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Lost TinyTrak: Found



As I move from my old home office to my new home office I have been stacking a lot of "stuff" on the electrical workbench in the other room.  The thought is that as I throw things away (old parts, old projects, stuff) that I will try to spend a few minutes stripping off things like connectors that might have value on other homebrew projects.

As I am working way through the stack of stuff on the bench I found this little black project box with some serial connectors.  It turns out that it is one of several TinyTraks that I own but no longer use.

The TinyTrak is a APRS interface between a GPS and a Amateur Radio. It made me laugh, it should help you from getting lost.  It was lost and I just found it.  ;-)

I am going to remove it from the project box but likely will file the TinyTrak away. I think that I have another one or two around here someplace. Maybe it will become part of a future project or I will give them away at a future club meeting somewhere.

73 de NG0R

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It looks a lot like winter



Everything looks like nice, fresh, and clean this morning after the snowfall.  There is not quite enough snow to cross country ski (I will check the trails while I am out running errands just in case there is a chance of skiing later today) but just enough snow that I had to plow the driveway and shovel the sidewalks last night.

The weather service is predicting 40 to 50 degrees later this week so this snow will likely be a memory in a couple of days.

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QSOs for Sunday

I worked DR60BENE on 10m RTTY. (I stumbled across them looking for another DX station.)  I figured that DR probably was Germany but the rest of the callsign did not make sense.  After a quick visit to QRZ.com I discovered that it is a special event station related to Pope Benedikt XVI.


Hopefully I will have time later in the day to put some more contacts into the log. If not, then this was a good one to keep my daily goal in pace.

73 de NG0R

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QSOs for Friday

I was lucky enough to work 9N7MD on 20m CW. They are in Nepal for a few days so I suspect those QSOs will make people happy.


http://www.mdxc.org/nepal2011/

I am little nervous about this one sticking in the log....  I work them but they seemed to have a hard time returning my call correctly. Everytime that I resent my call they indicated that had it correctly. (I can't imagine that they are working the pile-up band hand with a paddle.)  When I search the online log I still don't see my info appearing.  --Not a good sign.  :-(

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Ubuntu 11.10 network and kernel blues

When I upgraded a couple of my PCs from Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10 I ran into a major issue.

I live out in the country in the middle of no-where and do not have access to DSL or a Cable for broadband. I have two wireless ISPs connected to a router that has two WAN interfaces. (I am full time work from home employee so I need solid internet and VPN connectivity) The upgrade had an issue with one of the two wireless ISPs... no connectivity to the internet at all.

It turns out that Ubuntu 11.10 ships with linux kernel 3.0.0-12-generic-pae. That kernel seems to present some sort of network issue. If switch back to a previous (old) kernel like 2.6.38-11-generic-pae it works fine. I struggled to find a fix other than using the old kernel. This created a new issue when I went to upgrade version of Oracle VirtualBox because the kernel and headers did not align properly (old kernel + new heads = errors.)

I found a posting from someone that indicated one of the new release canidate kernels should resolve the problem.
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.2-rc2-oneiric/

1. Download kernel packages for your architecture.
2. Install them using dpkg -i *.deb
3. Reboot the Ubuntu with recently installed kernel.

That resolved the network issue.  Then I ran sudo /etc/init/d/vboxdrv setup  and rebooted the PC.  I am fully back in business with the new kernel and Oracle VirtualBox 4.1.6r74713 on Ubuntu 11.10.

I will test this for a few more days before I apply to my main PC and my wife's PC. It is appears to be working well based upon my limited testing tonight.