💾 Archived View for sdf.org › stug › phlog › 2021 › 20210912.txt captured on 2023-01-29 at 05:07:14.
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12 September 2021 This weekend has been a bit of a makey weekend. Saturday was spent making a coaxial dipole antenna for 2m and 40cms. This is a nice simple antenna design where there is a portion of coax with the shield removed, a portion of coax with the shield intact and then a choke made from coax coiled around a form. The antenna is meant to be constructed using a continuous length of coax. It is also known as a flower pot antenna as it can be constructed using pipe and then stuck into a flower pot. I have placed mine into the loft. It has been rather magnificent to be honest. I have received signals from Gloucestershire, Shropshire, Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and other such places. I had a play on FT8 and was heard in south London, some 150 miles away. I think the FM reception limit is about 40 miles but not sure what I can manage on 10W. The performance on 40cms is a bit odd. I can hit the local repeater and get a clear signal but the waterfall is blank. Shall have to play some more. Today has been spent playing with computers.... Well.. I find I cannot run Chromium and WSJT-X at the same time on my main PC. Particularly using PSK reporter. So I started playing with a raspberry pi I had bought for digi-modes in the field. I had set it up earlier in the year to run headless but could I remember what I was doing? Nope. After faffing, I got the VNC server side to work. It was simpler than I was making it. Then I hit the second issue which lead me to start playing around with the Pi. The noise when connecting the ICOM IC-705 to a PC with USB is outrageous on 20m. It is fine on 7m though. The issue remains with the pi too. I was using a cable with inductors fitted either end too. So this started me looking at running via wifi. After much searching I found myself hading to update the firmware of the radio. Well it was at version 1.11 and version 1.26 was recently released so I was a fair bit behind. Then I found I needed to use specific software from ICOM which was windows only. Cue more searching and suddenly I discover kappanhang. This wonderful software replicates the functionality of ICOM's windows only software. So it all works nicely. Then I got a clever idea to write a script to run kappanhang and WSJT-X with a single command. My shell scripting knowledge is mostly through searching snippets and adapting. I spent ages trying to work out why I couldn't open a terminal, chenge the folder and run the script. This took faaaaar longer than it should of. Turns out you need to use terminal -e "PATH/SCRIPT_NAME -script variables" I kept trying to do this with ./ at the start and other such nonsense which shows I was not thinking at all. Stupidity! Anyhow, the Pi part suddenly enables me to use my COM laptop for FT8 games in work. My main PC uses the monitor which I use for work and my sound issues with the COM laptop would have given me more headaches. However, Pi for WSJT-X running with COM laptop for VNC interfacing could work. The wifi interface means I can have the radio at one end of the desk with the ATU, antenna connection and power while keeping the rest of the desk clear for actual work stuff and the COM laptop. Almost ideal when procrastinating. Today is a good example of a day where I have started to do something to try and make life a little easier but got bogged down in daft issues. Suddenly the day has passed and I am listening to the delights of julius58's show on Anonradio. That means it is soon the end of the day and a return to work again. Sigh. Solving software issues often make me feel like I have wasted the day but then again, I always learn something and I often make my life easier a little bit. Just doesn't give something obvious to show for it which sounds interesting when people ask how the weekend was. Still, if I enjoy it then who cares. Right, today's show has got me wanting a drink seeing as the songs have all been about beer, whiskey and tequila. Slainte mhath!