Redhatter’s Web Blog

Well, yesterday I received my first QSL card. About a month ago, I was tuning around on 40m and noticed there was a station calling CQ. A station with what I thought was a rather unusual callsign, VI2AMW60.
I sat there for a moment racking my brain trying to think what country VI was… in the meantime I decided to respond. I soon realised okay, the contact wasn’t overseas — but it was a special event station.

We exchanged details briefly and the chap at the other end asked if I collected QSL cards. I normally don’t bother about QSL cards, but since this is a special event station — I figured why not. He directed me to QRZ.com where the address details were mentioned. I sat down and designed a QSL card to send off. The card I sent off is shown below.

I wasn’t expecting anything back… there was mention on the QRZ.com page about including a self-addressed stamped envelope or some such. I wasn’t sure whether that only applied to overseas or who that applied to. Much to my surprise however, I received the following card in the post yesterday (again click to enlarge).  This shows the front and back of the card I received.

Well, I’m very happy to have received that card. For what it’s worth, this may be the first and last QSL card I receive under this callsign, since I hope to hear from a WIA assessor about upgrading my license to a Standard license — and with that, I’ll be getting a new callsign. Time will tell there. But to the people of the Illawarra Amateur Radio Society, I thank you for your QSL card.

Well people will have noticed that I’ve been quiet on IRC, forums, email… and also on most of my usual haunts around the amateur bands (especially HF).

I’ve been out at Laidley for the past few weeks, doing some industrial experience with a small outfit known as Eze Corporation, who trade under their trademark of SmartWheel (warning: Flash-laiden site, not recommended on slow hardware or low-bandwidth links). They’re based about 2km outside the centre of Laidley and specialise in electric vehicles.

At the present time, it’s all research and development.  Rather than having a single engine and transmission system, these vehicles operate similar to the large mining trucks — four individual motors on each wheel, turning independantly.

My role has been primarily the programming of a small driver control console, the Tritium TRI63.  This little beast sports a Texas Instruments MSP430F135 16-bit microcontroller, with a Microchip MCP2515 CAN controller.  A rotary encoder hooks up to the steering column to measure rotation of the steering wheel, while a potentiometer measures the accelerator pedal position.  The role of this controller, is to take these inputs, then figure out the speed and direction for each wheel — and send it out on the CAN bus to the other controllers.

It’s been a fun project thus far.  The development environment I’m using consists of my laptop running Linux (at the moment I’ve moved back to my old PII 300MHz laptop, since my newer one’s screen shat itself last week) which does all the compiling (mspgcc for the win), and a Windows XP desktop that runs IAR Embedded Workbench — which I use for flashing and debugging.  This has been handy experience — since my final year project at uni involves use of CANs on the Atmel AT91SAM7X256 MCU.

Earlier this month I was commuting two and from Laidley… getting up at 4:00AM to catch the 5:10AM bus from The Gap, arriving at Laidley 7:30AM… then catching the 4:38PM bus from Laidley home, arriving back at The Gap around 7:30PM.  This last week however, I’ve spent a few nights out here… makes it a lot easier and it means I can pack the hours in before uni resumes next week.

I’m quite enjoying the lifestyle out at Laidley too … peak hour barely rivals Brisbane’s traffic on a Sunday morning, and it’s all flat, perfect bicycle country.  The only downside is that it’s unpaid work — but hey, I’ve got my foot firmly in the door.  If I could get paid work here at the end of the year, I’d be out of Brisbane like a ball out of a cannon.  Maybe there’s scope for that in the future.  Time will tell.

Hi all…

I’ve been busy lately, thus haven’t had a lot of time to post on here… but I’ll save the full details of where I’ve been for another post.  People might recall my earlier attempt at a homebrew 2m/70cm whip antenna for a handheld radio.

At present, I’m out at Laidley (actually about 2km outside… near the Vaux and Lowe street intersection) and tried hitting a number of repeaters on 2m and 70cm.  Depending on where I stand, I seem to be reaching these repeaters in that, I get a response when I hit and release PTT:

• VK4RGC Mt. Tambourine 146.700MHz (-600kHz offset) — S7, have to stand in a specific spot
• VK4RDD Toowoomba 146.750MHz (-600kHz offset) — S9
• VK4RZD Mt. Perseverence 438.050MHz (-5MHz offset) — S2, too difficult for practical use (shame since it’s part of the WICEN/QDG network)

The ones I definitely can reach from here however…

• VK4RIL Laidley 147.100MHz (-600kHz offset) — S9, no surprises there
• VK4RAI Ipswich (The Knobby, Glenmorgan Vale) 146.900MHz (-600kHz offset) — S9, have to stand in specific points.

The big surprise however, was this one… VK4RAX.  I can reach it from The Gap no problems with a rooftop antenna and 5W.  Tonight however, I was receiving it S7~S9 (depending on where I stood) and managed to make contact with a few people.  Standing on tiptoe helped — as I haven’t as yet gotten around to building an extension lead that will make the on-hat antenna practical (the coax I’ve got is a little inflexible).

Apparently the signal was quite scratchy, but this is to be expected for a 5W handheld at this distance.  The image below (taken from Google Maps) shows the approximate direct path for the signal and the distance — click for an enlargement.

I’m hardly breaking any world records here, but this is by far my personal best on this handheld.

Emma was our family pet, of almost 18 years. She arrived in the family, as a barely 6-week old kitten in late 1990, and has been part of this family ever since.

We’re not exactly sure when she was born… possibly around August/September. She had a comfortable life, at times playful, much of the time peaceful.

Towards the latter part of her life, she suffered from some inflamation, but apart from this, no other medical issues — she was in good health. In the last few months however, a thiroid problem developed. It turned out this was masking a kidney issue, which only showed up after the thiroid issue had been treated.

Emma passed away in her sleep around 8:45PM. I have collected some photos of her, as a memorial… they may be found here.

Well, I spent much of my weekend fooling around with antennas in one form or another.

I had taken down my HF rig to bring to the Brisbane Amateur Radio Club social — to sort out why it wouldn’t tune up on 10m… the problem turned out to be my power supply. I was using an old 250W AT computer PSU capable of supplying 9A at 12V. My radio, a Kenwood TS-120S is a 100W radio, and draws 20A when running full power. Now I had assumed since the mic gain was turned down to comply with my 10W limit, so the limited power wouldn’t be a problem… not so… it turns out that although I turned the mic gain down, the radio still wants its 20A for voice peaks. This causes the voltage to drop, and of course, instability.

Well, BuyEquip had some 600W ATX power supplies, that advertised a 52A 12V output rail, brand new for $60, so I snapped one up. A few more bits and pieces, and now my radio is much happier on 10m. Interestingly, the box says 52A, the unit itself says 20A… either way, I’ve met my requirements.

Earlier when I had my HF rig set up, I had taken the balun out since I noticed it seemed to be shorting out the feedline (measured with an Ohmmeter), and I couldn’t even pick up commercial SW stations (I used to hear Radio New Zealand quite strong around 7.145MHz).

I later discovered that it’s quite normal for a 1:1 balun to appear as a DC short… my balun uses ~10 turns of not-very-thin copper enamel wire and I guess I’m used to transformers for other applications where one sees a much higher resistance. Transformer Baluns are typically almost purely reactive — remember the reactance of an inductor is Xl=2(pi)fL — at DC, f=0, thus my ohmmeter sees Xl=0.

However, I knew I had done something wrong when wiring it up as when I disconnected the shield — I received Radio NZ S9+10dB, connecting the shield back dropped that to S2.

In the meantime, I used a 5cm piece of RG58, soldered straight to some 300ohm ladder line (surplus from my sim jim antenna).

I wasn’t sure that I had wired the balun correctly — and had lost the plans, so I set about locating some on the ‘net. A quick search revealed this page from the Antrim & District Amateur Radio Society. Well… what a difference it made… my noise floor on 80m went from S7 down to S3!

I spent the evening chatting on the Australia Wide Night Owl Insomnia Net (Friday evenings after 10:00PM at 3.6MHz LSB) — talking with stations as far away as Coffs Harbour, and even heard a feint amateur contact from New Zealand (ZL1?? callsign).

The other issue, was with my handheld. I’ve got two portable antennas for it, neither of them are particularly efficient on 2m, both are brilliant 70cm band antennas. One is the antenna that Kenwood supplied with the radio, the other was a Comet SMA3 antenna that I had bought at BARCfest. Not bad for portable use — but I wondered if I could do better.

People might remember my old project, the Hat-lamp, where I set out to homebrew a headlamp using a hard hat. Two radio amateurs suggested that I add an antenna mount to that — one suggested I could have a SMA-SMA socket adapter there and use my handheld’s existing antenna, the other suggested a SO239 socket on the top with a mobile antenna.

Well I gave the idea some thought… The big issue with this is two-fold: clearance (the antenna would have to incorporate a spring to absorb being whacked against low objects) and the social aspect (what would people think after seeing it). Neither of the handheld antennas were particularly good on the former part — I managed to bend the newer antenna once just sitting down — it’s mostly bent back into shape now, but I didn’t want to risk it. Both would be rather conspicuous though. A mobile antenna would be a rather heavy thing to have sitting on one’s head, so I gave that idea a miss.

I found some stainless steel fencing wire that was quite stiff, and cut off about 60cm of it. The idea was I’d wind the bottom of it into a spring, and a SMA plug would be soldered to the end (using some copper enamel wire to make the connection). Well, I built that Saturday Night, and using it directly on the handheld, noticed an immediate improvement in performance — I was hitting repeaters I normally don’t hit unless I’m plugged into the roof antenna. It is shown below… click on the photo for a larger view.

Last night, I set out to attach the antenna mount to the hat. One hole and a bit of elbow grease later, I had screwed the SMA-SMA adapter into the hole. The antenna neatly screws onto the fitting around the back of the hat, and a length of coax screws in underneath running to the radio. I haven’t tried walking around outside with it, but indoor performance is good.  The photos below show the socket views on top and underneath the hat’s brim…

The plan, the whip is still rather conspicuous — and there’s the risk of doing someone an injury if I’m not careful where I point the whip. I’m now looking around for a souvenir peacock feather that I can stick the antenna up the centre of… the idea being the assembly becomes decorative as well as functional (below is what it looks like now, sans feather). Well kinda… it’ll still look weird, but hopefully people will notice the feather rather than the antenna.

I’m pleased to annouce the final 2008.0 stages have been published.  I haven’t yet gotten around to giving them a run, I’ll set up a couple of chroots and do some test builds shortly, but in the meantime, I have put them up on my devspace for public review.

As previously announced, this release sees the addition of generic MIPS-1 stages for both big and little endian, as well as new stages for little-endian MIPS-3.  We still only support the hardware listed in the handbook however — the generic stages are provided merely as a convenience to those who may wish to experiment with other hardware, and know what they’re doing.

Approximately 1.2GB got uploaded over the 30 or so hours… this is apparent from my NTP server’s performance this weekend:

… Yeah… I think I’ll wait until I’m back at uni before I upload any more big files.

Anyway… as I say, the new stages are up, and I’d be greatful if some brave users could take them for a spin and report back.  In the meantime, I’ve got some chroots to set up and testing to do.

Well, presently I’m reading through the semester’s lecture slides to familiarise myself with the content I’m going to be examined on shortly.

And I’m noticing there are some bad habits that lecturers seem to be keen on repeating… again, and again.  Here’s some of my pet hates, as a student.  These relate to the presentation of the material we’re given, the actual format they’re provided in is another matter.

Many of these were provided in PDF, which is good.  My first niggle however, is when they do their “print to PDF”… in black-and-white… but don’t adapt their slides to suit this monochrome medium.

The above image is from a real presentation.  Those studying “Professional Studies II” (EEB781) at QUT might recognise it.  It was shown to us in colour during the lecture… but now when we review our notes, we only have it in shades of grey.  Thankfully we’re not being examined on that chart!  Then there’s this little gem…

This is a small section of a slide… Must I say, that black looks great on dark grey.  Mind you, the same criticism could be levelled at consumer electronics designers, who think it’s great to microprint 2mm high light-grey text on a dark grey panel!  But I digress…  Colour doesn’t necessarily improve things either… as shown by this example:

If it isn’t masking much needed information by discarding the colour information… the other trap they fall into, is scaling bitmap images up in size, and/or deforming their aspect ratios.  I’ve got loads of examples of this, dating back over 5 years of studies… Here’s a brilliant example of the former.

Uh huh… you honestly are going to tell me you can read every word of that?  Well yes, if you look closely, you can make things out… but why should we?  That slide is so blurred and pixellated, it’s hard to see what is being said.

Here’s the lesson… Vector graphics are your friend.  You can scale a vector to any size you like, and it won’t pixellate.  SVG is great for this… EPS isn’t too bad too.  Or WMF.  They all allow for graphics that can be scaled to any size.

Some things of course, are inherently bitmaps, such as photographs and scanned images.  If you must use a bitmap… make sure it’s a decent resolution to begin with. Making a bitmap smaller (by resampling) is fine… but don’t try to make it bigger… it’ll look like utter shite.

And of course, if you do try to resize a bitmap (or any graphic really, vector or bitmap)… at least preserve the aspect ratio.  Nothing looks worse than a stretched and distorted photo…

If you look closely, you can see the top-left photo has been stretched (made bigger!) horizontally slightly (not too bad, but still).  The worst is the bottom-right photo, which has been compressed vertically.  It’d be okay had the image been compressed horizontally in proportion… but instead, it looks squashed.

Just about every presentation package I have used, provides the means to scale images while preserving their aspect ratio.  Some do it by default… some require you to hold down Shift or Control whilst dragging it out.  In either case… it’s trivial to do.  If something doesn’t fit the hole in your slide… consider cropping the bits that aren’t needed so that it matches the aspect ratio of the hole.  But don’t squash it!

Anyway… that’s enough ranting from me… about time I got back to my studies.

Another one that arrived via the Department of Defence… this time, a rather striking series of images. I have no idea where these photos were taken, or who was involved… but anyway. Enjoy.

To avoid my ADSL link getting saturated, I’ve moved the article here.

The following is an email I just received via the Department of Defence.
Enjoy. :-)  (Update: It has been revealed by a commenter to this post, that the transcript below is a hoax.  Cheers for the info.)

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For those that don’t know him, Major General Peter Cosgrove is an ‘Australian treasure!’

General Cosgrove was interviewed on the radio recently. You’ll love his reply to the lady who interviewed him concerning guns and children… Regardless of how you feel about gun laws you gotta love this! This is one of the best comeback lines of all time. It is a portion of an ABC interview between a female broadcaster and General Cosgrove who was about to sponsor a Boy Scout Troop visiting his military headquarters.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER: So, General Cosgrove, what things are you going to teach these young boys when they visit your base?

GENERAL COSGROVE: We’re going to teach t hem climbing, canoeing, archery and shooting.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER: Shooting! That’s a bit irresponsible, isn’t it?

GENERAL COSGROVE: I don’t see why, they’ll be properly supervised on the rifle range.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER: Don’t you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children?

GENERAL COSGROVE: I don’t see how. We will be teaching them proper rifle discipline before they even touch a firearm.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER: But you’re equipping them to become violent killers.

GENERAL COSGROVE: Well, Ma’am, you’re equipped to be a prostitute, but you’re not one, are you?

The radio went silent and the interview ended.

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Clearly a certain General didn’t read the part of the ACMA rules that state you should not use language that would offend a reasonable person. But very succinct nonetheless.

Hi all…

This is more a note to myself… but may also be useful with others who may be wondering WTF is wrong with their mod_auth_mysql setup.

To configure it, do it as per the instructions mentioned in the CONFIGURE file, or even following the /etc/apache2/modules.d/12_mod_auth_mysql.conf that the ebuild installs… HOWEVER… you will need to change the length of the password field in the MySQL code snippets to suit your encryption method.

I decided to use SHA1 hashes, which are 40 characters long (encoded as hex).  Thus, you use a column type of CHAR(40), and set your authentication configuration to use AuthMySQLPwEncryption sha1. To use the “scrambled” encryption scheme (uses MySQL’s PASSWORD() function), this column needs to be 41 characters long, not the 20 advertised in the examples.

Once you do this, everything should be fine… and things will work as expected.