Quite a good video from the Radio Society of Great Britian (RSGB) that I had not seen before.
In Ireland, the national society is the Irish Radio Transmitters Society.
September 5, 2010
What is Amateur Radio?
June 15, 2010
Supporting space missions
I had a very nice surprise waiting for me when I got home today.
Previously, I posted that I played a very small part in receiving data from one of the satellites (Pollux) that formed part of the Atmospheric Neutral Density Expirement on STS-127. Henk, PA3GUO did a nice video about it as well.
Today, the postman delivered an ANDE-2 mission patch which flew on STS-127 (which I also happened to see on the launchpad last June), how cool is that!
June 13, 2010
Rewiring
Been real busy at work with a project proposal. We finally got it submitted last Friday. Consequently I do not have as much done with the new machine to replace the dell dimension desktop. I started look at it today and I realised I had run out of spare sockets on the RIGrunner in the shack. So I need to sort that out first but it will require me pulling everything off the desk to do a bit of rewiring (sigh).
So rather than tackling that today, I first installed a 190 Litre Single Water Saver Kit that I got from ecostore.ie. It is 1/4 full already with todays showers. After that I moved my battery bank to its new home (with help from EI8JA). This is also going to require some rewiring to get the Inverter output back to the garage to hook back into the house wiring (where it moved from).
PV Panels are hooked up again, and the bank is being charged, but no AC available back in the house yet. Oh, lucky me, I’m “off” tomorrow, I wonder what I will be doing?
June 12, 2010
Xastir gets OSM
Pretty much what it says. Last Wednesday Xastir got OpenStreetMap support in CVS courtesy of Jerry Dunmire, KA6HLD. Even though Jerry says its early days yet, it is “good enough” for me already. Way to go Jerry!
May 22, 2010
“Gorilla” Update
I’ve not been in the shack all that much recently (being part of the organising team the the Irish IPv6 Summit kept me busy) so I have not been doing much checking up on the PV installation and how it is working. Today, after assisting the South Eastern Amateur Radio Group set up a station for the EI2GEO special event station, I got to sit down and do some investigations. I have a second 60 Watt solar panel that I mentioned before. We hooked it into the battery system on Jim, EI8IG’s camper van to keep the battery topped up via solar power, and ran the radio from the same battery bank. This evening I dropped out my little 850 watt generator to keep the battery topped up overnight (and to give it a good run).
Today over a 12 hour period between approximately 08:00-20:00, my rrdtool graph says the system produced an average of 148 watts. 148 x 12 gives 1776kw, or approximately 28.5 cents of electricty (including vat). If we have about 7000 more days of sunshine like today (unlikely) then the system will have “paid for itself”. While it doesn’t seem like a whole lot, it is currently averaging about 1/6 of the ESB bill (over 30 days).
That is the first part done. Next I intend to replace my power hungry dell dimension desktop (approx. 125 watts, 24/7 or approx. 48 cents per day ) with a more efficient machine (approx 20 watts or approx. 8 cents per day). To do this I have purchased an Intel Pine Trail base D510MO a 40GB SSD drive, 4GB of ram and a DC powered case (I already have a DC supply in the shack, plus I can experiment with it in the car as well).
Thus far the machine seems to be able to do most of the tasks I need it to do, time will tell though as I need to get 6 RS-232 ports operational on it to control all the items I have running.
As an aside, we recently replaced the old washing machine (at least 10 years) with a super duper A rated new one. Initial testing seems to suggest that it is no more efficient than the old one. My suspicion is that I tested the old one (which I no longer have) in late Autumn, where it would have the benefit of taking hot water from the cylinder (Central Heating). The new one doesn’t have a Hot water input, so has to heat the water itself.
May 8, 2010
Linux in the Ham Shack…
… has moved. New url http://lhspodcast.info/
I have been catching up on episodes lately. Richard has a new noise-gate (the lack of one never bothered me before) and they are reducing the length again. Personally I think about 1 hour is enough, but that is just me. Keep up the good work guys.
Amateur Radio at the European Parliment
Amateur Radio was recently presented to members of the European Parliament. The theme was Amateur Radio benefits Society with a focus on Emergency Communications. It generated an interesing post from the EU Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid & Crisis Response, Dr Kristalina Georgieva. Ireland was of course represented at the event by committee members of the Irish Radio Transmitters Society. Looking at the pictures of the event it was interesting how many different comissioners were there. Next Saturday the Global Simulated Emergency Test (GlobalSET) takes place (I’m participating myself), given the increased profile of emergency communications at such a high (political) level. It will be even more interesting to see if there is increased activity this year.
April 21, 2010
Solar Dynamics Observatory
The Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched in February of this year. Earlier today NASA held their first briefing where pictures and some video clips were released. One word, stunning!
Significant data was gathered on the recent solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections. This are of interest to Amateur Radio operators as when they happen, the HF bands are pretty much unusable.
Still though, the detail is just stunning.
April 16, 2010
March 26, 2010
DXCC
Recently I’ve got more time to operate radio, so I’ve been working on my DXCC totals. Its becoming very, very addictive. For various reasons, my Antenna isn’t exactly a work of art. It is a 7m long piece of wire taped to a fibre-glass fishing pole, tuned against ground. I’m predominantly operating in “search-and-pounce” mode using morse code, where I continuously tuning up and down, looking for stations (rather than sitting on a frequency, and putting out endless CQ calls). While it’s not very efficient, it’s great fun, and I’m really enjoying it.
So, where do I stand? Well at the moment, I’ve 87 different DXCC entities worked, with 55 confirmed. Visualising this using Xplanet, it looks like:
Green are DXCC entities that I’ve already worked and confirmed. Yellow are ones worked but not confirmed, Red are ones that I’ve not worked yet. If I can keep my current level of activity, HF band conditions keep improving, and I “work” more stations that use Logbook of the World, rather than depending on QSL cards (my own below), I should achieve 100 countries confirmed by the summer. In theory 
