planetkris

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the crash…

What’s next Kris? - A car that runs on NO GAS? *chortle

In the picture we have a standard 1400mAh Yaesu FT-60 battery (FNB-83 on right) that lists for $65, next to an FT-60 AA pack (FBA-25 on left) with 6 Sanyo Eneloop AA’s which total out to $50 and that price is for the 8-pack, so you have 2 more rechargeable AA’s for your walkman. I’m sure you could find the stock battery for cheaper, but even if they were the same price this new Eneloop pack lasts a third longer with 2000mAh of power.

Tech stuff: I numbered the batteries thinking that I may have to take them out and put them back in. This keeps them in the same order in the pack and I won’t mix in other batteries of various age and charge states. You also may notice the small piece of foil wrapped around the negative terminal of battery #6. This is done in order to mimic the factory battery pack. It may be part of its charging circuit, or simply may connect to the external charging pads found on the FNB-83. Either way - I want the FT-60 to recognize this as a rechargeable NiNH battery pack… because… that’s what it is. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the stock battery is just 6 AA sized cells sealed in the case. Now - This is actually a somewhat controversial modification that Yaesu won’t warrant, but it means that you can charge your new batteries in the unit. Controversial because if you are a moron - you can try to charge non-NiMH batteries and you will start a fire. A chemical / metal fire. Don’t bother reaching for the ABC class extinguisher. They also say something about about missing a temperature charging circuit in the AA case (thermistor maybe), but I can’t find one in the FNB-83, so I think this is part of the ‘cover your ass’ portion of their battery charging guide.

The Sanyo Eneloop is finally a good rechargeable battery worthy of your attention and their super flash marketing. I’m done buying ‘rechargeable’ batteries from companies that make the bulk of their money on disposables. I’ve had particularly horrible luck with bunny batteries. We got a charger and 4 of their batteries for Christine’s digital camera. After maybe 5 recharge cycles the battery life was down to 1/5th alkaline AA’s, and I’ll explain how charging them wrong was most of the problem.

Your super speedy rapid fast $9 plug in battery charger is crap. I discovered that keeping your batteries topped up and on the charger until use, is what’s killing them. I learned this too late to save a pile of NiMH Motorola TalkAbout batteries… sorry Earth. It’s A charging BASE. It’s where you keep your TalkAbout when not in use. It’s also plugged in and overcharging your batteries constantly.

The secret to making rechargeable batteries last? Effort. I know you don’t want an Excel sheet of your battery packs, voltage, and temp - so I’ll make this easy. Charge them up for no longer then 12 hours (overnight) and take them off the charger. I know the little green light comes on. I know the red light stops blinking. Take them off the charger! They’re ready to go! When they die, charge them! Don’t throw them in a drawer. Get them on the charger as soon as you can. After they have been charged up and sat in a drawer for 6 months - you’ll need to charge them again. Although with these new batteries that’s becoming less of an issue.

10 ECHO “Charge for 12 hours and stop.”
20 ECHO “Use Whenever.”
30 IF BATTERY = DEAD THEN 10
40 ELSE GOTO 20
50 END

Summary:
You can buy these off the shelf and they are ready to run.
You can get a better then stock NiMH battery for your gear.
They stay charged and ready for an emergency.
Check out the data.
Check out what the digital camera guys had to say.

We had a blast with all our friends and family!
Don’t worry - I’ll link a gallery or two here when we return.
Maybe I’ll share a story or two… More likely it will be on the brides site - sunmoonstarsgirl.com

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

This weekend was the annual ARRL Field Day. Celebrated by hams across the country, the (24 hour) event is part contest, part emergency exercise. Groups obtain a higher score the more “off the grid” they are. Point bonuses are awarded for alternate energy sources, such as portable generators, solar, and battery powered transmitters. The idea is to demonstrate to the public - A. We’re geeks and we’re having a good time. AND B. We are the people that will be relaying a message to your loved ones when the power goes down due to a natural disaster, etc.

I went into my first field day weekend with a little trepidation. I tried to figure out what the activities were going to be (of the various clubs in the area) before spending a full weekend with one particular group. My objectives were: Have a good time, learn more about ham radio, tune my homebuilt antenna, learn more about satellites, meet some folks, play with APRS, have a good time.

Later Friday night after visiting some other field day sites, I stopped by The Southern Orange Amateur Radio Association’s location. A relaxed group of folks, SOARA held their field day activities in Mission Viejo’s Gilleran Park. Friday was merely a get together BBQ to plan the various stations and activities for Saturday. As I pulled into the parking lot I saw a familiar face. Tom AE6SH, who volunteers as an EMT/ham for many rallies in the Southwest, greeted me with an: “I know you!” I was quickly introduced around to club members and started to get an idea about what field day was going to be like with SOARA. Three towers. All modes, all bands, APRS, D-Star, satellites, etc. When I asked what OSCAR satellites would be worked, Vlad KI6BLP said only: “All of them.” To which I could only respond: “Awesome!”

Saturday morning, up at 6:30 and off to Gilleran Park. I helped string lines and lift towers. At 11:00AM K6SOA was on the air! Everything was well planned and well placed. They use a contest tracking program on wireless laptops to log every contact and check for duplicates instantly (reminder: this is in tents - in a park - on generator power ). I grabbed my headphones and jumped in with Greg N6REG on the BIG 20 Meter antenna. He logged a ton of voice contacts while I typed them into the laptop. Stations were calling “CQ Field Day” from all over the US. I got excited when we heard from Western Florida, even more excited when we talked to Western Massachusetts!

Later in the day, I cracked out my home built ‘handi-tenna‘. This antenna is based on K5OE’s design for a small, portable, cheap - satellite antenna. The only tiny problem is you need an expensive analyzer to tune it. Up until now I was unable to find someone with the right equipment. In a matter of minutes I had a device in my hand that told me my antenna was tuned to 420Mhz. As the birds are on 436Mhz, I would have to trim it a little. (Birds = slang for satellites) An hour or so of fiddling and I had it set in the 435-440 range. Thanks Richard K6RBS for the analyzer!

I took a break and went and grabbed Christine. I convinced her to come back with me to field day and she brought some ‘busy work’ just in case she got bored. The good news is, after listening to some contacts and hearing CW (morse code) on 20 meters, she enjoyed hanging out and logging with some of the SOARA operators. I know she was most excited working with me operating on 40 meters when we made a contact with a station in Nevada, as it was the first one from that state.

The work on the handi-tenna payed off later that night, when I was able to track and listen to SO-50. I won’t go into all the details of how an FM voice satellite contact works, but I was able to hear Vlad KI6BLP call the clubs K6SOA callsign FROM the satellite. This is with my $11 antenna, handheld radio, and headphones. Thirty minutes later an even better pass of AO-51 came over the ocean. I was able to copy dozens of callsigns from Southern California to Washington State a lot clearer then I ever expected. Previous to this I had tried working satellites on three separate occasions with no luck. To learn more about amateur radio satellite communications, click here.

We left the site around 10:00PM and headed home for some sleep. I returned on Sunday morning to help for the remaining four hours of the contest. I helped Heiko AD6OI and Patti AD6OH on the 6 meter antenna. It was pretty quiet on the band and only after calling “CQ Field Day CQ Field Day this is Kilo Six Sierra Oscar Alpha” about 30 times did we make a few contacts. I got to check out D-STAR with Biran NJ6N’s setup. We watched a webcam broadcast from a field day site in Washington - over the ICOM ID1’s internet connection.

Tear down was quick and everyone pitched in to carefully pack the towers, rope, cable, and radios back into storage and the various vehicles that had brought the equipment. I had an awesome time and I want to thank and shout out to: AD6OI, AD6OH, AE6SH, AE6H, KI6BLP, NJ6N, K6RBS, and N6REG! I look forward to participating more in SOARA’s activites in the future!

About 12 years ago compact fluorescent bulbs came on the market. About 8 years ago I replaced every light bulb in my apartment with them. Why? They run a lot cooler and use a lot less electricity. This is not saying that you should go off into some enviro-friendly psycho recycling tirade. Just stop buying incandesent light bulbs please.

I have only had 1 of those lights ‘dim’ in 12 years. It still works, but it takes too long to come up to full brightness. I just replaced it and wondered why everyone seems to still be using edison bulbs.
Of course now that I think about it. The small amount of mercury these lights require to function should probably be noted before you dispose of them…

Coal power or heavy metals - ehh, you can’t win’em all.

For Christmas everyone pitched in and got me a 27″ Sony Wega. With about 1/2″ to spare I slid it into our entertainment center the other night. We warmed it up by watching “Serenity” and playing 8 hours of Katamari on the PS2. I’m so happy to have that silly switcher box off the top of my TV, and to hear things in STEREO *gasp. I lived with a 19″ bubble TV for 10 years - it was about time…

We have some friends coming over for a New Years Day - Rally Marathon party. I can’t wait!
Thanks Mom, Dad, Joyce and Don!

Mitochondria are part of your cells and they make energy for your body. They are only inherited from your mom. *cough And their lineage can be traced back to one woman. Do they retain these memories? Probably not, but you you’ll get extra science geek credit for this one. The kids in the lab will love it!

Click here to buy the T-Shirt!

My new host bluehost.com has just opened up their firewall to allow outbound pings to pingomatic. This, so far, is the only issue I’ve had. All my domains are moved over. I have 3 installs of WordPress. I have 1.6GB of space left, 75GB monthly transfer, and all the email addresses I’ll ever want. I have shell access, but I really don’t need it with their kick ass control panel. An awesome deal for $6.95 a month.

If you want to sign up click here to let them know that Kris sent’ya.

I added the “moo” to the subject for search ability. This way I can search technorati for “pingomatic moo” and find if it worked for sure.

This evening Christine and I traveled across the UCI campus to watch a PowerPoint presentation. This is the first time I’ve ever waited in line to see slides on an overhead projector.

David Byrne uses PowerPoint as a meta medium. A catch all for music, pictures, and text. He points out that a lot of applications don’t allow this sort of flexibility. “Try opening an mp3 with Photoshop,” he exlaimed. But he’s quick to point out it’s shortcomings. “You can make one thing fly across the screen, but when you ask it to do 5 images it doesn’t know what to do. It throws up it’s arms - I can’t do THAT, but how about THIS!” He’s excited when he gets an unexpected result. When you get something that you didn’t anticipate.

He went on to talk about how powerful a medium it is in the business world and how it can give a false weight to even meaningless presentation topics. How it’s wizard can suggest content, even if you don’t have any! The social implications of taking long complex topics and condensing them down into 7 bullet points.

I asked David if he was drawn to this sort of niche medium and if he was worried that future “enhancements” to the product may limit his creativity. He used the analogy of the pencil - “You don’t see people picking up the pencil and saying ‘I need to make this better! This needs to be in color!” He explained there are limitiations in PowerPoint that don’t need to be overcome. It’s what makes the program simple and easy to use. If it’s changed radically - it stops being what it is - a simple media basket for images, text and music. An interesting way to express ideas visually.

He presented us with several slides that he had found on the web. Marriage counseling; a jar of pants; suggestions for dealing with the homeless. All funny examples of slides that were intended to be serious, but it’s meaning somehow got lost in the translation.

I too ♥ PowerPoint. Read more about this on BoingBoing.

A precursory glance has revealed that it’s probably the greatest map search ever. I love the google simplicity and the sims’like graphics and shading. I have loaded a 2048 X 768 map of Irvine. I did a plot from my old apartment to Las Vegas and it came up pretty quick.

I have enough faith in Google to make this my defacto map search standard - sight unseen. I don’t see me being disappointed. The only thing that could make me giggle with delight is a “tulip based” turn by turn generator. Yahoo maps had something almost like this at one time and then dropped it. Silly Yahoo…