planetkris

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the crash…

I bought an Icom IC-2200H mobile 2 meter radio right after I got my license. It was the same price new as many of the used ones shipped via ebay. I’m still not sure why 3 year old radios sell for $20 less then brand new ones - and why people don’t take into account the $16.95 worth of shipping. For $4.05 more, you’re better off with a warranty - here’s why:

Several times when I was just getting the hang of using the radio I would push to transmit and nothing would happen. I would look down at the radio and be like - huh? Then I would push to transmit again and it would key up no problem for the rest of the day. I chalked this up to my inexperience with the unit.

A few months went by and it did it three times on one occasion. I was having a nice conversation on my way down to the shop. I was talking away and I heard the other person on the repeater over the radio key up and say something like: “Are you still there? Did you hit a dead spot??” While I was squeezing my mic and chatting away to no one apparently. “What the hell?” I keyed the mic up again and described my problems. Later in the QSO it did it twice more! At this point I knew something was wrong and it wasn’t my new license.

I brought it back to the good people of HRO in Anaheim, CA. They tried patiently to repeat the problem while in the store. I must have keyed up 100 times on some poor simplex frequency. I couldn’t get it to happen under controlled conditions. This is no surprise to me as a computer technician.

I offered up a solution. If I could get a picture of it in action - would that satisfy the warranty repair folks? They agreed and for the next 3 days I drove around with my digital camera practically guaranteeing that it wouldn’t fail anytime soon. I left the shop and made a call on the way home to the local SOARA repeater. I looked down and there it was! Red light on the microphone - NO transmit on the display! My IC-2200H had a PTT problem.

I pulled over, snapped some shots, and went to HRO the next day. They sent it right out to Icom for me and I had it back a couple weeks later. It came back with no real explanation of what was fixed - but that something WAS repaired. So, if you have experienced this problem: 1. It’s probably not your imagination. 2. It’s NOT the microphone. 3. Be glad you spent the extra $5 on the brand new rig. 4. I hope you get it fixed as quickly as I did.

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

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!

It seems as if every few years I remember I have a web log or *cough ‘blog‘ here at the home base - planetkris.com. I once again will remind you that I’m usually busy over at rallynotes.com with my rally adventures. As a spin off to rally, I recently got my amateur radio technician license and have been getting into a lot of new activities and clubs, etc. As an established geek, I’ll be posting about that from now on here. Check out the ham radio stuff on rallynotes if you want to keep up.

Christine pointed out to me that I still have posts from 2005 on the main page.
Speaking of the SunMoonStarsGirl, she has a new gallery up.

While you’re busy checking that stuff out - I’ll be working on my ARRL Field Day post.

Other top items:
I’m getting married in August. Honeymoon in Tahiti.
I started a motorsports company. I’m doing contract tech work in the mean time.
I still live in California.

-and we’re done here!

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.

I knew the day would come. I knew one of these days I would slug my Visor Prism out of my ‘man purse’ and someone would say something awesomely sarcastic. Like - ‘Welcome to the 21st century dude…’ OR ‘Was your Apple II not small enough?’ The exact sarcasm was - ‘Woah, that thing is vintage!’

It was time to look for a new Palm.

I can appreciate the Swiss Army style PDA’s out there, BUT there comes a point when the tool is no longer useful for it’s original purpose. For example: Pliers are a handy tool. Screwdrivers are nice to have on you. So is a shovel and a hammer. How about a can opener and a lighter too! Now you have this shovel-hammer with pliers that pop out from the side and the head pops off to reveal four screwdrivers and a lighter. There is a sharp curled corner on the side of the shovel to open cans with. NONE of those tools is now anywhere near as effective as it’s original. You fill the lighter with dirt when shoveling. The screw drivers fall out when hammering and you look ridiculous trying to open soup with a giant shovel.

I don’t need, nor want a ‘phone - organizer - PDA - laptop - keyboard - bluetooth - camera - wifi - internet - mp3 player - memory stick reader - shovel.’ It’s too much! I mean - it’s certainly handy to have in a pinch, like on the Lost island or something, but it takes crappy pictures, you’re surfing the web with a 320X320 screen (that’s 20px bigger then this picture over here) and it’s costing you $60 a month in phone and digital minutes. I dunno, it’s not for me.

I picked up a new Palm Z22. Unfortunately, it too was not without compromise. For starters, they have replaced Graffiti with the new and improved, recently patentable, continually copyrightable, Graffiti 2. It sucks. I’ll let my meta tags and key words be clear here - Graffiti 2 is a bowl of suck. I spent 0.001 seconds learning to cross my T’s before looking for an overlay.

There was a trick where you could beam Graffiti 1 from an old PDA, writing over the current Graffiti 2, but it doesn’t seem to work with the Z22. I tried for about 3 hours. In the end, Teal Script works fine. You drop it on and think about paying $30 for it… The nag screen is only in the program, so unless you insist on tweaking every character, you’ll never see it. I’m waiting for an overwrite from Palm. They have received hate mail over Graffiti 2.

Now to the good stuff. It’s small, light, and fits into a wallet size man bag. Christine calls it the ‘pouchette.’ Very masculine. Take a look at the size difference here: It makes the visor LOOK like an Apple II. The nav buttons are easy to use, but make older games harder to play. Tons of memory. Pictures and backgrounds are easy to load with SplashPhoto (included). It’s a one stop charge and sync USB connector on the top, and it does everything my Visor did. Dates, To-Do’s, Address Book, Memos. The included ‘day viewer’ is nice, but it was easily replaced with my current favorite - Whatzup.

So, for $99 I’ve retired the brick. I’ll add it to my 20th century computer technology collection. It will charge on it’s base quietly next to my PowerPC and my Zenith 286 Laptop. Rewarded for it’s years of hard service getting crushed in my front pocket.

Small update: Visor Prisim spelled Visor Prism. It appears the spell check got away from me.

planetkris.com Search Keyphrases (Top 10)

This is a perfect random sample of my existance.
I also love that 15 people typed ‘ihatetexas’ into a search engine.

Seeing as I manage a handful of WordPress sites, I often have to deal with comment spam. When I was running MT the main problem was that I didn’t have the tools to prevent it. Key words only go so far. If you ever wanted to post about the time you tried a male enhancing drug after a trip to a Vegas whore house… Well - no one would be able to comment about it without mentioning 20 of those key words and getting the comment sent to spam hell.

I still have some blacklist words and some common spam words setup in WordPress. The most effective technique is closing comments after 90 days and if you have more then 1 link in your comment it goes to automatic moderation. I’ve been very happy with this setup. There is usually only a handful of comments waiting in my moderation bucket with ‘real people’ able to post on the site instantly. Only the occasional spam squeaks by and lands on the site.

Yesterday I received several notifications of new comments. I took a glance and went right to ‘action stations’. Twenty or so spammer comments had already been posted so I used WP’s ‘mass edit mode’ to whip them out of there quick. I then turned ‘always moderate’ back on and noticed that they were all from the same IP range. The most spam I’ve received in the last year from one location - great.

I went to the host website and they looked receptive to reporting abuse. I don’t know if comment spam from an IP switching bot is in their Terms of Service, but I gave it a shot. This morning another full battery of 50 comments hit my bucket. Time to ban people.

inetnum: 85.255.112.0 - 85.255.127.255
address: Inhoster
address: Poltavskij Shliax 24, Xarkov,
address: 61000, Ukraine
phone: +38 066 4633621
e-mail: support@inhoster.com
remarks: Abuse contacts: abuse@inhoster.com

Report abuse, then ban their IP… Then post all of their info on the net listing inhoster.com as spammers.
Sounds good to me. Comments are back on.

I haven’t seen AdSense ads on the rallynotes main page for like the past month. I just keep getting the friggen PSA’s on the home page. Now that I’ve upgraded WordPress I’ve been blaming just about everything on them. I can’t upload BMP’s. “Damn you WordPress!” I crash Photoshop trying to scale down a picture. “WTF? Maybe it’s WordPress!” I spill limeade all over myself while typing a post. “F*** you WordPress!” Okay, I’m kidding… Mostly…

So, I’m ready to pack this up to WordPress. It’s not Google. They are awesome. They are smart, and trading at what $400+ a share? It can’t be them… Wait a minute.

The word on the street says that some certain key words in your blog web journal will make a page into PSA fodder by AdSense. So I scan my page and discover that I have mentioned a casino hotel resort by name. I delete it, thinking - I’ve got to try something right? BAM! Google Ads back on the page after a 4 week hiatus.

I write content for content. I’m not some sleazy RSS agro spammer pulling text off 1000 websites to make my account rack up the cash. *Sheesh. I guess that’s what I have to contend with if I want to utilize their service.
If you start seeing PSA’s (That’s a Public Service Announcement for those of you not in the biz.) watch out for these blocker words, even if they are totally legitimate.