AmateurRadio.com

Both the Baofeng UV-5R handheld UHF/VHF radio and the Sainsonic AP510 APRS tracker come with interface cables with pirated chips. These are clones of Prolific USB/serial chips. Since Prolific has taken measures against this, only old drivers will work with them. That means that one has to stop automatic driver updates as explained on the Miklor site for the Baofeng UV-5R. The same is true for the AP510. This is a nuisance.

I got tired of this and got myself some USB/serial modules from Ebay based on the CP2102 chip instead. The cost was US $1.43 a piece so it should be affordable for anyone. I also got some clear heat shrinkable tube.

It wasn’t too hard to follow the instructions on the Miklor site. I ended up replacing the chip in the original Baofeng serial cable. I’m a hardware guy so I think it is a shame not to see the three LEDs for power, rx, and tx so I used my Dremel to make a 12×12 mm cut-out in the original case, and then I closed it by using transparent shrinkable tube. For a picture, see the top of the first image.

If it doesn’t work the first time, exchange the rx and tx connections and see if that works better. According to this site, the boards can be marked just opposite of what you might think.

The Sainsonic AP510 APRS unit has a cable that on first sight just looks like a standard USB cable, but it also contains such a chip. Here I made a completely new cable without any case.  It is important that 5 Volts also passes through as this is used for charging. The pinout can be found on the site of DJ7OO (use Google translate if needed). I enclosed the board in shrinkable tube which is transparent enough for the LEDs to shine through as seen in the bottom of the first image. The board with the fake chip is found in the middle. 

So now I have interface cables for both units that don’t require me to stop updates of drivers or any other special precautions and it is much easier to program the devices from any PC.

Sverre Holm, LA3ZA, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Norway. Contact him at [email protected].

Both the Baofeng UV-5R handheld UHF/VHF radio and the Sainsonic AP510 APRS tracker come with interface cables with pirated chips. These are clones of Prolific USB/serial chips. Since Prolific has taken measures against this, only old drivers will work with them. That means that one has to stop automatic driver updates as explained on the Miklor site for the Baofeng UV-5R. The same is true for the AP510. This is a nuisance.

I got tired of this and got myself some USB/serial modules from Ebay based on the CP2102 chip instead. The cost was US $1.43 a piece so it should be affordable for anyone. I also got some clear heat shrinkable tube.

It wasn’t too hard to follow the instructions on the Miklor site. I ended up replacing the chip in the original Baofeng serial cable. I’m a hardware guy so I think it is a shame not to see the three LEDs for power, rx, and tx so I used my Dremel to make a 12×12 mm cut-out in the original case, and then I closed it by using transparent shrinkable tube. For a picture, see the top of the first image.

If it doesn’t work the first time, exchange rx and tx and see if that works better. According to this site, the boards can be marked just opposite of what you might think.

The Sainsonic AP510 APRS unit has a cable that on first sight just looks like a standard USB cable, but it also contains such a chip. Here I made a completely new cable without any case.  It is important that 5 Volts also passes through as this is used for charging. The pinout can be found on the site of DJ7OO (use Google translate if needed). I enclosed the board in shrinkable tube which is transparent enough for the LEDs to shine through as seen in the bottom of the first image. The board with the fake chip is found in the middle. 

So now I have interface cables for both units that don’t require me to stop updates of drivers or any other special precautions and it is much easier to program the devices from any PC.

Sverre Holm, LA3ZA, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Norway. Contact him at [email protected].

According to the following post, the US Air Force still trains a few individuals each year on Morse Code. Also this blog that this post is on is a cool SWL website if you are interested.

http://swling.com/blog/2015/12/morse-code-training-in-the-air-force/






Mike Crownover, AD5A, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Texas, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

According to the following post, the US Air Force still trains a few individuals each year on Morse Code. Also this blog that this post is on is a cool SWL website if you are interested.

http://swling.com/blog/2015/12/morse-code-training-in-the-air-force/






Mike Crownover, AD5A, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Texas, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

courtesy: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/

This month's Sky & Telescope magazine mentions an interesting study presented in a press release from the International Astronomical Union's 29th General Assembly held this past summer.



Frederic Clette (Royal Observatory of Belgium) and colleagues analyzed the past 400 years of sunspot records and found that the (previously believed) upward trend in solar activity is really a calibration error. They found instead, that solar activity has been relatively stable since the 1700s.

The IAU's summer press release goes on to say ...

" The Sunspot Number, the longest scientific experiment still ongoing, is a crucial tool used to study the solar dynamo, space weather and climate change. It has now been recalibrated and shows a consistent history of solar activity over the past few centuries. The new record has no significant long-term upward trend in solar activity since 1700, as was previously indicated. This suggests that rising global temperatures since the industrial revolution cannot be attributed to increased solar activity.

The results ... make it difficult to explain the observed changes in the climate that started in the 18th century and extended through the industrial revolution to the 20th century as being significantly influenced by natural solar trends.

The apparent upward trend of solar activity between the 18th century and the late 20th century has now been identified as a major calibration error in the Group Sunspot Number. Now that this error has been corrected, solar activity appears to have remained relatively stable since the 1700s

The newly corrected sunspot numbers now provide a homogeneous record of solar activity dating back some 400 years. Existing climate evolution models will need to be reevaluated given this entirely new picture of the long-term evolution of solar activity. This work will stimulate new studies both in solar physics (solar cycle modelling and predictions) and climatology, and can be used to unlock tens of millennia of solar records encoded in cosmogenic nuclides found in ice cores and tree rings. This could reveal more clearly the role the Sun plays in climate change over much longer timescales. "

courtesy: World Data Center - SILSO

The graph above shows the Group Sunspot Numbers (GSN) measured over the past 400 years following the new calibration. The Maunder Minimum, between 1645 and 1715, when sunspots were rare and winters harsh, is clearly evident.

I found this graph particularly interesting with regards to long-term affects on propagation as it illustrates the upcoming predicted Gleissberg Cycle, the 'cycle within the Cycle' ... a period of several weak 11-year cycles in a row and lasting from 80-90 years ... great news for low-frequency fans but not so good for 6m diehards. 

Maybe we'll get one more humdinger before it arrives!



Steve McDonald, VE7SL, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from British Columbia, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

The big shack renovation meant I had to put all my stuff back into boxes. No problem spending some time without my rigs and tools, but I didn’t want to spend a couple of months without any form of radio. So I left out the RTL-SDR dongle and a mobile whip to see if I could get some more out of it than digital TV. I have had the dongle for a while now, but I was never impressed by it. Lots of white noise and very few signals to be seen on the waterfall. I even boxed it up nicely to avoid EMI.

The first step was to see if the dongle still worked by scanning the DVB-T bands. After installing the necessary RTL-SDR packages I fired up VLC to see if it would decode signals. There are packages like MythTV and MeTV that can let you watch DVB-T, but I don’t like cluttering up my system especially since VLC is such a versatile piece of software. For it to work you need to open an console though, but the internet is awash with good tutorials to help you get it done.

Step 1: install dvb-apps with sudo apt-get install dvb-apps
Step 2: use the scan application that comes with dvb-apps: scan /usr/share/dvb/dvb-t/tw-All > channels.conf
Step 3: open the channels.conf file with VLC
Step 4: choose your favourite channel and enjoy

Most of the time Linux provides an alternative and in this case it’s w_scan: w_scan -X -c TW

substitute your own country code in place of TW; a list can be retrieved by issuing the command w_scan -c ?

Before I knew it I was watching the WBSC Premier 12 baseball games and found out Taiwan’s public broadcaster is airing Person of Interest. Usually I find that watching tele is just a big waste of time, but I do also find that it is the only time I am not physically active and I do need to rest more. My wife likes PoI too, so now we have a date every Monday through Wednesday at 10.

The FM band was another check to see if the RTL-SDR dongle works as advertised. On Windows the prevalent SDR software is SDR#. On Linux this is GQRX, which is based on GNU Radio, a very powerful but complex piece of software. Before you can start GQRX you need to deactivate the dvb_usb_rtl28xxu driver as this conflicts with the rtl2832 driver. Issue the following command: sudo rmmod dvb_usb_rtl28xxu. If you never watch TV then blacklist the driver in order for it to be never loaded when you insert the dongle.

I could indeed receive FM broadcasts, but as many as I could with my Sangean ATS-909, so no big win there. GQRX also has a build in AFSK demodulator and I tried to decode some APRS signals on our local frequency of 144.640 MHz. I could hear signals and see them on the waterfall, but not decode them. After trying some other antennas and even taking everything outside in the open I grew a bit frustrated and searched for some other signals to decode. Tracking aircraft using ASD-B seemed fun (G4VXE wrote about it before here on AmateurRadio.com ) so I tried to set that up. And in doing so I got a big surprise.

[to be continued]

Hans "Fong" van den Boogert, BX2ABT, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Taiwan. Contact him at [email protected].

The annual AmateurLogic Christmas Extravaganza is this Friday night at 8:00 CDT, 0200 UTC at www.live.amateurlogic.tv . You don’t want to miss it.

George Thomas, W5JDX, is co-host of AmateurLogic.TV, an original amateur radio video program hosted by George Thomas (W5JDX), Tommy Martin (N5ZNO), Peter Berrett (VK3PB), and Emile Diodene (KE5QKR). Contact him at [email protected].