planetkris

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the crash…

Kenwood is pro APRS. Something must have been lost in the translation when the marketing guys wrote up the specs for the TM-V71A. It lists APRS, and then to the right it says: NO.

What does that mean? It certainly can transmit and receive on 144.390. So, it doesn’t have a built in TNC like its older brother the 710. So? It’s certainly an APRS capable radio. It even has the industry standard 6-pin mini din ready for packet data on the back of the rig. The TM-V71A is great for APRS duties.

Something tells me that the marketing department wants you to steer over to the RC-D710. It’s a ready to go TNC with all sorts of options that make your V71A ‘feel’ like you spent the big bucks. Well, the small bucks are okay with me. Matter of fact, with this unit connected to an Argent Tracker2 and a Garmin Nuvi 350 - it’s about $1500 worth of kit for about $600. Stay tuned as I install it over the next few weeks.

First challenge: Getting the radio to talk to your TNC (tracker).
I guess I could blame those marketing guys again, but I don’t know who messed up the verbiage in the manual on the pin-outs for the DATA jack. I opened up the manual and flipped to the section on packet operation. Easy enough, I just have to provide audio in/out, PTT and ground. Wait… What pin is PTT?

1 PKD input, 2 DE, 3 PKS input, 4 PR9 output, 5 PR1 output, 6 SQC output
Seriously Kenwood? Where did these abbreviations come from?

The description is just as confusing. For pin 3: ‘L’ is transmitted and the microphone is muted. The letter L? The low? What?!
Does that give one any indication that pin 3 is the PTT? Leading to the confusion is the ability to set the “baud rate” for the radio. (Please take note the quotes…) This had me questioning if there actually was a TNC in the radio and whether to pass audio data or digital data to the unit.
Panicked, I called Brian NJ6N for some help. He chuckled at the descriptions and pointed me to buxcomm.com where a handy reference sheet tells us the following.

1 DATA IN, 2 GND, 3 PTTP, 4 DATA OUT, 5 AF OUT, 6 SQ
Now that’s more like it. Brian also explained that the baud rate has to do with the filtering the unit is doing. For very high data rates it skips some of the internal circuitry that could lead to some issues with received packets. For our purposes, APRS is 1200 baud and the default settings will be fine.

Cable time: Because I’m super impatient, I scrounged the house looking for a 6-pin mini din connector. “Hey, that PS/2 keyboard / mouse connector looks like it could do the trick!” Before you could say “e-waste” I had the end off a PS/2 keyboard on the desk hooked to an ohm meter. Bad news - They don’t use pin 2, and they don’t even bother to leave an un-used wire in there. Don’t bother tearing open the mouse - it also doesn’t utilize pin 2 at all. Thinking that this is the end of my experiments I slice the connector open and take a closer look. Pin 2 is there and, sure enough, nothing is connected to it. After digging a channel with a sharp knife I find there is enough there to solder. The elegant solution I came up with is to ground the pin to the outer shield and use that for pin 2 ground. A little heat shrink and we’re back in business. For those of you with patience, it looks like this cable from Byonics should do the trick.

Using the Tracker2 manual I came up with the following pin configuration:
Argent Tracker2 >>> Kenwood TM-V71A
DB9 >>> 6-pin mini
1 audio out >>> 1 data in
2 squelch input >>> 6 squelch out
3 ptt >>> 3 ptt
5 audio in >>> 5 af out
6 ground >>> 2 ground

Plugged in and ready to go: I turned on the radio and tuned to 144.390. I specified in the menu which side my packet operations would be on. My Tracker2 blinked to confirm it was hearing packets! A quick test and I was able to send a message to K6SOA-9. Receive and transmit both work. Now, one side of the radio will be dedicated to APRS, but this is no different then the D700. A remote switch is in the works to allow me to turn off the tracker and regain the use of both A and B sides, should I need a cross-band repeat or dual receive.

Next time I’ll be detailing the entire install. From hacking the existing FM antenna mount, to Garmin Nuvi 350 APRS messaging. I even tackle getting the Honda Fit amplified antenna working inside the car. As you can see I’ve added a 12v cig jack and Anderson power pole panel. Stay tuned!

The number one reason for me not to upgrade to a linux os was simple: dual monitor support. I have a wacky setup as well. I have a 15″ warm flat screen CRT Samsung, and a 22″ glorious Acer LCD. 1024X768+1680X1050. I’ll detail my setup at some point, but here’s what went down…

Ubuntu live CD failed to even show up on one monitor. I searched on the internets and was told that KDE had a rough time with dual monitor support. I found out that Xfce handles dual monitors with ease. Discovered that Xubuntu is bundled with Xfce and Firefox and not some wacky Opera or Konquerer deal. After loading the Nvidia drivers automatically after install I configured twinview and was well on my way in one evening. I had heard about Virtual Box - but the pot was made sweeter when I found this post about seamless XP integration with Virtual Box.

Here is the magnificent geek screenshot.
For extra points the folder that’s open under XP is a shared drive, the wallpaper is mandolux, and I’m listening to somafm.com

Oh - Vista AND Windows 7 can suck it.

Here he is! Our new, life-size, Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube - ready for action in the portal of our living room. Properly weighted and built to scale, our Companion Cube will help us with lots of mundane tasks around the apartment.

Take 2 yards of $1 dark grey fabric, 15 light grey felt squares*, 3 chopped rhubarb, 2 pink felt squares*, 1 Faux Suede Buff Storage Ottoman, about 4 hours of pattern cutting and easy stitching, and you too can have your very own! It’s basically a spiffy slip cover on an already cubed ottoman. The five sides are cut 16.5″ square (to accommodate for sewing), and then there are really only 4 other pieces: The 5.5″ corners, the 4″ centers, the 6″ circles, and the 4″ hearts. Check out my pattern for the Companion Cube here. (*aptly named felt “squares” were 12″ X 9″ at your local crafty store)

Check him out chillin’ in the living room. ♥

After playing the game Portal for 3 days straight a couple months ago, Christine and I remarked that these cubed ottomans (that we’re strangely so fond of) could easily be upgraded to Companion Cubes. As a surprise to Christine when she returned home from a conference - I sewed one up. Enjoy!

Search engines make webmasters lazy. Why take the time to index all the groups, organizations, and programs at the university, when you can just throw them all up there. I think the liberal use of subdomains makes it a lot harder to find stuff. In a folder hierarchy you can see what’s below. With subdomains it’s all over your head - literally. Just how many are up there?

As Christine is in Graduate School here at UCI, we often need to look up a service, site, number, notice or document pertaining to the: shuttle, class, administrator, help desk, parking. I’ll spend hours trying to figure out if I need to call Housing, ResNet, NACS, or ICS when the cable goes out. Tons of silly acronyms and even more websites on silly subdomains.

The UCI network group [at one time] published sixty or so of them - turns out there are more then 400 uci.edu subdomains. This was one of those side projects that started out like “hmm - I wonder…” and rapidly evolved into several hours of throttling my connection just enough so that every web server on campus wouldn’t report my IP. “shit… That’s a lot more then 60…“

My list:
hidden.uci.edu.subdomains

They apparently hand them out like candy. There are no rules for wildcards or leading with www. Sometimes they have both, sometimes only one. How frustrating is it that you have to remember the www on some and not others? Some sites are updated daily, some sites have seen more work in the late 90’s. I’ll bet that a lot of this is unavailable to those outside of the uci.edu domain. A lot of services and hidden extras to be found I’m sure. Enjoy this fascinating list of hidden uci.edu.subdomain goodness. Just finding out that we had a passport office on campus was worth the time.

UPDATE: There was at one time no approval process, but one is in place. It is up to the approved group to setup the DNS to respond to www or not.

Check out the APRS tracker box I just built. This box hooks to 12 volts, an antenna, and a GPS puck. It transmits it’s location on programmed intervals through the radio to digipeaters in my area. These digis then transmit my location information to the internet. Check out findu.com.

I wanted the box to be as small as possible, so I ordered two sizes. The smallest one they had and the next size up. I used the tiny 9″ x 8″ x 4″ box. A bit of a squeeze, but it’s all in there. It’s a good thing you can take off the HTX-202’s battery. The idea is: I can throw this unit in any vehicle (car, truck, rally car, etc.) and track it from space.

The Byonics TinyTrak TNC with GPS receiver is around $120 with cables. The radio was $55 used on eBay and the connectors were found at the local electronics store and a swap meet. The powerpole chassis mount is wired up in series so that other hardware can be powered and either connection can be used.

I started with AO-51 at 9:23, but I didn’t hear it at all. I am following the ‘if you can’t hear it, don’t transmit’ rule, but I think no one was on it. (over the ocean / day after field day) Next time I will try at least once to transmit. At 9:30 I gave up on the low AO-51 pass and moved on to the prime 53 degree SO-50 pass.

Now there is a bit of a trick to the SO-50 and that is its 10 minute timer. You need to turn the transmitter on by sending a tone for 2 seconds to the satellite. I expected that to have been done by many other hams working the bird as it passed. I didn’t hear much on the downlink until another station keyed up on the uplink frequency with the PL of 74.4. This turns the timer on. You can clearly hear it in my recording as it goes just about full quiet and XE2BHL calls out.

Needless to say, I’m stoked! There is a lot of things that go into tracking and contacting a satellite and any one of a number of issues can prevent you from hearing anything. I had an un-tuned antenna, a time problem (UTC -8 instead of -7), and a polarity issue (holding the antenna flat instead of upright). Finally hearing both SO-50 and AO-51 at Field Day made me a lot more confident in what I was doing.

Things I learned:
Don’t assume a ton of people will be on the satellite you’re working.
Listen first THEN transmit
AND when nothing is heard at all transmit at least once
Callsign in phonetics! Kilo India Six India Uniform Charlie
Delta Mike One Three (see grid squares)
Keep at it!

I had to get clever and figure out a way to use my mp3 player / voice recorder (with no mic input) to record sounds off my hand held FT-60 transceiver. As you can see on the right, I still play with legos. It’s my lego mp3 holder thingy. That’s an earbud strapped to the small mic hole on my Creative mp3 player. It’s surprisingly not that bad! I was able to place it on the front seat of the car while I was outside yeilding my antenna around. This kept a lot of the ambient noise down and I was able to record my very first satellite QSO!

SO-50 6/25/2007 9:37PM PST - XE2BHL - DM12 - Jose in Tijuana, Mexico
KI6IUC first satellite contact - MP3

Yeah, I know - about time. My used Series 2 has been pretty good to me for about a year now. Just before Christmas we lost power in the middle of some heavy Tivo usage and she didn’t boot right back up. I was sitting at the ‘just a few minutes’ screen for more then a few minutes. I tried hitting the enter key on the remote. I’m still not 100% sure what that’s supposed to do. After some time and a reboot - it came back up.

It was a three days before our New Years WRC Party and Christine calls me from home. “The TV is black and the Tivo guy won’t come up.” I have her pull the plug and ‘reboot’ it. Tivo comes back up, but not for long. The morning of the party it takes a black screen nap again. Now I’m worried. I can’t stand just pulling the plug to turn it off, so I reach down and power cycle the UPS.

I know the Tivo is a Linux PC and I know it could be giving me WAY more information then: “Almost there! Just a few minutes…” I think the drive is probably beat, and it’s about time to crack the case anyway. I print out the Hinsdale Guide and download the MFS Tools Boot CD. As long as you can master / slave drives and type - you too can handle this.

The first task was to get the Tivo apart and get an image backup. It took some time to prepare a fat32 drive for where the image would transfer to. I forgot how long it takes a 40GB drive to format in DOS. Once the image was transferred, I copied it onto my new Western Digital 160GB. Unfortunately the max drive size the ’stock’ Tivo can see is 137GB, but at $1.75 a gigabyte it’s not too much of a loss. Plus no drive really formats out to it’s ‘listed’ size, as I have several 112GB “120’s” kicking around.

So now I’m rocking a 136 hour Tivo! I removed the /tvbin/modemtest file so it shouldn’t hang at boot anymore, plus I don’t use the modem to connect to the Tivo service. Having a fresh drive to store 5.6 days of programming should make me stop worrying when either Christine or myself decide to grab 2 seasons of something. The next step is to load telnet and some other utilities so that I can monitor drive space and get into some other fun Tivo hacks.

Oh, and one final note: The Speed Channel can suck it. They have no plans to carry WRC this year. This is THE main reason I pay $28 a month for digital cable. I hope OLN can pick up the pace - but I’m not paying $300 a year to watch one week of Dakar…

Back in the days when modems ruled and your parents long distance bill would be one more month away.
ATZ
OK
ATDT5551212
CONNECT 300

I started my career as a field service tech. Besides the hours of McDonalds behind the wheel of a 1984 Ford LTD - I was mobile; Climbing stairs, lugging monitors, and other physical activity. I then worked in a computer repair shop. On my feet all day - at the workbench. Even at my last few jobs with corporate America, I tried to stay mobile. Taking stairs, working calls, etc. My current job requires no such ambulatory motion. I connect to remote servers and call customers from my fat cushy desk chair. Inside my boring cubicle.

This morning I dropped my leather sofa sized office chair off at the empty cube beside me. I plunked down about 10 pounds of scrap wood, and began lifting my monitors 18″ off the surface of the desk. “What the hell are you doing?” asked some. “Kook!” scoffed others. I had at least mentioned this to management in the past - how it would be nice to pull the monitors up and be able to stand at my desk. “Are you going to stand up all day?” - “Yes,” I replied. “All day… Get it out of your system.”

I built an 18″ stand out of 2 pieces of scrap plywood and some leftover poplar. It took me like an hour to design and build over the weekend. Pictures to follow…

It has certainly been a string of ‘office space’ moments all morning.

My top 5 reasons to stand up while you work:
#1. Health.
Keeps the blood flowing to the feet and legs - heart gets more of a workout.
#2. Productivity
I usually want to snooze at 2:30 in the sofa chair.
#3. Originality
My office mates mock me - because they want to BE me. My personality can’t sleep in a chair. I think that if everyone was able to customize their cube, we’d see more out of the box thinking.
#4. Mobility
When the 9.0 quake hits Irvine or the brush fire spreads - I’m out the door!
#5. Stamina
Being on your feet all day isn’t as bad as slouching to death in a sleepy leather chair.

Break conformity!

I also want to give props to the guys at Pixar for giving me the ‘Eureka’ moment:
Check out this behind the scenes look at Pixar - by “Ain’t It Cool News”