HORUS Balloon Repeater Flight Sun May 27th

Posted by Dale on Wednesday, May 16, 2012
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The Project Horus team will be presenting a talk on the project at the WIA AGM to be held in Mildura over the weekend of May 25-27. The talk itself will be on the Saturday, however Sunday morning we are going to be flying the balloon repeater, APRS and telemetry payloads as well. This will give conference attendees the opportunity to see launch operations as well as the chase vehicle setups we use to run these flights.

As this flight will be launching from Mildura, it will also be the first time the balloon repeater is accessible from 5 states and 4 capital cities at the same time. The footprint will extend to cover VK1-Canberra, VK2-Sydney, VK3-Melbourne, VK5-Adelaide and the NW Coast of VK7. The window for contacts covering that footprint will only be ~30 minutes at apogee. In all, 2,000,000 sqkm of SE Australia will be able to see the balloon repeater as the footprint will extend to approximately a 1600km diameter.

Reference:
VK Logger

WS122 Aust. Parts List

Posted by Dale on Friday, April 27, 2012
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This is a part list of parts I am looking for for my WS122 restoration project to get it back on the air again and being able to take and use at military reenactment related events.

If you have and/or know where theses parts are it be great to know and to hear from you to source via the contact page

Valves
* 1D5GP – acquired
* 1C7G – acquired
* 1H6G
* 1F5G
* 6U7G – aquired
* 6N7GT
* 807 – aquired

* Valve Spares box
* 12V vibrator can (will have a ZAA 9900 on top the can)
* Aluminum front panel protection cages for PSU and wireless set
* PSU 1A
* morse key
* headset and mic
* relay protection cover
* belly plate for wireless set
* earth spring-loaded knob
* signal satchel
* suitable paddle knobs – aquired awa paddle knobs as suitable replacement

a wreak of a WS122 set be great to for parts, as still need headset drop leads etc for my wireless set.

and I will be updating my progress with the wireless set here:
http://gallery.dale.id.au/albums/hardware/WS122_Aust/

updated Thu May 3 23:48:42 CST 2012

New Gallery Added

Posted by Dale on Friday, April 13, 2012
Posted in: /dev/urandom. Leave a Comment

I have add a new gallery of the WS122 Aust. to show the restoration progress of the wireless set I am restoring.

The WS122 Aust is a 1945 built wireless set based on the British No. 22 wireless. The WS122 is a C.W, M.C.W, R/T unit and puts out about 10-20 Watts on 2-8MHz (150-37m bands). The set could be used in a couple of variations, ground station, vehicle station, or manpack station (this to 3 people). The set was built primarily in Melbourne by ‘Radio Corp’, but parts the set was built at ‘National Radio’ in Adelaide.

Gallery

COQC QRP HOURS CONTEST 2012

Posted by Dale on Thursday, April 5, 2012
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The contest is for low power operation (QRP) and divided into two (2) one-hour periods.

Date / Time: Saturday, 14th April 2012 / 1000-1159 UTC.
Frequency Band: 80m
Category: Single Operator.
Modes: CW or PSK31 or RTTY / SSB – see Frequency / Mode Table below.
Power: Preferably 5 Watts, but not more than 10 Watts average (CW / PSK31 / RTTY) or PEP (SSB) at the transmitter output – this is to stress the QRP nature of the event.
Exchange: A three-digit serial number starting at 001 and incrementing by one for each new contact.
Repeat Contacts: No repeats – only one contact per mode per hour.

Reference:
VK QRP Club

Yaesu FT-897D and double SSB problem

Posted by Dale on Friday, March 23, 2012
Posted in: Hardware. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Last couple weeks I have a had a problem with my 897D doing double SSB on RX and TX. Last night I was looking around for a firmware update for the 897D to see if that might fix my problem as I have tried other things like full CPU reset on the rig etc.

Well I found the page below in my travels and it had reference to relay cleaning by hold down the UP and DWN keys and powering the rig ON will start the cleaning of the relays and display CLEANING RELAYS on the screen. The great news is that this little unknown trick to me has fixed my double SSB problem :-)

Reference:
http://www.hampedia.net/yaesu/ft-897.php

[How to] Prey 0.5.3 under Debian

Posted by Dale on Friday, March 16, 2012
Posted in: Linux. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a Comment

Today I setup Prey 0.5.3 on my netbook running Debian testing.

# apt-get install prey

Here is what I modified in my ‘/etc/prey/config‘

....

# autoconnect feature, disabled by default until we are 200% sure it
# works flawlessly in all platforms. feel free to try it out though.
auto_connect='y'

....

# you can get both of these from Prey's web service
api_key=''
device_key=''

....

# if you're having trouble getting requests across your firewall or proxy,
# you can try adding '-0' to make curl perform HTTP 1.0 requests
curl_options='-0 --compress'

# this option prepends a random number as a subdomain to the check URL on http mode
# makes it harder for other programs to block Prey so its a good idea to be on
randomize_check_host='y'
....

Also I added to my root crontab for updates

# crontab -e

*/10 * * * * /usr/share/prey/prey.sh > /var/log/prey.log

[Link] First “Squeeze”-based Debian Edu version released

Posted by Dale on Tuesday, March 13, 2012
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The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu “Squeeze” 6.0.4+r0! Debian Edu (aka “Skolelinux”) is a Debian Pure Blend specifically targeted at schools and educational institutions, and provides a completely configured school network environment out of the box. It covers PXE installation, PXE booting for diskless machines, and setup for a school server, for stationary workstations, and for workstations that can be taken away from the school network. Several educational applications like Celestia, Dr. Geo, GCompris, GeoGebra, Kalzium, KGeography and Solfege are included in the default desktop setup.

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