A lot has changed since I last posted. I got hired by Intel for the Itanium Platform Validation Engineering team, I spent two weeks in California for training (Santa Clara area), I moved to Worcester, and most importantly... I got more radio stuff. (you can see where my priorities are!)
Radio stuff:
* NA1C no longer needed his old Tempo 2020, a clone of the Uniden 2020. I bought it from him at a bargain price as the bandswitch wafers are having problems and need repairing or replacing and he didn't really want to deal with it. Still haven't fixed it... haven't decided if I will replace them with banks of relays or re-tension the wipers properly and see if that helps. It covers 80, 40, 20, 15, and 10 meter bands, and has receive support on 15MHz. It's got a dual 6146 final amplifier and seems very well constructed, except for the bandswitch.
* I bought an old Globe Electronics VHF-62 Hi-Bander for $20 at a hamfest, guessing that it would be something interesting. I was not disappointed - it turns out it's a 2-meter and 6-meter all-tube AM transmitter capable of approximately 50 watts on both bands, plus CW! I haven't powered it up yet, as I do not know the multiplication factor for the local oscillator, have no receiver to match it with, and haven't figured out what repairs it will need. Still an awesome deal, it seems very well constructed though it was a kit.
* I went to fall NEARFest in Deerfield, NH with KC2EMA, KB1MSH, AB1JD, and now-KB1RGK. We had a much, MUCH better time than this spring - I was far overprepared, bringing a full tent (with stakes this time), a tarp and posts/stakes/rope to put it up, a grill, enough food for four days, plenty of dry clothes, etc etc. We didn't have to sleep in the van this time, we bought much cooler stuff, and AB1JD did not get hit on by creepy fat old hams. A good time was had by all.
* I'm building a 1kW linear amplifier, capable of operation from 40 meters to 10 meters with the possibility of adding some more inductance and capacitance for 80 meter operation. It only produces about 500 watts up toward 10 meters, but that's to be expected, as it uses a pair of 813s in grounded grid. The input matching network is apparently
the magic that makes it so powerful, most people I have talked to tell me I am insane to expect anything more than 600 watts out of a pair of 813s but several people say ZL1AXB (the designer) is definitely right about it. Almost all my parts are at least 100% overrated for the job, so I am not too worried about magic blue smoke.
EDIT: I almost forgot!
* The aforementioned NA1C and I are setting up a ghetto colocation facility in the basement of his apartment. Routers are kept off the floor using cement blocks, our cooling consists of a set of ventilation fans stuck in a broken window, and the power for the room was run while the fuse panel was fully live. Racks are out, stacking the equipment up one box on top of the next is in - just make sure to put the longest boxes at the bottom. We're running point to point links to various friend's apartments in the area using a 12dBi omnidirectional 12cm whip antenna and a pile of old 30dBi parabolic dishes... in general, it's going to be interesting. and cheap. And a perfect example of how NOT to run a datacenter.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Friday, June 27, 2008
gravity incident and new antenna
Wednesday, Jack and I went to pick up a 10/15/20 meter triband yagi that a silent key donated to the WPI Wireless Association. The rope used as guy wire (this taught me to always, ALWAYS use stainless steel wire rope instead of cotton rope) was... less than the strength it needed to be to lower the tower onto the ground safely, and as a result it ended up on the ground quickly and not exactly in the best shape. As a result, I am attempting to repair it and keep it for my use, as no one in the club will want to deal with bent and broken elements on an antenna that would only be used for field day events (thus, assembled and disassembled a lot).
And the new antenna...
I went to home depot and purchased $38 worth of EMT and fittings. By my calculations this should build a nice 6-meter 5 element yagi - a pretty good price for one I'd say. I just need a few U-bolts and the scrap G-10 fiberglas bar I have to finish it off.
And the new antenna...
I went to home depot and purchased $38 worth of EMT and fittings. By my calculations this should build a nice 6-meter 5 element yagi - a pretty good price for one I'd say. I just need a few U-bolts and the scrap G-10 fiberglas bar I have to finish it off.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Creating a FreeBSD 7 Desktop
1. install - partition to choice, set timezone, use X-Kern-Developer, set system to run sshd and linux ABI, create user account
2. add DHCP options to proper interfaces in /etc/rc.conf
3. reboot to make sure those work
4. cd /usr/ports && portsnap fetch && portsnap extract
5. install screen, pine (installs pico as well), sudo, portaudit, portupgrade (installs portinstall as well), irssi
6. when the irssi build breaks, cd /usr/ports/devel/glib20; make install clean;
7. when that build complains of already existing, make deinstall reinstall
8. restart the irssi build, it should complete. this doubles as a test case for whether gnome2 will complete successfully, or at least get past devel/gio-fam-backend.
9. add your user account to sudoers if desired
10. follow these instructions: http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/faq2.html
11. when gnome2 complains of dbus being too old, run the logalyzer. it will fail to find anything, check UPDATING and then run portupgrade -a to upgrade all existing ports.
12. When portupgrade -a fails, run pkgdb -F and fix anything that seems broken. BE CAREFUL here! go back to 11 and repeat until things seem under control. This may take a while.
13. Try building x11/gnome2 again, as per faq2 above. When it fails on sysutils/hal, attempt to build sysutils/hal manually, it will probably fail with a message about PolicyKit missing, so build sysutils/policykit manually and try again. If at any point a manual build complains about having already been installed and requiring proper reinstallation, do make deinstall reinstall.
14. when sysutils/fusefs-kmod fails, follow the instructions by p3n1x here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/bsd-17/installing-fusefs-kmod-set-srcbase-if-it-is-not-in-usrsrc-627393/ and then restart the build. If it doesn't fail, you already had your userland sources on the system.
15. when lsof (or any other port) fails to build, I just installed them from packages instead using pkg_add -r, as I was more concerned with getting the system up than having it as optimized as possible. Once the recalcitrant package is installed, restart the gnome2 build and it should continue.
16. if you somehow avoided it before, as I did (even though I thought I selected the X-Kern-Developer install), cd /usr/ports/x11/xorg; make install clean. I also had to manually start the x11-drivers/xorg-drivers install to get the mouse and keyboard/kbd drivers, I'm not sure why that wasn't automatically included.
17. Set up hidentd to use identd - only necessary if you use IRC and dislike waiting the extra 45 seconds for the identd request to time out.
18. set linux_enable, identd_enable, gnome_enable, dbus_enable, oss_enable to YES in /etc/rc.conf - also optionally set hostname="desiredmachinename". If you do this, add the same name to /etc/hosts as 127.0.0.1 to avoid sendmail etc having problems with unqualified unknown hostnames.
19. comment out ttyv8 (xdm session) in /etc/ttys to avoid it conflicting with gdm
20. set ttyd0/1 properly for 3wire operation to enable tty login
21. install audacious, mpg123, oss (install this from ports in audio/oss not from the official 4Front BSD installer! it goes a lot better, believe me.)
22. at this point you should reboot and get your xorg.conf file working. This is system dependent so I'm not going to write about how I did it, if you want info on a multidisplay system using the nv driver with all screens rotated 90 degrees, email me or something.
23. set firefox as the URL opener via system->preferences->preferred applications. My install came with this semi-broken, right clicking links in gnome-terminal and selecting "open" only gave me an error.
24. install multimedia/audacious-plugins - without this, audacious can neither input nor output media files nor audio. I'm not sure what use audacious is without it, but for some reason the default install does not include it. You will also want to go to Preferences->Audio in Audacious and select the OSS or OSS4 output plugin, else, the default setup will read your media files, "play" them, and write them back to disk, quickly running you out of free space. Again, not sure what use a media player that defaults to shuttling files about on disk instead of playing music is... must just be me.
That's pretty much it! what I have left to do: copy my documents from my old install, get the flash plugin working in Firefox, install Java (ugh), get nvidia drivers working instead of nv drivers so I can use both outputs on each card and get 3D hardware acceleration, and possibly dispose of a pesky problem involving xscreensaver that causes bad Xorg crashes. The only things I have to do to be ahead of where my old install was are copying my old documents - everything else can wait.
2. add DHCP options to proper interfaces in /etc/rc.conf
3. reboot to make sure those work
4. cd /usr/ports && portsnap fetch && portsnap extract
5. install screen, pine (installs pico as well), sudo, portaudit, portupgrade (installs portinstall as well), irssi
6. when the irssi build breaks, cd /usr/ports/devel/glib20; make install clean;
7. when that build complains of already existing, make deinstall reinstall
8. restart the irssi build, it should complete. this doubles as a test case for whether gnome2 will complete successfully, or at least get past devel/gio-fam-backend.
9. add your user account to sudoers if desired
10. follow these instructions: http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/faq2.html
11. when gnome2 complains of dbus being too old, run the logalyzer. it will fail to find anything, check UPDATING and then run portupgrade -a to upgrade all existing ports.
12. When portupgrade -a fails, run pkgdb -F and fix anything that seems broken. BE CAREFUL here! go back to 11 and repeat until things seem under control. This may take a while.
13. Try building x11/gnome2 again, as per faq2 above. When it fails on sysutils/hal, attempt to build sysutils/hal manually, it will probably fail with a message about PolicyKit missing, so build sysutils/policykit manually and try again. If at any point a manual build complains about having already been installed and requiring proper reinstallation, do make deinstall reinstall.
14. when sysutils/fusefs-kmod fails, follow the instructions by p3n1x here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/bsd-17/installing-fusefs-kmod-set-srcbase-if-it-is-not-in-usrsrc-627393/ and then restart the build. If it doesn't fail, you already had your userland sources on the system.
15. when lsof (or any other port) fails to build, I just installed them from packages instead using pkg_add -r
16. if you somehow avoided it before, as I did (even though I thought I selected the X-Kern-Developer install), cd /usr/ports/x11/xorg; make install clean. I also had to manually start the x11-drivers/xorg-drivers install to get the mouse and keyboard/kbd drivers, I'm not sure why that wasn't automatically included.
17. Set up hidentd to use identd - only necessary if you use IRC and dislike waiting the extra 45 seconds for the identd request to time out.
18. set linux_enable, identd_enable, gnome_enable, dbus_enable, oss_enable to YES in /etc/rc.conf - also optionally set hostname="desiredmachinename". If you do this, add the same name to /etc/hosts as 127.0.0.1 to avoid sendmail etc having problems with unqualified unknown hostnames.
19. comment out ttyv8 (xdm session) in /etc/ttys to avoid it conflicting with gdm
20. set ttyd0/1 properly for 3wire operation to enable tty login
21. install audacious, mpg123, oss (install this from ports in audio/oss not from the official 4Front BSD installer! it goes a lot better, believe me.)
22. at this point you should reboot and get your xorg.conf file working. This is system dependent so I'm not going to write about how I did it, if you want info on a multidisplay system using the nv driver with all screens rotated 90 degrees, email me or something.
23. set firefox as the URL opener via system->preferences->preferred applications. My install came with this semi-broken, right clicking links in gnome-terminal and selecting "open" only gave me an error.
24. install multimedia/audacious-plugins - without this, audacious can neither input nor output media files nor audio. I'm not sure what use audacious is without it, but for some reason the default install does not include it. You will also want to go to Preferences->Audio in Audacious and select the OSS or OSS4 output plugin, else, the default setup will read your media files, "play" them, and write them back to disk, quickly running you out of free space. Again, not sure what use a media player that defaults to shuttling files about on disk instead of playing music is... must just be me.
That's pretty much it! what I have left to do: copy my documents from my old install, get the flash plugin working in Firefox, install Java (ugh), get nvidia drivers working instead of nv drivers so I can use both outputs on each card and get 3D hardware acceleration, and possibly dispose of a pesky problem involving xscreensaver that causes bad Xorg crashes. The only things I have to do to be ahead of where my old install was are copying my old documents - everything else can wait.
setting up desktop again...
So I finally bit the bullet. I'm rebuilding my desktop's OS from scratch, on a new hard drive, because I did some things wrong over time and fouled it up pretty bad a few weeks ago trying to get smart-card login working... not such a smart idea after all. Steps:
1. curse at all three non-working dvd/cdrw combo drives, blame them, the install CD, and my system's BIOS alternately until trying the only cdrw drive I have left makes it work perfectly. (combo drives scheduled to be smashed and burned tomorrow)
2. set up rc.conf to handle ethernet interfaces, etc etc
3. portsnap fetch && portsnap extract (use this from now on, not cvsup)
4. install screen, pico, sudo, irssi, portaudit, portinstall, portupgrade
5. get Gnome2 working again. This is going to be fun...
6. Transfer all documents from Windows drive and old FreeBSD drive (including all requisite .confs, motds, cronjobs, login scripts, etc etc etc) to Tantive's RAID for safekeeping.
7. get NFS mount of RAID working.
8. get nvidia drivers working.
9. ???
10. PROFIT
1. curse at all three non-working dvd/cdrw combo drives, blame them, the install CD, and my system's BIOS alternately until trying the only cdrw drive I have left makes it work perfectly. (combo drives scheduled to be smashed and burned tomorrow)
2. set up rc.conf to handle ethernet interfaces, etc etc
3. portsnap fetch && portsnap extract (use this from now on, not cvsup)
4. install screen, pico, sudo, irssi, portaudit, portinstall, portupgrade
5. get Gnome2 working again. This is going to be fun...
6. Transfer all documents from Windows drive and old FreeBSD drive (including all requisite .confs, motds, cronjobs, login scripts, etc etc etc) to Tantive's RAID for safekeeping.
7. get NFS mount of RAID working.
8. get nvidia drivers working.
9. ???
10. PROFIT
Friday, June 13, 2008
Usable Repeaters - 70cm
No Output:
K1KKM
N1DOA
N1WPN
KC2LT/Georgetown
N1EXC
N1WPN/N1WP
W1AJI
N1VQQ/446.375
K1CA
N1FOS
K1JC
WA1DMV
NS1RA
N1LHP/441.9
K1ZIK
WA1RHN
NE1B
Operational!:
NY1Z
N1LHP/444.1
K1SI
KC2LT/Derry
N1VQQ/447.825
KA1LCR
All No Output means is that I don't get any response upon transmitting my callsign on the input frequency with the proper CTCSS/DCS tone, at 5 watts, with a rubber ducky, from Fernwood Ave in Bradford.
All Operational means is that I get a response from the repeater.
K1KKM
N1DOA
N1WPN
KC2LT/Georgetown
N1EXC
N1WPN/N1WP
W1AJI
N1VQQ/446.375
K1CA
N1FOS
K1JC
WA1DMV
NS1RA
N1LHP/441.9
K1ZIK
WA1RHN
NE1B
Operational!:
NY1Z
N1LHP/444.1
K1SI
KC2LT/Derry
N1VQQ/447.825
KA1LCR
All No Output means is that I don't get any response upon transmitting my callsign on the input frequency with the proper CTCSS/DCS tone, at 5 watts, with a rubber ducky, from Fernwood Ave in Bradford.
All Operational means is that I get a response from the repeater.
First Post!
pretty much this blog is just so I can keep track of what repeaters I've found to be operational and other radio notes. I considered writing a simple web application to track this but decided it was better to host it somewhere more stable than the computer under my desk... so here it is. I doubt this will ever be of any interest to anyone except myself, or possibly other hams in the northeastern massachusetts area.
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