Even though I resisted, eventually I migrated from a separate PDA to a SmartPhone, of course a Treo running PalmOS. I was never blind, PalmOS was old. It wasn’t pretty or sexy but it’s breadth of applications combined with the openness of the platform brought unheard of power to an extremely mature platform. Currently I use a Pre, which from my point of view followed Apple down all the wrong roads. It’s a very nice device, but in creating that device they lost the power that made the Palm platform great: Developers.

I just wrote 4 paragraphs on the history of why the iPhone deserved to die but didn’t. That’s not what this post is about so I deleted them. I’ll just sum it up really quickly:

• AT&T’s network is a joke.
• Apple has draconian, unevenly applied, and poorly understood application store submission policies.
• Apple has destroyed the market for truly high quality supported apps by encouraging $2 apps that contain mostly pretty fluff, but some how adjusted user’s expectations to be happy with the fluff.
• The iApps DRM is restrictive and really accomplishes nothing other than locking you to Apple’s monopolistic distribution channel.

I bought an iPhone last week.

A local Ham was getting a iPhone4 and I picked up his “old” 3GS. There are a few Ham radio applications on the platform that I wanted to run and this was a great opportunity to check it out. I have no plans to ever activate it, I’ll be using it as a WiFi only device. I wanted the GPS though, and the iPod Touch doesn’t have that feature. The camera is pretty nice as well.

Everything I stated above is still true. Finding a decent quality app in the store is difficult, but I was surprised to see that after a few years there are more than a few decent applications to be found.

The 3GS is FAST. Seriously fast. There is no waiting. I thought my Pre was fast, and it was about equal to the 3G iPhone, but the S does make a huge difference.

I never did truly replace my Centro with my Pre. There were too many applications for PalmOS that just have no WebOS equivalent. I’m seriously considering going back to a 2 device model for a while where I have a phone, and a PDA. If I can just separate the decent applications from the crap in Apple’s app store a deactivated iPhone might work quite well.

Field Day 2010 is now over and our little 3 man /2 dog station not only made an impressive showing, but we also had a lot of fun.

The homebrew solar panel was completed late Friday night, we had planned for 2 identical panels but time only allowed for 1 to be completed. The panel provided enough current to operate our complete station as well as charge our 200AH battery bank during the day so we could operate well into the night. We measured our consumption as well as the output from the panel, we were 100% solar powered for most of the daylight hours. The homebrew panel was measured putting out over 100W (intermittently) after cabling losses from the panel into the operating area. Our entire operation (2 radios, 2 logging PCs) was based on the solar system, and although I did bring the generator as a backup plan we never even had to consider using it.

The Elecraft K3 performed wonderfully on crowded bands racking up just shy of 100 SSB contacts on various bands. The TS-2000 was used for Digital (PSK31) and also did quite well with just at 100 contacts attributed to it.

When the SSB operator got tired, we would fire up the digital station and work for a while, and then back forth throughout the contest. We remained 1A at all times. It’s strange running Field Day with no SSB stations  in the background. When we worked PSK31 an eerie silence descended on the station. No audio output from the radio was required and no one was calling CQ into the mic. It was almost as if we weren’t operating at all.

Severe storms were building north all day and finally ran through our area at about 2am Sunday morning. The poor band conditions (we’re attributing them to the storm) saw to it that that we went to bed at about 1:30am. We woke up praying our antennas were still erect, and they were. We resumed operation at about 6:30am Sunday.

Our antennas were a multi-band windom orientated N-S and a G5RV orientated E-W. We used guyed military surplus 5′ fiberglass poles to get them up about 40 and 30′ respectively. Next time we’re thinking of adding a vertical of some form into the mix. Sometimes they can pick out signals better in bad band conditions. We’re even considering moving to 2A and to add a full time digital station.

The dogs provided the critical service of cleanup of accidentally dropped consumable.

It looks like all said and done with our bonuses and multipliers we will have scored just about 1000 points during our 24 hour run. Not too bad at all.

Continue on for some pictures of our station…

[View with PicLens]

So Field Day is almost upon us so preparations have begun in earnest. We have at least 3 “affiliated” Field Day operations going on in the Des Moines area this year (DRMAA/ARCS, Polk County ARES, W0IW) in addition to several others north of us in Ames area.

Field Day is supposed to be an exercise in emergency communications preparedness but for most it’s a great excuse to get together with local hams and have a 28 hour long party. Amateur Radio is one of the last bastion’s of true geekdom remaining, so you can be assured it’s a geek party.

Preparations is kind of a misnomer for this event. The “hard core” operators all know what equipment they have and what they need to bring to make things work. The extent of preparation for that part of the event is typically a simple “Joe, you have power covered?” “Yes.” “Bob, Steve You guys bringing the towers?” “Yep.” “Ok lets move onto more important business. How many meals do we need how much charcoal, how much and what kind of meat?” There can be surprising debate over this last issue, especially living in Iowa.

A few years ago back in ’07 some friends and I did our own mini Field Day. It was just 4 of us but we had a great time and we decided to do it again this year. We’re using it as an excuse to get our gear out and sharpen some skills. Our goal this year is to run 1A, and run it entirely solar powered. It’s getting down to the wire but our 300W homebuilt solar panel should be finished in time and it will feed 200Ah of battery capacity. It’s our plan to run completely from the battery bank, including radios, logging PCs and lighting.

We have a varied selection of radios to use as desired although we’re planning on the main rig being the shiny new Elecraft K3. Backup will be my Kenwood TS-2000 and I’m sure at least 1 or 2 other rigs will make an appearance. We’ll be attaching to some wire antennas that we’ve amassed over the years. I believe the plan is to erect a multi-band windom in 1 direction and a G5RV perpendicular to it.

I have 2 Acer Aspire One d250 netbooks that have direct DC-DC power adapters. They draw just under 2A @13.8V each under worst case circumstances, and generally hover around 1A during use. These are great computers for ham radio. They’re small, self contained, low power consumption and they run Windows XP. If they had a built in RS-232 serial port they’d be perfect but USB->Serial converters have gotten much more reliable in the last few years so it’s only a minor inconvenience. One will be for logging, and the other will be used for PSK-31 and satellite tracking if I get ambitious and try to make some satellite QSOs.

Oh, and we’re having steaks, burgers and brawts. Lost of them. Our grill is propane.

By the end of the contest I had made about 25 contacts on 6M, 3 on 2M and 0 on 440. My 6M antenna is a Comet GP-15 vertical which was all for the best since my rotator broke after my 3rd 2M contact and I was unable to reposition anything. If I had thought about it I certainly could have easily made a few 440 FM simplex contacts, but for some reason the thought never occurred to me.

Now I have my next project cut out for me, HAM IV rotator repair. It was brand new when installed about 5 years ago and I’m very disappointed in it’s longevity.  It has not been used nearly as much as it should have been, but perhaps that’s part of the problem. Maybe it felt neglected and threw a temper tantrum.

The contest was a lot of fun, and I got to blow the dust off of my Heil set and my TS-2000. I’m looking forward to Field Day in 2 weeks, while much of my equipment will be pressed into service.

Mary and I enjoyed the Iowa Renaissance Festival in the Amanas a couple weeks ago. It was a nice day, hot but the consistent breeze kept it bearable.

We’ve had several successful ARES events, most recently the Dam2Dam race in Des Moines and the Copper Creek Triathlon in Pleasant Hill. The next real event is the annual ARRL Field Day and I will be participating although not with any organized club event this year. Some good friends and I are going to do our own thing, part party part operating event all fun. I’ll probably take Q and will likely camp at the farm for overnight operating this year. We have much planned, and some of it may actually happen!

Last weekend I was able to operate parts of the ARRL June VHF Contest and I had a pretty good time. That’s for the next post though.

• 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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.