiana LinuxFest in Indianapolis, Indiana. If you’d like to register, use the promotional code LHSPODCAST50 (all capital letters) and you’ll get a $15.00 discount on the ticket.
• Music in this episode is from 20lb Sounds, fronted by Dan Lynch of Linux Outlaws fame.

Topics:

• Scott, AD7MI, posted an article on his blog about moving to an all-Linux ham shack. Richard and Russ discuss the article, including Shackbox Linux, Ham Radio Deluxe, CQRLog, and more. Ultimately, Fldigi and CQRLog resulted in “100% Linux Nirvana”.
• Scott also asks what we think would be the ideal Linux-based ham shack. Russ describes his shack, which he thinks IS ideal. Our hosts then discuss various soundcard interfaces:
  • RigBlaster
  • MicroHAM
  • Rascal
• Most sound cards work fine, and Russ recommends the SoundBlaster series over all, but suggests staying away from the SoundBlaster Audigy SE (model CA0106) sound cards as they don’t seem to work well (or at all) under Linux.
• Richard likes his Yaesu FT-897D. Most modern rigs allow a fixed-audio level connection to the computer sound card, as well as computer rig control. Russ has the Kenwood TS-570D, and it, too, is well-supported in the Linux ham libraries.
• Russ and Richard discuss the fact that most hams don’t log VHF/UHF contacts, other than in contests or toward an award.
• The FCC, created by the Communications Act of 1934, included the requirement to maintain a log book in the rules. Sometime between 1983 and 1986, this requirement was dropped as the FCC determined that the information was of little use to them. (If someone can point us to a reference that identifies when the exact rule change occurred, please let us know. I was unable to find the specific change online. -Ed.)

Feedback:

• Leif, KC8RWR, writes that Internet over EME (earth-moon-earth) isn’t likely to work due to the high latency involved. (This may be in reference to a comment in Episode 48.) NASA and DARPA are involved in a Deep-Space Internet project.
• Leif also asks “Isn’t Morse code dead?” and wasn’t it replaced by “Gerke Code”? Our hosts discuss.
• Craig, KB5UEJ, writes that he thinks Russ’ audio is louder and muddier than Richard’s in episodes 46 and 47. Russ agrees that the audio on a few of the recent episodes did suffer, but should be much improved now.
• Grant, KC9SJQ, comments that he doesn’t see a link to Russ’ screencast about SSL anywhere. Yes, it somehow disappeared, but Russ is working on it. He’ll either find the file or redo it.
• William, KB9TMP, sends his comments about Episode 48 where we discuss KE9V’s article that questioned the relevance of amateur radio.
• Craig, KB5UEJ, commenting about WSPR, says that you can run less than 5W on an FT-897 by reducing the audio drive from the computer to the radio. Richard points out that the reduction is often not uniform across the audio freqeuncies used, so some intelligibility may be lost. He had that problem with packet, but he’ll try it with WSPR.
• Matt wants to know the artist and title of a song in Episode 48. The song was “Endline (Choose Nothing)” by I Am Not Lefthanded from the album “Yes Means No”. Check out the show notes for Episode 48 for a link to the song.

Donations:

• Scott, AD7MI, sent a donation just before we recorded! Thanks, Scott.
• If you’d like to help the podcast, please consider making a donation. It’s easy! Just a click on the Donate button on the web site.

Contact Info:

• Contact Richard at [email protected], Russ at [email protected], or both at the same time at [email protected].
• Listen to the live stream every other Tuesday at 8:00pm Central time. Check the LHS web site for dates.
• Leave us a voice mail at 888-455-0305 or 417-200-4811, or record an introduction to the podcast.
• Sign up for the LHS mailing list.
• Sign up for the MAGNetcon mailing list.
• Thanks to Dave from Gamma Leonis for the theme music.

Music:

• Redemption Song performed by 20lb Sounds.
• Jimmy Carter, also by 20lb Sounds.