4 State QRP Group Bayou Jumper (Paraset inspired QRP XCVR)

Posted on 26 Jan 2017 by Nate Bargmann 2,923 views

Just before Christmas the 4 State QRP Group announced that a new kit is available, dubbed the Bayou Jumper. From its introductory page:

“Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear” and build the Bayou Jumper. The name “Bayou Jumper” is a play on “Ocean Hopper”, a famous regenerative receiver of a bygone era. It retains that great retro look but with modernized circuitry. With it’s distinctive panel and wood box enclosure it pays homage to the famous spy radios of WWII. It is designed for the CW segment of the 40 meters.

4 State QRP Group’s Bayou Jumper transceiver.

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Compiling WSJT-X 1.7.0 on Devuan Jessie

Posted on 23 Dec 2016 by Nate Bargmann 1,922 views

The latest version of WSJT-X, 1.7.0, was released on 19 December, 2016.  I found that the available Debian formatted package would not install as it is biult for Ubuntu 16.04.1 (and variants) which has a newer version of Qt5 on it than Devuan Jessie (as Devuan Jessie is mostly a downstream distribution of Debian 8, Jessie, these notes should apply to it as well).

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My first introduction to amateur radio

Posted on 17 Dec 2016 by Nate Bargmann 865 views

It was early 1977 as I recall, probably just after New Years, I was 13, CB was big in the popular culture and I wished to be able to take part but a CB at the time was just too expensive for my parents to satisfy my radio curiosity on what they presumed may be a whim.

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Running Electraft utilities on Linux amd64 and multiarch

Posted on 31 Jul 2016 by Nate Bargmann 1,270 views

At this time the Elecraft utilities for Linux are only available as i386 32 bit precompiled binaries.  Other architectures such as amd64 or armhf (Raspberry Pi) must use another means, if possible.  The Debian Linux distribution and its derivatives (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Etc.) and forks (Devuan which I now run) have the capability to enable “multiarch” which allows running i386 32 bit binaries on an amd64 installation as a native application.

The following is a rough guide to set up an amd64 based installation to run i386 binaries.  The first step is to enable multiarch (if not already done so when the system was installed) by following the Debian Multiarch HOWTO.

After enabling the i386 architecture, aptitude shows about 24000 new packages the reason being is that now there are many packages available in both amd64 and i386 versions.

After some checking with the ldd system utility, I found that the following packages need to be installed:

libstdc++6:i386
libgtk2.0-0:i386

These pull in additional packages they depend on if a smart installer such as apt-get or aptitude are used.

The help functionality is not available without the installation of the following package:

libgtkhtml-4.0-0:i386

I currently cannot install this package on my present system, Devuan Jessie 1.0 Beta, due to a dependency error with the libgtkhtml-4.0-common:i386 package being unavailable.

As I use the Clearlook-Phenix theme on my Xfce desktop, I needed to install the following package for the Elecraft utilities to use this theme:

gtk2-engines:i386

Beyond the Help viewer issue noted above, I cannot view the release notes in the K3 utility but can view them in the P3 utility.  I store the firmware files in custom directories for each, which is odd that the P3 works and the K3 doesn’t.  If it’s any consolation, the K3 utility, Rev 1.15.6.27, doesn’t show it either on a native 32 bit installation, so I don’t think multiarch is at fault here.

 

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Enabling sysvinit on Minibian Jessie 2016-03-12

Posted on 28 May 2016 by Nate Bargmann 1,247 views

As I was building a very minimal system for running APRX (N0NB-10) I chose to use Minibian as the starting point rather than stripping down the full Raspbian image to run on a Rasberry Pi model B.  Stripping the system to just those things that do their job and then get out of the way, I chose to enable sysvinit.  As I was doing this headless, I found that after installing the sysvinit-core package that I could not log into the system using SSH.  Hooking up a monitor and a keyboard showed that init did not proceed through the system startup.

Looking at /etc/inittab I found it to only have one line! Certainly not enough to properly start the system. As my current APRX digi is running a stripped down Raspbian Wheezy image, I copied the /etc/inittab file from it to the new system. Problem solved and init worked flawlessly as expected. I was then able to proceed to remove the remaining unneeded packages.

The resulting disk image occupies about 525 MB in addition to the boot partition. This is far from the leanest Linux based system, but as I am familiar with Debian tools, this still leaves a useful system that is dedicated to being an APRS digipeater and iGate. It fits easily on a 2 GB SD card. As I have several on hand, I can easily write a new image should a card suffer data corruption.

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New weather station online

Posted on 16 May 2015 by Nate Bargmann 1,443 views

After ten years of reliable service, I have replaced the Peet Brothers Ultimeter 2000 with a Davis Vantage Pro2 wireless unit. This allows me to have the sensor unit a greater distance from the shack as it will transmit to consoles up to 1000 feet away at a location better suited for accurate measurements.  Data is being posted to the Weather Underground site and to the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP).  Quality analysis will also be performed within a few days and the data should be picked up by MADIS by 20 May.

The hardware setup is the Davis data logger with a USB connection.  The software used is WeeWX, which handles archiving the data to a database and sending current conditions to Weather Underground once per minute and CWOP every ten minutes.  Future plans include transmitting the data to the local APRS amateur radio packet network, although a few things need to be worked out for that and an increase in local activity would be nice.

Regardless, the weather data is looking good over the past several days.

 

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Defining your own happiness

Posted on 01 Nov 2014 by Nate Bargmann 1,400 views

Once again I had to relearn a tough lesson about letting one’s happiness be defined by others.  To wit, the heartbreaking end of the 2014 World Series for those of us who are Kansas City Royals fans.  I’ve been there before–1976, 1977, 1978, 1980, and now 2014–where the Royals just could not complete the deal in the last game of their season.

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Marshall County ARC Field Day featured in ARRL Midwest Division newsletter

Posted on 17 Aug 2014 by Nate Bargmann 2,675 views

It’s actually a rare occasion that I check out things like the ARRL Midwest Division newsletter.  A week and a half ago I did so for the first time in a long while (shameful, I know), and found, to my surprise, a picture of our club’s antenna 2014 Field Day setup!  Thanks to MCARC secretary/treasurer Mike, AC0I, for submitting the photo that appeared in the August 2014 newsletter at the bottom of page 3.

MCARC antenna setup Field Day 2014

MCARC antenna setup Field Day 2014

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Debian 7.3.0 (Wheezy) in VirtualBox

Posted on 23 Jan 2014 by Nate Bargmann 1,997 views

To test a software build I installed Debian 7.3.0, a.k.a. Wheezy, into a VirtualBox drive.  All seemed well except the VirtualBox Guest additions did not seem to be active as a shared directory to the host computer could not be mounted.  In Aptitude the necessary guest packages were installed and attempting to rebuild the virtualbox-guest-dkms failed by stating that no kernel source was installed.  A bit of investigation revealed that a 486 version of the linux-image package was installed but the 686 kernel headers were installed.  D’oh!  Seems the Debian installer chose the safe kernel but the dkms package recommends the 686 kernel headers.

I chose to install the 686-pae image and set VirtualBox to enable PAE and I was on my way.  It was a bit of a head scratcher for a few minutes.

 

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Netiquette

Posted on 18 Sep 2013 by Nate Bargmann 1,631 views

In this post “netiquette” will refer to the way we conduct ourselves on amateur radio ARRL National Traffic System affiliated traffic nets, not the Internet version.

Amateur radio traffic nets, particularly ones conducted in a phone mode, attract a number of passersby that have not been trained in various net procedures.  While I’ve never been a member of MARS (Military Auxiliary Radio System), there is a certain discipline that should be maintained for orderly net operations.  The ARRL Operating Manual, particularly the chapter on traffic handling. should be required reading for all new amateur radio operators who wish to get the most out of their new found hobby.  While waiting for the copy of the Operating Manual to arrive, this post offers a few tips to help you not sound like a LID (an amateur radio colloquial term for a poor operator).

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