Downloading programs over Ham Radio

Wanted to have this as a separate post. Someone on a digital radio mailing list posted this video from 1984:
http://www.itnsource.com/shotlist//ITN/1984/05/21/AS210584001/

It's a mostly alarmist piece about how piracy is destroying the software industry. It seems to be intact nearly 30 years later. In the last 30 seconds or so it includes a bit about Hams who are doing basically shared development of software by sending it back and forth over the radio. The software was stored on cassette tapes in this. The Ham at the end holds his microphone up to the tape player and hits play.

I wonder how long he had to sit there like that. Hah. Those things only ran at 1200baud I think. Maybe it was a really short program, just like 1 or 2k.

Icom 900A, etc

I was clued into these radios awhile back: http://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/fm_txvrs/900a.html
It's a very neat idea. Get a common control point and then buy swappable modules that cover the band you want. I know other radios did the same sort of thing internally: Kenwood TM 741/742/941/942, Yeasu 726R/736R, and a few others.

Kenwood even had a remote head RC-20 that would work with a bunch of their otherwise standalone mobiles. I think it worked from the X21 to the X41 series. IE TM-221, TM-241, etc. With the optional IF-20 accessory you could even hook up 4 different radios to it. You could attach radios for 2m/220/440/1.2 to it.

Neat concept, I'm sure it got expensive though. These systems were probably all phased out for single radios with everything in them. Makes me wish someone had settled on an open protocol for connecting external controls to these radios. Even make it industry wide, not just Ham Radio. Would it be against the rules to have a single control head and microphone that can switch between controlling 1 or more Ham Radios, a CB radio, GMRS, scanner, etc. Each radio could be type-certified for their task but controlled from one vantage point? I guess you would have to be careful to conduct yourself appropriate for the service you are using.

Kenwood's new TM-281 2m radio

Link: http://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/fm_txvrs/0281.html

With exciting new features!
LCD backlight color now back to orange instead of green!
Hi Power boosted to an incredible 65W. That's a whole 5W more than the TM-271! Wow!


Throw that old junk away and buy today!
Only $164.95

ARISSat-1 Finally Deployed from ISS

http://www.arrl.org/w1aw-bulletins-archive/ARLS007/2011

Just got the announcement from the ARRL about ARISSat. I've read the news before about it being deployed. The word is the NASA-tv feed showed it and that it was being handled rather roughly. I didn't see the stream, I wonder if anyone managed to screen capture that and post it somewhere like Youtube or Vimeo? I guess it's rather regrettable that the UHF antenna was forgotten/lost/broken. You would think after all the time it took to get it up there, they would be a little more conscientious with it. According to the ARRL bulletin, if they scrubbed the deployment, the next opportunity would be Feb 2012. Well, it's taken this long to get it up what's 6 more months? Especially since now the UHF component will never work? Then again, maybe it was basically a "now or never" decision, I doubt we'll ever know.

Well, on brighter news I heard a couple of seconds worth of SSTV from it last night. I haven't managed to find any tracking elements so I don't know where it is. I had my Kenwood 241A tuned to 145.950 and heard a few seconds of SSTV even though my antenna is a Ringo Ranger 2. Still want to try to find resources around here to make a WA5VJB cheap yagi sometime.

SSTV images in video games

I'm very late to the parade on this one but I don't know if there's been enough attention paid to this. In March last year Valve Software updated one of their games, Portal, to have radios that would play Morse Code and SSTV signals when you carried them to specific spots in the game. They did this as part of an Alternate Reality Game that led to the announcement of the sequel game, Portal 2. They actually included 4 more SSTV images in the sequel. One can be received during the first play through of the game, and the other 3 are part of a developer's commentary. More info about the Portal ARG here.

To receive these images, you can use any computer software such as MMSSTV and point the soundcard input to StereoMix, or similar. It's even possible to receive off of the youtube video in the above link.

2 interesting new(?) Chinese HTs

Couple of neat Chinese radios I've learned about recently. The first is the Baofeng UV-3R. It is a shirt pocket sized 2m/440 DUAL BAND radio. It does both bands in the same radio. Apparently it does 2w out, no indication if that's true for both bands. G4ILO has reviewed this handheld. One thing that he notes is that his came with separate vhf and uhf antennas, but some sellers on ebay are offering them with dualband antennas as well. It is currently $54.50 on 409shop.

The second one is the Puxing PA968. Here's something interesting.. You can buy it in either 2m or 440 varieties. The usual frequency ranges too, 136-176 or 400-470mhz. BUT, not only is it a radio, it is also a quadband GSM cellphone, with provision for 2 sim cards. This one is upwards of $194.74 on aliexpress. 

What would a modern BBS look like?

I remember the good old days of dialing into a BBS before the Internet was really big. You could use a terminal emulator included with Windows or something more specialized like Minicom in DOS. Sometimes you'd have to wait for hours to get connected because someone was tying up the telephone line and you'd end up getting busy signals. Then finally, you'd get connected! Then you could login and navigate pretty much a text-only system, with the only graphics being ASCII art or anything you downloaded and viewed offline. I had a 2400 baud modem through most of my BBS days. I think it took an hour to download 1MB. Anyone could run a BBS, it just took a dial-up modem and software on your computer.

What would a modern one look like?
I think it would be based entirely off of the Internet technologies that have become more popular since the 90's. You could set up a dial-up server with TCP/IP connections. Anyone who connects in would get a private IP address, then have a captive portal (such as used in wifi hotspots) to redirect people into a webserver you have set up. You could run a phpBB instance on the webserver and call it a day. That would get you forums, you could run other servers for other services. For example, have a FTP server set up for files. The users might even upload a file and link it in a forum post. Or run an email server for the users.

Depending on location or access to locations, it could be possible to set up wifi access points to allow for high-speed access to this modern BBS. It's a shame that DSL isn't a little more like dial-up, not speed-wise but with dial-up's ability to just call anyone and get a digital conversation going.

Uses? Community-oriented network, really private network, backup communications path if a group loses access to the Internet, maybe useful in places like Egypt etc. I could see a case where wifi access is available and someone walks by with a Windows CE palmtop or similar device to send/receive email real quick.

Experimental AMPS mini-basestation

This is really neat. Mark Atherton has put together a very basic, working, replica of a base station for analog cellular phones. I've blogged about something similar for GSM phones in the past. This analog system is pretty fascinating for me.

We really have the parts to put together something basically similar for ham radio. The audio could be exactly the same as it is now. Add in a control channel and people could call you even if you have the volume turned all the way down. There have been in-channel methods for quite a long time of course. Signalling systems such as CTCSS, DCS, DTMF have been constructed in the past, and barely used. As of yet, noone has constructed an out-of-channel signalling method. The capability is there for APRS I believe. Some APRS capable radios can advertise a frequency you are monitoring in your report. I think one or two may even allow you to QSY to an advertised frequency.

It'd be pretty cool if you could send out an APRS call, have the other parties' radio QSY to your freq if they answer it, test the path, maybe QSY to a mutually accessible repeater if necessary, etc. I have no delusions that this would be constructed or used though. Previous in-channel signalling methods have been around for decades and remain fairly unused, except to access a repeater. Other neat technologies have falling by the wayside, like Kenwood's DCS-based ID tech.

You know what they say, a rolling stone gathers no moss.

A new challenger has appeared: BJ-UV55

Found this on Alibaba the other day. It is a Baojie BJ-UV55 dual band mobile. Emailed the seller and it's not out yet but they expect it to release in May. It seems that Wouxun's as yet unreleased KG-UV920R is spurring other Chinese manufacturers to make their own mobile radios.

The specs are fairly typical. 136-174mhz and 400-470mhz. 45W VHF, 35W UHF.

What I don't know:

• If the front panel can be remotely mounted.
• If it has crossband repeat
• Price

I doubt this company is going to go through the FCC certification process either so your mileage may vary. I just like to keep track of these things.

I guess it's also listed under the model number TC-UV55 and a different company. Not too unusual in China.

HTPC Capacitors

Ahh, the dreaded bulging capacitor problem. This is a Geforce 5200FX graphics card from my HTPC. Granted, it's pretty old. I built this machine back in 2006 which makes it pretty ancient for computer technology. A couple nights ago I sat down to watch a recording only to have it crash a few seconds into the video. I did a little troubleshooting today to find that the machine gets to POST only when I take the video card out. (Of course, once I do it gives me the error codes for no video card.) I found these caps when examining the card. 4 electrolytic capacitors 6.3v 1000uf all were bulging. The single 16v cap looked perfectly fine. I ordered a new card, but I think I may add some electrolytics to my next Mouser order to see if I can't revive this one too.

I've been playing something of a handyman this past year anyways.

Another ARM single board computer (SBC)

This is the i.MX53 Quick Start Board:

Full specifications

This should be a pretty neat SBC. It costs $149 and includes a Freescale 1ghz Cortex-A8 ARM processor, 1GB ram, 4GB microsd card with Linux, 5v power supply with worldwide adapters. Expansion boards include a $49 HDMI output and a $199 4.3 800x600 LCD screen. (Which seems a mite overpriced to me given the glut of under-$50 7" photo frames.)

I've also covered the Chumby Hacker Board here. It's $89, and also includes a Freescale ARM processor but only at 454MHZ, 64MB ram and a 512MB microsd card with Linux. On the other hand, while a lot of the processing specs are lower, the Cumby Hacker Board includes several GPIO connections and is even compatible with Ardunio shields. Could be handy for more low level interfacing than this board.

I have yet to find anyone using these boards in a Ham Radio capacity yet. Rig control, Digital modes, Micro Repeater controller, SDR, D-Star adapter (with dongle), Codec2.. There are a lot of possibilities.

Link to the full information on the i.MX53 Quick Start Board on the Freescale website.
Here's the blog post on the Freescale website that I learned about this board.

Electronic Project Lab

This is one of my favorite "toy"s from my childhood. This was actually my second one, the first was the venerable 200 in one Electronic Project Lab. Radioshack used to carry these things before they decided to become a cellphone kiosk. I'm actually looking to acquire a used 200 in one again, that was always my favorite but mine got really ratty and destroyed many years ago. :(

The radio club is unofficially thinking about finding some of these for a basic electronics class. I'm thinking, why not build a kit of our own? You could probably buy enough components to build 20 of these for $20. The asking price was never really for the hardware. The instruction books with all the projects are really what is valuable. Unfortunately, those aren't freely available. It'd be great to find a community driven project to make a series of circuits to fill this role. It's hard to find freely available circuits that use the same parts.

I loved the spring based hookups that these kits used. Breadboards are good for testing circuits out, but these are very neat in that all your components are fixed in place and you can pretty quickly run wires from one to another. It's nice for car rides also, no risk of losing tiny components as the car is moving. The spring idea is probably covered under some sort of patent though. So any community made clone would probably have to do something different. It'd be great if some place offered a strip of breadboard like material where each hole could be wired up separately underneath. Or, what else could you do?

Circuits could include:
A basic circuit
operation of resistors, resistors in series, parallel, variable
operation of capacitors, showing they store energy, use as time delay, pass AC but block DC, etc.
operation of transistors, as switches, as amplifiers, darlington pair
operation of diodes, rectify AC, etc
operation of transformers, upconvert/downconvert voltage. etc
operation of relays
operation of inductors (???) never covered in the kits I had
oscillators
voltage/current
voltage dividers
Simple logic circuits (and, nand, or, not, xor, flip flop, latch, etc)

Not only have purely theory based circuits but also edutainment ones such as sirens, "police light"s, timer games etc. Code practice oscillator, crystal radio, AM radio, FM? Radio would be very nice, especially for a radio club! You could wire two kits up to send Morse Code back and forth to each other... neat demonstration for a field day setup.

Anyone wire one up to use as a QRP CW transmitter? I was once playing with my 200in1 kit and accidentally affected our TV. I was maybe 11 and built the metal detector circuit which involved a radio signal. Well, I was somewhat randomly changing parts around and ended up making something that I could sweep around and all of a sudden our TV looked like it was scrambled. It was on ch 6 or 8. So I tuned the TV around the channels and then tuned my circuit with the variable cap and I was able to knock out any channel up to 13. I wrote down my changes, or so I thought.. next time I tried to build that circuit it never worked again. Probably for the best though. :)

Inexpensive digital multimeters can be had for less than $5 shipped on ebay. That can be useful for teaching the skill of using one with such a kit.

These kits are probably the reason I got into electronics and they have also nurtured my love of science (although Mr Wizard had a huge role there too!). I intend on passing on something like this to my kids one day. It'd be incredible if others could do the same as well.

Volkswagen making a $600 car that gets 258mpg? Probably not.

The part that seems too good to be true is the price. I don't know where that came from. I did some google searching and came across a page that casts some skepticism on that low of a price point. Now, that page claims it'll cost more like $26,000. If so, no thanks.. I'd be interested if it were $600 actually.

This is a really neat little car anyways. One website says it's actually two seats, the other one is right behind the front seat... like a jet fighter. The motor is a 299cc single-cylinder diesel engine. I'm not a mechanical person, is single-cylinder even possible? I'm sure it doesn't have the acceleration of a jet fighter :) But with gas prices probably never dropping again, unless we have another deep recession, anything that uses less gas is awesome in my book.

Begin tangent here....

Electric cars are available now, but only really economical if you build one. It's very much like the early days of the Ham Radio pioneers or the computer hobbyists of the 70's. If you want one, it's better and cheaper to build than it is to buy.

Here's a link to a blog of an Aussie ham who has posted about his EV (Electric Vehicle).

According to him, the electric car uses pennies per km of electricity. Their electricity prices cost more there than they do here, that's for sure. I believe they also have a solar panel array set up, although I don't know the capacity, that actually supplies all the energy the car needs.

I'm just going to copy & paste a chart from a .doc file on this page
 (The actual .doc file is here)

Myths about Electric Cars

Electric Cars are Expensive	You can convert a small car for between $8,000 and $15,000. You can convert a small car and install solar PV panels to charge it for less than the price of a new medium size petrol car!
Electric Cars are Slow	Our EV has faster acceleration that it did as a petrol car. It has so much torque it can can pull 5th gear from 0 rpm.
They don't have enough range	We drive up to 80km every day. This is perfectly adequate for metro driving. We have a second petrol car for long distance use. But we hardly ever use it and are considering selling it.
But we need infrastructure like charging stations	All you need is a power point. There are many more power points that petrol stations already. We have never needed a charging station while driving around Adelaide as our range is fine for a full days driving.
The power stations will be overloaded	Power stations are idling at night and could be put to better use. For an average day of 30km driving our EV uses just 5 kWh. We have offset this with a PV solar array that generates 8 kWh/day. So we drive an electric car, pay nothing for fuel, and use less electricity than before!
Charging is slow	You don't sit next to the EV waiting for it to charge. We just plug in at night and unplug in the morning. Like a mobile phone. It's easier and takes less time than going to a petrol station.

Eh, why not include the specifications from the same file. 

Specifications

Battery pack	36 Lithium Cells, 3.2V each, better than 10 year life time or 150,000km
Operating Voltage	120V DC
Range	80 to 130 km
Top speed	130 km/hr
Conversion Cost	Around $15,000
Economy	200Wh/km or 4 cents/km. Free “fuel” if you install PV Solar panels at home.
Servicing	No servicing is required for Electric Cars. There are no oil changes, radiators, or spark plugs. The only wearing parts are brakes and tyres.
Motor	40kW, 200Nm DC motor. 1,000,000 km life expectancy
Seats	4 Adults
Weight	900kg (40kg above previous weight as an internal combustion car)
Driving	Like an automatic. The car is placed in 3rd gear for all forward speeds between 0 and 80 km/hr. No gear changes.
Green House Emissions	Zero. The electricity we use in charging is less than the energy our PV solar system makes every day. By recycling an old petrol car we avoided the GHG emissions involved in manufacturing a new car (even a new electric car).

Mr. Rowe is a pretty good salesman for EVs, I have to say. :)

Transmit and Receive simultaneously on one frequency?

Just read an article on ZDNet about researchers at Stanford coming up with a way to transmit and receive with the same radio at the same time.

I guess the key is the put a receive antenna precisely positioned between two transmit antennas. The idea is that the waves from the transmit antennas will cancel each other out and the receive antenna sits in the null zone. I wonder what the radiation plot is for that antenna arrangement, hah.

Here's the video from the article:



They are talking about applications for wifi. Could be useful for ham radio?

ICOM 9100 clears FCC?

https://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/ViewExhibitReport.cfm?mode=Exhibits&RequestTimeout=500&calledFromFrame=N&application_id=833935&fcc_id='AFJ318300'
This appears to be the FCC ID: AFJ318300


Word on the internet is that the price when it comes out will be either $3600 or $4000. It's all rumors right now but I guess it's suppose to go on sale at Dayton.

Personally, I think that price is extremely overkill. They wouldn't sell it at that price if people wouldn't pay for it though. It's also for a very niche market so they have fewer units to spread fixed costs over as well. It's simple economics. Once they sell all the units to people who are willing to pay such a price, maybe they'll lower the price in order to sell more units.

There are cheaper ways of doing D-star on HF if that's what you want.

Unit	Price
D-star adapter	$600 (inc. UT-118 Dstar codec module and case)
Kenwood TS-2000	$1549
	$1999 w/1.2ghz

So for roughly $2600 you could have a set up that can do basically everything the 9100 can do. Less than that if you can find the TS-2000 used for a good price. You can't do the 128k high-speed data on 1.2ghz, but last I heard, neither will the 9100. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Heck, you might be able to do that cheaper.. I've heard about a soundcard GMSK modem that can use a DV Dongle to let you talk D-star on a 9600 capable radio like the TS-2000 for the price of the dongle, $200. I can't find the program right now though. (I'll update if I do.)

Ubertooth One

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mossmann/ubertooth-one-an-open-source-bluetooth-test-tool/posts
Check out the video on that page. It's a roughly 50 minute talk given by Michael Ossmann about his Ubertooth project. The project is a 2.4ghz transceiver that is able to monitor the entire communication between Bluetooth devices. This is useful because most, if not all, bluetooth adapters cannot be used in the same way.. they automatically strip information out before it gets to your computer. With this Ubertooth dongle he can better perform a security audit on bluetooth devices than previously possible.

What I find more interesting about this is that this wasn't all that complicated hardware wise. The protocol sounds like it was a real pain, but he's had prior experience with implementing that on the USRP. The dongle, as it stands, is mostly 3 chips. A CC2591 2.4ghz PA/LNA, CC2400 2.4ghz RF transceiver and a LPC175x series ARM chip.

What inspired him to use a chip like the CC2400? He previously played around with a kids toy called an IM-ME. It's a pink pager-like device meant for girls to send instant messages over the Internet (via a usb dongle plugged into a computer)... He was able to turn it into an inexpensive spectrum analyzer type device. How? It has a CC1110 chip. This is an RF transceiver chip with an integrated 8051 cpu. According to the linked site:

Frequency range: 300 – 348 MHz, 391 – 464 MHz and 782 – 928 MHz

Pretty neat, it's capable of operation in the 70cm and 33cm bands at up to 500kBaud. This was in a toy that was less than $20 on ebay. I'm guessing that chip was unsuitable for the bluetooth use that he wanted, therefore the choice of the CC2400 chip.

Something else I found interesting was the Kickstarter site itself. Quoting from the About link:

Kickstarter is the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Every month, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

A new form of commerce and patronage. This is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Instead, they offer products and experiences that are unique to each project.

All or nothing funding. On Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. Why? It protects everyone involved. Creators aren’t expected to develop their project without necessary funds, and it allows anyone to test concepts without risk.

It's a neat idea. I don't know how well it has worked out in the past since this is the first I've heard of it. You can pledge a few dollars to help a project out without expecting anything in return or there are bonuses to pledging more. For the Ubertooth project, $15 will get you a pcb and a stencil, $30 gets you that and an assembled serial board to help you load the firmware, $100 or more gets you a fully assembled board, etc. I'm sure that Mr Ossmann would deliver, but I'm not sure if the website has ever had problems of someone refusing to deliver after getting the funding. I still like the idea though.

Michael Ossmann has a very nice blog: Here
Travis Goodspeed has a blog about similar such things: Here
(He has a project for a conference badge that includes somewhat similar but different brand wireless components. I may ramble on about that at another time, in another post.)

RF over Fiber Optic

I have recently come across this idea. It's apparently possible to buy boxes that can convert RF signals into optical signals that can be sent over fiber and reconstructed on the other side with another box. There are converters for one way or transceiver purposes. Some have bandwidths of 2500mhz or even 4000mhz.

Here is a PDF with the basics.

Has anyone ever used something like this for Ham Radio purposes? I'm still looking around but it seems pretty obscure to me still. I'll make a new post if I find anything.

Tokyo Hy-Power HX-240 2m -> HF xverter

http://www.thp.co.jp/english/hx_240_e.html

This is backwards from what you'd normally expect. You hook a 2m all-mode rig up to this and use it to receive and transmit HF. 2.5W/10W in on 2m translates to 30-40W out on HF. The going price is roughly $200. Neat.

HF HT

This is a handheld radio from a CB manufacturer, Magnum, that purports to do 10 meter and 12 meter all mode operation: AM/FM/SSB.

It's pretty shameful when a CB manufacturer does something that not even a ham radio one is doing. I know these are meant to be for freebanders but I kinda want one. I am normally 100% opposed to this sort of thing. They aren't fooling anyone when they sell the "10 meter amateur radios" on ebay that look and act exactly like a CB. If you ever bother to look up the manual for one, you see it's braindead easy to mod it for 11 meter use. They may as well put a switch on the front panel for crying out loud. I don't know if this handheld has a VFO mode or if it's more channelized junk. I haven't found out much information on it, besides lots of listings on stores that are primarily CB oriented. Some of them don't even pretend this is intended for amateurs who want a 10m or 12m HT, they list it strictly as a CB. It's a little pricey too, $210-$280 from what I've seen, and you have to mod it if you intend to switch bands from 10 to 12m.

Let's not pretend for a second that these are intended for amateurs though, these are meant for people who are going to "mod" them for CB use.

QAM modem IC?

While browsing some of the tapr HSMM information, including one of the message boards, I found a post referencing a very highly integrated modem IC for doing QAM data with an I/Q interface. Here is the post. and Here is the IC in question.

I'm going to quote from the webpage:

The CMX7163 QAM Modem is a low power half-duplex device supporting multiple channel spacings under host microcontroller (µC) control. Its Function Image™ (FI) is loaded to initialise the device and determine modulation types. 
The 7163FI-4.x supports 4-, 16- and 64-QAM modulations up to 96kbps in a 25kHz channel, with channel estimation and equalization to provide robust performance under realistic channel conditions. 
Flexible bit rates support a wide range of applications requiring a selectable bit rate and robustness.

 An integrated analogue interface supports 'direct connection' to zero IF I/Q radio transceivers with few external components; no external codecs are required.

The odd thing is the message board post quotes 64kbps in a 25khz channel but the chip maker's website says 96kbps. Obviously that'd be the 64QAM modulation. That's still very impressive, in my opinion. I'd love to see these incorporated into a design for a 440mhz or higher HSMM radio.

Just read the datasheet, you can do 96kbps with 64QAM, 64kbps with 16QAM and 32kbps with 4QAM. That is assuming 18,000 symbols/s (your baud rate). This falls well within the 19.6kilobaud limit on 2m but outside the bandwidth limit of 20khz. If you reduced the baud rate to 9000 symbols/s you'd take up half the bandwidth. It'd fit within the 56kilobaud/100khz limits in the 440 band just find though.

The downside is that these are only available in 64 pin packages, VQFN and LQFP. Small pins with little space inbetween but I've seen people who could solder it.

Return to Mt. Packet

KE9V has posted a list of basically New Years resolutions for ham radio and his #1 item is to set up a 1200 baud packet node again. I'd like to resolve to do the same. It's a shame that the old packet radio network(s) were tore down as the Internet got big. Even if packet was only 1200 baud, it's got reliability on it's side. Sure, the Internet's probably pretty resilient, but that doesn't include your connection to it. 1200 baud is super pokey but it's much faster than 0 baud. I would like to investigate HSMM installations but that will have to wait on personal funding and contingent on interest from other hams in the area, of which few have interest in computer technology I think.

Kenwood RC-D710 (D710) Control head... with other radios?!

I was clued into this on the Curling Smoke blog ran by KE9V. Here
As an aside, this links to a TAPR mailing list which is talking about the control head being on sale at HRO for $150. The posting was dated 12/25/10 but today (1/2/11) I can't find it on HRO's website.

Apparently the control head for the Kenwood D710 radios can be bought seperately because you can buy the radio without the APRS functions. The TNC and APRS logic are both in the control head so just buying the right one and adding it to the radio will let you add that functionality in. The interesting part comes Here. With the right cable, you can plug the head into any radio to decode APRS packets, even an HT! (Thanks to Bob, WB4APR for detailing this)

Apparently it's even still possible to connect the Kenwood AVMAP device to show the icons on a map.

Bob writes:

CONCLUSION: On long trips, no matter where you are, we hope you will see not only one of these recommended voice repeaters on your screen, but also the nearest IRLP or EchoLink node as well... This combined with APRS Voice Alert will guarantee that if there is someone nearby wanting to chat, we will find each other.

I've made the mistake of believing APRS is for tracking only in the past. I think it would be far more useful if people would use it to advertise local services, such as repeaters and echolink nodes.  Mr Bruninga really stresses this on his website and I really respect that.

got a Blogger app for my Droid phone.

Just testing it. I started a build of a softrock rxtx ensemble. I'm excited to get it built. Hopefully I will be able to get it done.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Eight Below

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0397313/

Just watched this DVD last night with the wife. It's a very sad movie about some antarctic explorers who are force to leave their sled dogs behind when they evacuate to avoid some bad weather. I couldn't help but notice at one point in the movie, fairly early on, that they are talking on a radio that looks a lot like the FT-817.

Clip on Youtube Here is the specific spot of the movie with it. I can hope this link doesn't go down all I want but It'll probably disappear eventually, given the nature of it. If I find out it does, maybe I'll throw up a 30s excerpt, should be fine for fair-use clause. They have some pretty sweet, but old looking, base gear also.

Sad movie though, I don't think I'll watch it again.

Yeasu FTM-350R ramblings

http://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/fm_txvrs/3350.html
Just noticed this radio and wanted to make some comments. I actually found it by clicking an ad for associatedradio.com and then seeing the FTM-350AR had 220 capability. "Oh neat, 220!" I thought. Then I read that it was 1W. Well, okay it's a pretty feature packed radio, maybe there wasn't room for any bigger PA for 220.

I'm a little disappointed really. The 350R is a $500 radio, the AR is MSRP $780 with a ETA of 12/27/2010. At least they have a built-in APRS TNC (will it do regular packet or does anyone care at this point?) and a barometric pressure sensor. They are also bluetooth ready.

The bluetooth module to add support is $75
The "Internal GPS" unit is $75
If you opt for the "External GPS Antenna" unit instead, it's $70 but you have to buy a $60 cable and a $25 "External GPS adapter"

There's an oddball addon for it. I love oddball addons.
Yeasu FPR-1 Monitor Unit This is a pager sized device that works with the 350R, it can receive your 440band transmissions up to 1000' away. I might look for the manual online to try and get an explanation for this. $60

I'm still looking for one of these radios that can use a computer in the place of the remote faceplate. I've been considering attempting to do that with my Alinco DR600. If only I could find the weird 6-pin connectors they use. I may just figure out a cheap way of connecting to it without the connectors.

Ham Radio Cellphone Network

I highly recommend this article to anyone, it really resonated with me. The article makes a good point that anyone can throw a wire into a tree and call CQ. But there was one key paragraph that sent my mind wondering. I quote:

Future developments in the non-amateur world of radio from that point included cellular technology and the transmission of higher speed data over the air. Commercial applications for broadcast radio and television have changed radically and now include the imposition of digital methods. Military applications for secure battlefield communication use satellite and terrestrial means like mesh networking for voice and data transmission. Our homes, restaurants and coffee shops are bathed in RF transmitted data that keep our mobile devices connected to the Internet.

 Sure, there's the High Speed MultiMedia HSMM experiments... although the working group for that has disappeared and the general attitude I see about it, over and over is that you can do more with Part15 than you can with the higher power afforded with part97. It's a shame really. I've also seen a couple rare web pages discussing experiments with DATV. Much to my surprise, the experimenters preferred DVB-S to ATSC.

I'm not saying that Ham Radio is completely irrelevant. There's a lot of focus on it's use in emergencies and getting ready to help out in a disaster. And that's great. We have digital modes that run with a soundcard interface on a computer and software defined radio. There is a fairly basic digital voice mode called D-star. That's the big developments lately. Other than that, operating is fairly much the same as it was 30 plus odd years ago.

Why not a Ham Radio Cellphone network? I did some searching and this is what I've come up with..
Okay, the article discusses the use of this stuff to "hack" people's cellphone connections and listen in to their traffic. It misses a point that is blindingly obvious to me.

• European GSM cellphones have 900mhz as a band
• American Ham operators have 900mhz as a band
• Hardware exists to set up a homebrew cellphone base station
• How cool would it be to set up a legal ham radio cellphone network!

KJ6GCG, Chris Paget, set up his system to demonstrate the vulnerabilities of the GSM system specifically by spoofing the network ID for an active carrier. It should be entirely possible to set up a "fake" carrier that will not interfere with any commercial one and run it on our 900mhz band. Possibly even restrict access to special SIM card programming that could be posted online for any Ham Radio Operator to access. GSM can be run without encryption entirely, it's another point that allowed Mr Paget to demonstrate the call recording. Running in this mode will avoid any trouble with the regulations on the merits of codes and cyphers. The 900mhz band in the phones should be completely unused in America, that option is there to remain compatible with European networks.

Imagine this: Your area sets up a Ham Cellphone node and various operators get a GSM quadband phone of their choice (probably needs to be unlocked). Now they can carry a form of communication around that allows them to contact other hams at any time. It will always work in an emergency. You could potentially allow for a "phone patch" operation. It would be beyond easy to put in an extension number to allow access to any attached repeaters, echolink, etc. Call ex# 270 to access the 147.270 repeater!

I wonder if the data connection works.. Hello hinternet! GSM-APRS? Text messaging? You could set up a truely cell based network with HSMM backhauls between each cell. Put the backhaul in the Ham allocation of 2.4ghz and have fun.

The OpenBTS project is what makes all of this possible. They use a software defined radio called the Universal Software Radio Project (USRP) along with their own Linux-based software to fully act as a Cellphone Base station. There is a blog written by the OpenBTS developers here.

Incidentally, The OpenBTS people have been running a small cellphone network at the Burning Man festival for the past 3 years or so. They get a special temporary license from the FCC and coordinate it with the phone company that covers (or doesn't, in this case) the area. The Wikipedia article references this but I can't find the blog posts that I remember where they talked in detail about it. This is the authorization for 2008 with temporary callsign WD9XKN.

Of course, after writing this whole thing I run across a Wikipedia page with GSM frequencies worldwide. Some of the allocations fall in the 900mhz band but it's not clear to me if there are any channels that fall completely into the 902-928mhz bandwidth that we are allotted. Can uplink and downlink frequencies be set to fall within the allotment? Will that actually work with any phones? I don't know.

Questions? Comments? Flames? Does anyone really read these things?

There have been a couple of interesting developments recently that I'd like to highlight.

The first one, I'm most excited about it, is the announcement of the SDR-Cube Transceiver.

A Portable Software Defined Radio
Utilizing An Embedded DSP Engine
for Quadrature Sampling TransceiversGeorge Heron, N2APB   and   Juha Niinikoski, OH2NLT

Very Neat! This kit takes a SoftRock 6.3 SDR and provides a dsPIC with all the brains to do AM/SSB/CW. It's apparently built to be very easy to couple with a NUE-PSK modem for not only computer-less SDR but PSK operation too. The makers say it can work with other computer coupled I/Q SDR boards as well, so it should work with any other SoftRock. The case will come painted black and several kit options will be available. They are planning to be a source for the SoftRock 6.3 RXTX if you want to go with that option. Personally I'd rather use an Ensemble RXTX and have 3 bands.
I highly recommend anyone to check out the website here.

NUE-PSK modem. I kinda wish they had a keyboard built-in. It'd look a lot like an old Tandy Model 100 though. That wouldn't be a bad thing, I don't think.

Something similar is the Mobo 4.3 Project. I don't know a whole lot about this project so I'll let the page speak for itself:

An all singing and all dancing all band 5W HF Software Defined Transceiver based on the popular Softrock 6.3 RxTx kit.
The Motherboard, or Mobo v.4.3 is an addon board to plug onto the Softrock v6.3 RxTx, to transform it into an all band (160-10m) HF SDR transceiver electronically controlled via USB.  This project, which started in mid 2009  has now been through the initial development phase, the result being a nicely performing all band transceiver, with an exceptionally linear transmitter output.  Measured IMDR is of the order of 48dB at 1W PEP and a respectable 31dB at 5W.  

Sounds pretty neat but again, with this project you require a PC to run the radio. Now if we could combine these two projects somehow, that'd be really neat. One thing that really impresses me is the digital power/swr meter. It's the smaller board to the right in the above picture. If the mainboard detects a high swr, it can automatically reduce your power so you don't burn out the driver. How cool is that?

Finally, Wouxun has announced a new radio in their line-up. It is a dual-band mobile radio. Link to the image, the Ed that runs Wouxun.us has all the details. No pricing information on it yet.

• Dual Receive (Truely, not dual-watch like the handhelds)
• Crossband
• Dual Frequency display
• 50W
• 999 channels
• Remote head.. Mount radio somewhere else and just put the head on your dash. Looks like Mic plugs directly into the head also. Hope that's a standard feature and includes mounting gear.

Looks like there are going to be multiple versions like the handhelds. 218-260 is listed! So there's a possiblity there of 2m/222.. 136-174/218-260. There's also some weird stuff like the possibility of 2mhz-30mhz AM-only receive. Or 500-2000khz, Or 50-500khz all AM-only. I don't really see the point in it but there you go. Apparently FM broadcast is available too. So one option there gets you AM & FM radio. The 2-30mhz option is kinda pointless unless you want to listen to CB though!

Chumby Hacker Board

This is pretty neat. It's a Single Board Computer that is basically the guts of a small device called a Chumby. The hardware is all Open and it runs a custom distro of Linux. Specifications below.

• Freescale iMX.233 processor running at 454 MHZ
• 64 MB onboard RAM
• Comes with 512MB uSD card with 100 MB Linux installation all ready to go
• Dimensions are 3.9" (100mm) x 2.4" (60mm) x 0.75" (20mm)
• 3.3V I/O pins can talk to most sensors, motor drivers, etc. No struggling with 1.8V levels.
• Low power, fanless CPU draws only 200 mA at 5V
• Built-in Lithium Ion/Polymer battery charger and 5V boost converter for portable projects
• Three USB ports!
• 1.9W mono speaker amplifier into 4ohm (0.1" JST onboard connector)
• Microphone input (0.05" JST onboard connector)
• LCD controller with 2mm output port
• 3.5mm A/V output jack with stereo audio and NTSC/PAL composite video
• Back of board has GPIO outputs on 0.1" header spacing, plug in an Arduino proto shield! Serial ports, ADC's, PWM, GPIO all running at 3.3v logic
• Quadrature encoder connections onboard
• 5-way joystick on-board
• MMA7455 3-axis +-2G to +-8G accelerometer on-board
• 3.3V TTL serial port for easy shell access
• Full GCC toolchain is ready for you to download and get crackin'!
• Schematics, Gerbers and original layout files are at the Wiki

All for only $89 at adafruit.

This could have quite a few uses for ham radio operators. Linux has integrated support for AX.25 Packet in the kernel. I've heard it's possible to set that up with a sound card interface. If someone made the software available this could end up being a very small Echolink or IRLP node. I wonder if the processor is fast enough to do simple software defined radio tasks? This could make for a tiny, full SDR with one of the softrocks or some other SDR kit. The CPU uses very little power.

My only disappointment is no onboard wifi. It's a small loss though. Not everyone would use it and it's easy enough to add a dongle on one of the usb ports.

Supposedly the board is only in beta right now so it's subject to revisions and has a limited production for now. I see a bright future for this thing.

Kenwood TR-9000 Service manual

Found this up on scribd, hopefully it'll help me with my TR-9000 problems.

TR9000Ser

Kenwood TR-9000 Problems

Frequency knob won't change? No transmit or receive? (RX/TX) PLL unlock?

I got this off of Ebay and it seemed to work fine for a little while and then it just died quietly. Everything appears to work but there's no receive (which was my first clue) and no transmit, that I can detect anyways. No transmit could be a problem with the PA but no receive, IMHO, seems to be more of a PLL issue. If so, then that should be my problem with transmit as well. Additionally, it seems pretty random but the main tuning knob will sometimes cease to do anything. I can change the display from the mic or by scanning it while this is going on but the rotary encoder acts like it's dead. I think this is related to my more major issue rather than being one on it's own.

I have this Service Bulletin from 1982 that I found here

I did perform the measurement with my oscilloscope and I think the radio needs the mod described. I'm not sure how to align the radio after I do it though. :/ It's been years since I took the electronics course so I'm not even sure I did the RMS measurements and calculations right.

Measurement at TP3 with .2v/div and .2uS/div. The bulletin above says the radio needs the mod if TP3 measures less than .5vRMS. I think this is right.

The alignment instructions state:

To align L6 & 7, first position the slugs flush with the tops of the coils, then alternately adjust those two coils for maximum output at the first peak into the coil ( fundamental frequency).  Then align L5 for maximum.

I'm fine up to the "flush with the tops of the coils" bit. LOL I'm not sure how I will continue beyond that.

I haven't attempted this mod yet, I want to get all my ducks in a row before I do it.

The offending circuit! X50-1620-11

Of course, there are quite a few electrolytics there, hopefully it's not a case of a leaky cap. I don't see anything out of the sorts there so far.

Edit: I'm not sure if this is the problem or not. I was measuring some voltages and there are several places where voltages don't match up to what the service manual says they should. The base of Q13 has 6.5v which is good but the collector should show 6.6v, I have only .7v there. :/