The Retro 75 has arrived!

My package from Dave Benson arrived this afternoon.


As much as I might like to build it tonight I think that I will wait a couple of days. Maybe I can get Jacob (N0AEA) to help work on this one with me at the workbench.

SDR-Shell

Here is an interesting look SDR tool for Linux. (SDR = Software Defined Radio)

http://ewpereira.info/sdr-shell/

I am looking for forward to at some point focusing on my SDR project and getting them built and operational. Ideally my Softrock will drive a 28mhz to 144mhz transverter which will drive 902mhz, 1296mhz, and 10ghz transverters.

There are not too many people doing this on Linux so it should be an interesting voyage.

73 de NG0R

Svxlink, Qtel, and EchoLink

EchoLink will work on Linux using WINE. It works but sometimes can be a little flaky. I am not a huge EchoLink user but I do want it work properly as I talk with some other folks that are interested in building radio and electronics gear.

There is an Open Source project call SvxLink that offers a client (QTEL) and a server component.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/svxlink/

The challenge that I have is that they only have pre-built packages for Fedora based distros that can use RPMs. I use Ubuntu which is based upon Debian which uses DEBs for installation packages. In theory this should not be an issue because they list the sources files and give you instructions for how to compile it for your platform.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/svxlink/wiki/InstallSrcUbuntu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install g++ libsigc++-1.2-dev libgsm1-dev libpopt-dev tcl-dev libgcrypt11-dev libspeex-dev make alsa-utils
sudo apt-get install libqt3-mt-dev
wget  http://downloads.sourceforge.net/svxlink/svxlink-090426.tar.gz
tar xvzf svxlink-090426.tar.gz
cd svxlink-090426
make
sudo make install

In theory that is pretty simple... until you throw an error!  I am running Ubuntu 9.10 32bit and it appears that some important things might have changed since the instructions were written for 8.04 and 8.10.

--- Compiling AsyncSerialDevice.cpp...
AsyncSerialDevice.cpp: In member function ‘void
Async::SerialDevice::onIncomingData(Async::FdWatch*)’:
AsyncSerialDevice.cpp:299: error: ‘perror’ was not declared in this scope
make[3]: *** [AsyncSerialDevice.o] Error 1
make[2]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2

It appears that a couple of folks are talking about tweaking this install and then creating a deb.  So what does a person do until that is available?  --Of course... you Google to see if you can find someone that already has made a deb for testing. I found an old build at: http://hb9hli.radioamateur.ch/public/ubuntu/svxlink/ Install the couple of debs that are listed and you should be in business. I was able to get this to run on an ASUS EEE 900HA with Ubuntu 9.10 in about 2 minutes.

The images show the QTEL client.


This version appears to be pretty old. It runs and appears to be pretty stable based the initial testing that I did with the EchoTest conference room. At some point I would like to get the newer client running so that I can get visual feedback on my audio levels.

This tool is not as full featured as the standard EchoLink client but it appears that all of the important pieces are there and it appears to be more stable than running EchoLink under WINE.

Ok... enough time playing computer for this morning. I need to run some errands. Once I get those done I hope to make it back to the work bench and work on some radio and electrical projects. I will probably test QTEL out tonight on the QRP conference around 8:15pm central time.

73 de NG0R

PS... Here is another location to try: http://www.chrisronk.net/ham/linux.htm
Chris has converted the RPMs to Debs with Alien. It was on my to-do list but it looks like he might have it working. I am going to try it on another laptop that is headed to workbench but is not critical around here.

Wind Train CP 9704 - Cutting Snow

Here is a delayed photo....

A Canadian Pacific train hauling wind farm components across central Minnesota. The photo was captured on 2/15/2010 a few miles west of Watkins, MN as the train is headed eastbound.

New Kits on Order

Since I did not buy anything at the Mid Winter Madness hamfest I went with my backup plan. I had been waiting on ordering these until I knew if I had spent my allowance in Buffalo.

http://www.qsl.net/k5bcq/Kits/Kits.html

You can never have enough signal sources on hand. This one is pretty small and covers a nice range. It is WAY smaller than my HP606 and Wavetek 3000. It will make a nice addition to the work bench with the other test gear.

---

http://www.aade.com/lcmeter.htm


 I have been looking at ordering the LC meter for about 6 months and had always found a reason to avoid spending the money. I have a LOT of variable capacitors on hand that are unmarked. I also tend to homebrew quite a few of my inductors. Both of those reasons keep reminding me that it would be handy to have an LC meter on hand. (I will build a couple of additional test fixtures for it once it is assembled.)

I will see if I can get N0AEA and N2BEN to help assemble them once the kits arrive in a week or so.

73 de NG0R

Polyakov's Russian Mixer (N2CQR & AAITJ)

Kind of a neat circuit and article on the SolderSmoke Blog by Bill.


That is what you call "homebrew"... no SA612/NE602 blackbox mixer there.  :-)

That picture has a high "cool" factor for knack victims. I should try brewing up a diode mixer sometime soon. I need to starting working on a 30m receiver to go with my 30m transmitters/components that I am testing. (You need both pieces to complete a QSO. )

73 de NG0R

Photo Projects

It has been a while since I experimented with HDR photos.

Some examples of what an HDR photo is:
http://www.hdrsoft.com/gallery/index.php
http://www.vanilladays.com/hdr-guide/#onevsthree

I have been pondering some ideas for new photo projects. (Like I really need more projects in my life at the moment.) I have been feeling self aware that I have not been shooting nearly as many photos over the past 12-24 months. One of the things that I miss from my film days was shooting Velvia E6 slide film with polarizing filters and/or gradient/split neutral density filters. I was always trying to push the available latitude of the E6 film.  Back in the day, I shot primarily two different styles.... B&W and ultra contrasty E6 chromes.

It might be time to revisit HDR as a way to bring a similar feel to my digital work.

In the past my most rewarding photos (to me personally) were rural America route 66 style images. Travelling the roads of places like North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Colorado shooting a wide angle lens with some chrome loaded in the camera was pretty magical.

Thinking out loud... some photos projects might be slowly bubbling near the top of my to-do list.

(Yeah.. Yeah, I know that I need to get the photoblog and gallery up on the new web server after the migration.  It is buried on the to-do list some place.)

Here is a non HDR image from a couple of years ago. --Spring on the North Shore of Superior

The Flake Equation

Humor from xkcd


Click on the picture for a larger version.

Misc ramblings

After dinner I went back down to the man cave (my office at one end of the basement and my workbench in the utility room at the other corner of the basement.) I grabbed the Netbook and fired up EchoLink (with WINE running on Ubuntu 9.10) while working on a project.

Tonights mini project: I had three capacitors for the XV144 that had not made it onto the board for some reason. One was part of the 28mhz bandpass filter. The other two are used across a power regulator to prevent oscillations across the power supply and rails.  They were pretty simple to add.

While working on the transverter I chatted with several folks on the QRP conference. We have started to meet there informally outside of the normal Sunday & Wednesday group. Last night we talked about ordering, sorting, and stockpiling parts. Tonight we talked about making homebrew printed circuit boards. I received a lot of questions about how the process works. I outlined the important steps and referred people to my blog since most of the notes are already covered here. We also had HL2KAQ join the conversation from South Korea. It was kind of fun adding an international element to the conversations. HL2KAQ was connected in via a 70cm link on his end.

When I am over at the workbench working on a project and melting solder it is fun to be able to talk with folks about radios, rf, computers, and other topics. My wife and kids are normally winding down their day between 8:30-9pm so it is a good time to escape to projects in the man cave.

FYI... the XV144 and XV432 kits are completed awaiting testing and final configuration.  (I needed to get them completed before I start putting another project on the work bench.)

73 de NG0R

Echolink on Linux

I have not used EchoLink in almost 5 years. I had it setup briefly at my last QTH for short period of time just to see if I could get it work. Since I am rebuilding my XP laptop as a Linux Ubuntu based machine I am looking at my list of software to install and configure.

I decided to revisit EchoLink in hopes that I could get it working with Linux and that maybe I could find some other link minded people that want to talk about RF design and construction. (I like to think of myself as a builder.)

As I searched around on the internet it really seemed like EchoLink is focused on Windows based machines and the Linux and Mac community was left with what ever they could figure out on their own. I noticed that there are a couple of groups that are trying to come up OpenSource answers to EchoLink for Linux and Mac based users. I did see one brief mention of someone using WINE to host an EchoLink session. I decided to give EchoLink+WINE a try as I am having reasonably good success getting Windows based applications to work with WINE for the applications that I can replace with a native Linux solution.



The install was very straight forward. I spent more time getting the callsign validation completed and configuring my firewall for the proper port forwarding than installing the software. (I have two ISPs running into a router with dual WAN interfaces. I had to configure the EchoLink firewall rules to favor one ISP so the bits would land at the right spot behind the NAT.  Not overly hard to configure... just a bit of testing & tweaking.)

I ran a couple of tests within EchoLink to tweak my software based upon the system performance. I then connected to Node 9999 which is the EchoTest conference. I ran some tests until I got my microphone audio dialed-in reasonably well. (I should keep my eyes out for a better microphone at some point in the future.)

While I would rather talk with another Amateur Radio operator via a more traditional RF to RF method this might be a good way to talk with builders (even folks outside of my geographical region.)

--Time for me to head to the workbench and focus on building something

73 de NG0R

PS... Some follow-up notes:

• I spent about 90 minutes on the QRP conference last night. That was a lot of fun while doing other things in the shack. On my main machine the performance was pretty solid & the audio quality was decent.
  
• I decided to install EchoLink on my ASUS EEE netbook so that I can take it to work bench with me in the evening. It installed and connected fine but I had a problem getting the computer to acknowledge the MIC jack for an external microphone. I eventually found a quick mod to the sound card configuration that solved my problem. Notes below.
  

In order to get the microphone to work when using Ubuntu 9.10 for the ASUS EEE 900HA you only need to patch the ALSA configuration file as described above:

Patching of the ALSA configuration file (/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf)

1. Open a terminal window
2. Enter 'sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf'
3. Search in the file whether a line including 'snd-hda-intel' exists,
if so please delete that line
4. Add the following two lines to the configuration file:

===start here===
# eeePC 900a patch
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=quanta
===end here===