Fight for Air Climb

Today was the annual Lung Association of Iowa Power Climb, recently renamed to the Fight for Air Climb. The American Lung Association sponsors these events in many cities across the country, and the basic premise is this:

  • Secure the tallest building in the city
  • Find people to get sponsors and raise awareness.
  • Climb all the stairs.

Now, Des Moines is by no means a huge city so our tallest building, called 801 Grand, has only 41 floors of stairs.

Polk County ARES provides communication services for many events like this, and my position this year was in the 29th floor stairwell. This was not my first time working this event, nor is it likely to be my last, but there is always something awe inspiring about seeing this:

2010 Fight for Air Climb Lead Firefighters

2010 Fight for Air Climb Lead Firefighters

These are real men and women. They’re in full flame retardant insulative gear, full air tanks, boots, hats, etc. In other words, these men and women are ready to run into the burning building to save our lives. They come from all over Iowa to participate in this event. Gentleman, I salute and thank you.

WD TV Live

So, about 5 years or so ago I decided to built a HTPC to replace my aging Tivo. It was an epic story, a massive amount of money was spent, but in the end I was rewarded with a 2 tuner DVR in a nice brushed aluminum home theater case with a vacuum fluorescent display. It was capable of recording 2 shows at once while watching another or streaming video from a network source, a decent feature set for the time. A lot of time (and expense) went into ensuring it was whisper quiet. No small task when your processor is a Pentium 4 single core power-gobbling toaster.

I don’t watch much “TV” anymore; about 6 months ago I canceled my cable subscription and went strictly OTA/Downloaded content. The only channels I miss are Discovery and Sci-Fi, and the content from those can be found if one looks hard enough.

With the digital transition my 2 tuners and DVR functionality was lost entirely but I was already streaming most of my video from my NAS in the basement anyway. A few months ago the power supply in the HTPC died. No longer having the resources I once did, I replaced it with a fairly cheap one to get by. It was louder, but it worked again. In the last few weeks, some other strange noises have been coming from the AV cabinet and sure enough it was the HTPC again. Nothing’s broke, I suspect a fan is going bad. The HTPC really is in a harsh environment, honestly I’m surprised I haven’t had more problems with it. It’s hot in that cabinet, it collects dust and cat hair.

Although I wasn’t yet searching for a replacement someone was talking about an interesting device yesterday: The Western Digital TV Live. This device is designed to sell more WD external hard drives.

My biggest problem with most streaming devices is that they require that you stream from the Internet or a connected PC running special software. This WD box requires neither. It plays 1080p content nativity with no transcoding or server software required. In addition to streaming from any attached USB device (thumb drive, hard drive, etc) it connects to standard SMB (Windows) network shares using credentials you supply and streams the content from there. It can stream an extremely diverse selection of audio and video formats as well as display photo slide shows.

It’s menu interface is very similar to the modern Sony horizontal bar interface, that is not a bad thing. WD implemented it well.

It streamed every Audio and Video file I threw at it, and I have some strange video file formats. After 4 hours of streaming 720p it was slightly warm. No network hiccups or pausing and skipping. Video/Audio sync was good, which is important since it’s not adjustable.

This is the least amount of research I’ve ever done in purchasing something. I went from not knowing it existed to plugging it in in less than 3 hours. I bought it locally at Best Buy with plans to return it when it performed poorly and didn’t meet my criteria. I was surprised at how good it was, and became curious as to why it was working so well so I went out to do some research and find out why.

This is a Linux box. They’re leveraging all the well implemented free video codecs available in Linux. This explains why it supports Matroska container formats and the several advanced codecs they usually contain. It also explains it’s solid SMB implementation and the hacker community I found working on customized firmware for the box.

It has some Internet streaming stuff for YouTube and some radio streaming but honestly I don’t care. I have no desire to watch 240×320 streams on my 42″ TV. It doesn’t really get in the way and I don’t care how it works. I’ll just assume it works well and never use it.

There a couple small issues.

If it’s going to stream things from the Internet, it better have Netflix streaming. The WD TV Live doesn’t. I don’t have Netflix yet, but every single person I know tells me how wonderful it is, one of these days I’ll break down and try it. My next Blu-Ray player will almost certainly include that, so it’s not a big deal that WD didn’t, but it just seems odd that it wasn’t included.

It doesn’t create thumbnails for content on network shares and it’s default method of browsing is via thumbnail. When browsing network shares with default settings you get many identical empty thumbnails and you have to highlight them to see what they are. Thankfully they included an option to not use thumbnails and use something truly revolutionary: File names. This makes things much easier to navigate. For audio files you can tell it to use file names, ID3 tags, or the artwork stored in the MP3 file.

The WD TV Live has no way to limit itself to 1 server, establish a preferred server, or create a shortcut to a specific server/share combination. This makes for many additional clicks in the UI. When you select Network Share, it presents you with every machine on your network that has sharing enabled (every Windows box does) in the server list, and you have to select on the one you want then move on to select the share that contains your files. It’s all presented in a file/folder view so it’s not really painful, but it’s more clicks than you really should have to make in a properly setup system.

It needs the ability to hide things. Hide menu items I don’t use, hide machines that don’t contain media files, hide shares that aren’t related, etc.

This isn’t for everyone. It can’t play DRM protected content, it doesn’t have WiFi (it’s optional), it doesn’t have netflix streaming or a web interface for control when the TV is powered down (for streaming music).

For me this was the very definition of impulse purchase which I almost never succumb to, but it appears it will work out quite well. I’ll decide for sure over the weekend, but I think it’s a keeper. It’ll appears that it will easily replace my old HTPC while being dead silent and much lower power consumption (12V 2A wall wart). It could replace my AudioTron as well, but I’m not sure I will retire it yet or not. The web interface on the AudioTron is good, and I don’t really want to power up the TV to select a song.

Odds and Ends

Not much to update lately, but a combination of little things.

The D-Star repeater is rock solid and performing wonderfully well. There are new versions of the hardware interface I am using and I may upgrade in the future but right now I feel that I’ve accomplished what I set out to do and I’m going to just let it run for a few months. The only planned upgrade for it at this point is a temperature sensing fan controller. In it’s current incarnation it is located in my shack and the fan is quite loud all the time, there is no need for the cooling fan to be running when the repeater is in Rx mode. I have a controller somewhere that will do this, but I can’t seem to locate it.

My Heathkit GC-1000 power supply upgrade is on hold pending parts availability. I’m hoping to be able to place my order towards the end of January. I could probably source out the parts I need from multiple vendors, but I’d just as soon order it all, in 1 order, from Mouser.

We had our first ARES meeting of the new year this evening and things are filling out for an event-filled 2010. We have at least one event in 8 different months of the year. Several months have multiple events and several events still have dates TBD. This is looking to be a busy year for Polk County ARES.

More updates when things happen!

D-Star Repeater

Friday’s success with the 1.2GHz repeater coupled with the long weekend of hiding from shopping crowds allowed me to put my nose to the grindstone and work on one of my own D-Star projects, a non-Icom UHF repeater.

I’ve been working on this for months, very slowly. I’ve had a hotspot running with various levels of success during that time. My biggest problems were getting the audio levels set correctly without a deviation meter or oscilloscope, and, it turns out, hardware failure.

The GM300 I was using appears to have a problem where after a few days of use, it simply stops. It won’t TX or RX until power is removed for while.

On Saturday I decided to dig into my portable analog repeater and make it hybrid analog/d-star. This machine doesn’t get used at all; I built it a few years ago out of surplus parts mostly as a learning experience and since this D-Star repeater was a continuation of that learning experience, it seemed like a good fit. I keep the repeater on my shelf in case it is needed for an ARES event or an actual emergency, so it was still there waiting for me.

Today I finally finished it up, made the appropriate interface cables, set the levels properly (and hopefully permanently) and fired it up. It worked first try, and after some testing I decided to button the whole thing back up. Amazingly it is still working quite well even after all the screws have been put back.

For the digital repeater controller I’m using a Mini Hotspot GMSK Node Adapter from Mark Phillips. It was originally designed by Satoshi Yasuda 7M3TJZ, but he has closed up his design after a temper tantrum so I choose to go with what was available at the time. Satoshi has some nice new features, I’ll probably purchase one of his boards once he stops requiring you to buy a new preprogrammed PIC for every software update. I have experience with his code already and I’ve found buggy and updates were required frequently. I don’t have a problem with fixing code, but even though his price for updates is only $7 waiting 2 weeks for post to deliver from Japan for each update is unacceptable for me in the age of Internet delivery of a .HEX file.

The Node Adapter requires a PC to operate, and it uses the pc’s Internet connection to do D-Plus linking and D-PRS location reporting via the DVAR HotSpot software package.

Essentially this is a full duplex complete D-Star repeater with one single exception: Callsign Routing is not supported. This bugs a lot of people in the D-Star community, but it’s been my personal experience that callsign routing works poorly at best and it’s implementation imposes a number of restrictions that I’m quite happy to live without. Chief among these restrictions is the requirement for each repeater to have a unique callsign and that callsign also cannot be shared by any user anywhere on the network. This puts an undue burden on the FCC to issue these additional licenses, as well as individual users such as myself who would then need to create a “club” in order to officially then request a club callsign for their D-Star repeater. If callsign routing worked as well in practice as it should, it would be worth the hassle, but Icom’s implementation leaves much to be desired and at least currently, there is no alternative to their implementation.

So to sum it all up, the hardware is as follows:

  • Transmitter: Motorola M120
  • Receiver: Motorola GM300
  • Mini Hotspot GMSK Node Adapter
  • Cellwave 440MHz Duplexer
  • Motorola GR300 cabinet with small “jet turbine” cooling system.
  • HP ePC 42 running Windows XP

D-Star 1.2GHz DD Success!

I’m posting this from a laptop using an Icom ID-1 for Internet connectivity via our D-Star repeater and gateway.

It was frustrating, but in the end I’m glad I’ve participated in this project and that I  learned all that I have. This entire D-Star endeavor has been very rewarding.

Now it’s time for some more clean up and some additional documentation for users to teach them how to connect ID-1 radios to our gateway.