AmateurRadio.com

The Micro SD card I ordered arrived on Monday so I was eventually able to try installing the Google Android OS on my HTC Touch Pro. The delay turned out to be a benefit as I was able to take the advice of Eric SA5BKE who commented to my earlier post that he had found a better set of installation instructions to the ones I mentioned.

Still, as usual when I try to do anything with computers, if something can go wrong it will. First, the phone could not see the new SD Card. I had to format it with a utility from the SD Card Association. Then I messed up the screen calibration where you have to click, when prompted, on the corners of the screen, and wasted some time trying to recover from my mess-up. But eventually I was rewarded with the sight of the Android home screen on my HTC Touch Pro.

The effort was worthwhile. I really like the Android OS. It is so much better a smartphone operating system than Windows Mobile 6.1. You still feel that you are using a phone, not a Windows PC that has an annoyingly small screen. Making phone calls and sending text messages is really simple, as it should be. And once you have found out how the new OS is supposed to be used (since the download doesn’t come with a user guide) it’s easy to use.

I am a huge fan of Google – I have five GMail accounts and probably make hundreds of Google searches a week – and what I really like about Android is the way Google features are integrated into the OS. Until now I could never understand why people liked smartphones and would actually want to use them to answer email because my experience was based on trying to access GMail using one of the two awful web browsers on my Windows phone. But now I get a notification whenever a new email comes into any of my inboxes and I can either clear it or click on the email to read it in full or reply on a display designed to make full use of the small screen. I guess that’s how other smartphones work if you have a corporate mail server running Microsoft Exchange, but I’ve never had one.

I was also very impressed with the Google search widget on one of the virtual desktops of the home screen. It had a microphone icon so, out of curiosity, I clicked it and was invited to speak. A moment later it typed what I had said into the search box and was performing a search on it. Fortunately I hadn’t said something rude! I then had some fun composing emails and text messages without using the keyboard. Unfortunately the speech engine doesn’t recognize words like “comma”, “full stop” or “newline” as punctuation and formatting, nor does it recognize commands like “send.” But I was very impressed with the accuracy with which it understood what I said – the last time I tried voice input was at least a decade ago on a PC and I found it ultimately frustrating.

One of the applications I was keen to try out was Navigation, Google’s free satnav program based on Google Maps which is not available for Windows Mobile. I haven’t had a chance to test it in the car, but it seems like the full works, with a text to speech engine that barks directions at you. The optional but probably rather unnecessary satellite view looks rather cool, though I was rather less impressed by the route it suggested from home to Keswick, south-east of here, which involved turning right at the end of the cul-de-sac and going north, then west for a mile to reach the A66 before going east, instead of turning left and heading east which would save best part of two miles. My old satnav does that too, but that’s because the estate hadn’t been completed when the maps were made and it believes the top of the estate is still a building site.

The Android Market contains thousands of apps that you can download, either free or for a modest charge. However, sorting the wheat from the chaff seems like one of those things life’s too short for. It reminds me a bit of the early Windows “shareware” market when anyone who had taught themselves Visual Basic thought they would be the next Bill Gates by releasing some flaky software that did very little and usually crashed as soon as it experienced some condition the programmer hadn’t thought of.

There seem to be very few ham radio applications, though, and almost no really good ones. I saw quite a few apps to do with Morse, giving the lie to the idea that code is dead, but nothing that looked worth trying. The only professional quality radio application I could find is the new EchoLink client for Android.

My feelings about this have mellowed a bit since I wrote about it just over a week ago. Last Friday just before dinner I received a call through my EchoLink node from Practical Wireless VHF columnist and fellow blogger Tim Kirby, G4VXE, who was on his way home from work by train and called me using the EchoLink client for his iPhone. Though we’ve exchanged blog comments a few times it was very pleasant to speak with Tim for the first time. This was a contact we would be unlikely to make over radio and certainly not in that particular situation. Only EchoLink made it possible.

In the interests of research I had a conversation with myself using the EchoTest server and found the audio quality to be just as good as when I use my Kenwood TH-F7E to make contacts via my RF node. However the cellphone client has one disappointing limitation. You can’t make a direct connection using the cellular network. You have to use a communication option called “Relay” which only allows you to call other non-cellphone EchoLink users. It doesn’t allow other EchoLink users to call you. It’s a bit like having a radio and not being able to call CQ.

I was somewhat unimpressed by the Android APRS app, APRSdroid, not just in comparison with Lynn, KJ4ERJ’s APRSISCE for Windows Mobile, but even with the iBCNU app for the iPhone. The user interface is basically a console window: you can see position packets going out, and if you wish you can see raw packets of other users within a selected radius of your location. There is no support for messaging at all in the present version.

Tracking doesn’t seem to work very well either, unless you are also running another application such as Navigation that keeps the GPS on all the time. I think the problem is that the app tries to save power by turning on the GPS, waiting for a fix and then turning it off again until the next time interval. It didn’t work too badly when the phone was sitting in its charger cradle on my desktop, but getting a GPS fix when you are moving can take a very long time. There is a need for a simple APRS tracking and messaging application for Android but this has a way to go before it gets there.

The HTC port of Android OS is not an official release and has quite a few bugs and things that are still To Be Done. I’ve had the phone lock up and fail to respond to anything and have had to pull the battery a few times. There is no support for the built-in camera and the battery charge indication is completely fictitious. It’s also best not to use wi-fi as it warms up the phone and consumes a lot more power than under Windows Mobile.

Unlike most people I bought my HTC Touch Pro SIM-free and unlocked because I don’t like to be tied to a network. As a consequence I’m not going to be offered an upgrade for no extra cost when my contract runs out. I need to keep the phone for a while but I’d be more than happy to dump Windows Mobile because as a phone it’s too much hassle, even though it does allow me to run some pretty powerful applications. I hope that the issues with the HTC Android port will be resolved in order that it becomes stable enough and functional enough for me to use it on my phone all the time.

As so many people commented on my post about my apparently failing hard drive I thought I’d post an update. Dell had me run some diagnostics that are on a special diagnostic partition. I ran the entire set of hard disk diagnostics which took most of the day including a full surface scan and the drive passed all tests without a single error. Therefore as far as Dell is concerned there is nothing wrong with the hard drive. It’s possible that as Steve GW7AAV commented the operating system has marked the bad sectors so they won’t be used any more, in which case hopefully the issue was just a one-off.

In order to keep an eye on the situation I decided to look around for a SMART hard drive monitoring utility which can display the statistics stored on the hard drive controller, preferably a free one. My searches located one called Active@ Hard Disk Monitor Free which seemed to display an impressive amount of information. This program said the Health Status of my hard drive was OK, though the value was only 55% which didn’t seem too healthy to me. It’s up to 57% now, which makes me think that something bad did happen and the value will slowly improve with continued error-free operation. A look at other screenshots of the program showed values in the high 60s so perhaps I shouldn’t expect to see close to 100%. Hopefully if the problem occurs again this program will provide more information about what actually happened.

Annoyingly, when I started the computer the next day and looked at the stats I saw that Active@ Hard Disk Monitor Free is not free at all. It is a 14-day trial version. When I checked download.com I saw there were a lot of complaints about this. The old version was free, but not the current version. However it is only $6.99 to purchase a license for one PC so rather than waste more time trying to find another free alternative I have decided to pay for it.

It’s a long time since I worried about ‘improving my morse’. It’s not that it’s superb or anything, but it’s more than adequate for what I want to do with it. There’s not much that I hear on the air that I can’t copy – although I have a sneaking feeling that speeds in the international CW contests are creeping higher, and I have to listen to some calls a bit closer than I used to!

But I was having an interesting chat with Ian, G4WUH this morning – prompted by a comment of mine that the mobile rig I’m trialling in the car this week, the Yaesu FT1900E has a built in Morse trainer. Haven’t tried it yet, but can see it would be good to have running whilst you were in the car.

It was interesting talking to Ian this morning about improving morse speed. Ian’s background is a professional radio officer who was trained to use morse. Ian said that one of the ways to improve your speed and competency is to listen to as much morse as you can – for example, have the rig running whilst your watching TV or reading. It’s almost as if the subconscious brain starts to process it and it becomes a ‘background process’.

This will help you if you want to be able to send/receive morse at the same time as doing something else. I CAN send morse and talk at the same time, but it’s not easy AND I’m inclined to forget what I said…!!

Spent my birthday participating (casually) in the Straight Key Century Club Weekend Sprint. My Lake Fredrica neighborhood site was where I set up my shelter and 3 antennas. I had a 40m dipole fed with twinlead up 40 ft and running E-W. An End Fed Halfwave for 20m was nearly vertical suspended by a nearby tree. A twinlead 44 ft doublet on my 20 ft Jackite with the ends at 16 feet was setup running N-S to give me a bit of a mini-smorgasbord of antenna choices. Since it was really sunny, I hooked up my ACME GC100 Solar Charger and VW Solar Panel.

Bands were decent with 40m quiet and some DX coming through early from Eu stations. Nice to hear that again. 20m came alive and was pretty much the go to band for the majority of the day. I did check 15m a couple times but did not hear much and no one replied to my CQ’s.

In the middle of a QSO, my Jackite pole decided to collapse but I was able to finish the QSO with one end of the dipole about 4 feet above the ground. hi hi

The highlight of the day was my last QSO with EA3NO, Lluis in Spain. As the special station for the sprint there was a lot of competition but Lluis hung in there with my weak signal and pulled me out of the crowd after a couple attempts. THANK YOU FOR THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT Lluis!

Still wondering what a CPG is? Contest Point Giver! I am a really casual contester. Really the only reason I participate is that contests offer a fairly good opportunity to make some QSO’s. When you are QRP you have to do a lot of listening, plus pounce and search, but serious contesters will dig out weak signals to make the QSO’s so it is fun. I enjoy giving out points and reading the mail on ops that are faster than my cw comfort zone. Good practice, eh?

Here’s some photos from the day. Enjoy!

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72,

Kelly K4UPG PB #173 SKCC #5415

This is going to be pretty short, because there’s not a whole lot to say. I had a few hours of free time this weekend to work in the ARRL September VHF QSO Party contest. I’m not really sure where the name “QSO Party” comes from, but this was one of the most boring parties that I’ve even been to. (For those of you who are unfamiliar, this is just another contest, hence my question about the name.) Typically band conditions for VHF contests aren’t terrific in September, but usually there are a reasonable number of people to work. This year wasn’t typical.

As with most of my contesting efforts, I participate on a part-time basis. I had a few hours Saturday afternoon and more hours Sunday afternoon. I think that my total operating time was around 6 hours, and for those 6 hours, I managed an average of about 7 1/2 QSOs per hour, for a grand total of 45 contacts. That was just plain awful. I only worked 6 meters, and had a total of 10 grids for the contest. Most of the folks who I spoke with were having similar results.

I generally like the VHF contests, particularly on 6m, because you never know when the band might open up and you’ll suddenly be able to work across the country. This year, the farthest contact that I had was in FM18 in Virginia to the south, and FM43 in Maine to the north. Usually there will be an opening down to the south or southwest, and typically I’ll pick up a few grids in Florida, but not this year.

A lot of that six hours was spent with either the voice or CW keyer sending my CQs while I occupied myself otherwise. (Sharon’s glad, because it gave me a chance to finally upgrade her computer from an ancient version of Eudora to the current version of Thunderbird. But I digress…)

The only consolation that I have is that it seems that the folks in my area were all in the same boat, but I can’t say that this was one of the more fun contests in recent memory.

Here’s my score summary:

        Band  Mode  QSOs    Pts   Grd
          50  CW       3      3     1
          50  USB     42      42    9
       Total  Both    45      45   10

Score: 450

 450 points? Seriously? Ouch. I miss 2006. (Ok, those were earlier in the summer, but they sure were a lot more fun.)

Congratulations New England RadioSport enthusiasts for crafting an award winning proposal. Doug Grant, K1DG, Chairman, WRTC2014, Inc. stated in CQ Contest Reflector, “We consider this a great honor, and will work hard to make the event enjoyable and memorable for everyone involved.”

RadioSport Russia set the new standard and raised the bar for competitors and participants. A job well done that benefited the future of ham radio. We have an example of world class competition that speaks to international goodwill and the enduring spirit of wireless communications, nothing less than field day style, for the young at heart.

The task in New England is monumental and I’m hedging the assembled team of passionate volunteers and excellent leadership will produce one for ham radio’s history book. This is an exciting moment for RadioSport USA!

Contest on.

See Also.
World Radio Team Championship 2010 Russia.