NM5DV Softrock SDR Blog

I am often asked about Mac Vs. Pc, I was browsing around today and I stumbled upon this article.

Essentially most of the security experts agree that the only thing that makes Macintosh less vulnerable to malware is the market share.

Mac osX is a smaller, less lucrative target to exploit.

I am working hard to burn the rust off of my bloggin, its been a while .

Well here is the article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10444561-245.html?tag=smallCarouselArea.0

73

I got a new laptop from work. My work uses active directory and Microsoft outlook so I needed to have the use of windows xp and outlook. I decided that I would give virtualization a whirl.
I repartitioned the existing xp partition down to 10 gigs and left myself a nice big (relatively) 70 gig partition. I installed 9.10 on it and away I went.
I added a repository for virtual box and installed it.

Once I installed vbox I created a 10gig dynamic partition. This was a mistake as the dynamic drive sizing doesn’t dynamically resize the drive. I suggest making the drive as big as you intend to make it, in my case I should have made it 40 gigs.

Here is a screen shot of it booting up:

An interesting thing that vbox has is seamless mode:

You can see multiple windows running on the linux desktop , a windows window. its still a virtual machine but it makes it seem much more integrated.

What I really wanted to show is how to create a shortcut to launch your virtual machine. Otherwise you have to launch the vbox control panel each time. I’ll do this in the next post.

73s de nm5dv

Sorry for not posting for a while. Been very busy and blogging took a back seat.
I intend to start up again.
I have gotten a htc dream aka the “g1″. Its a great phone and It should be able to blog out a bit more.
I have next 2 weeks off for paternity leave after the birth of my third child, second son.

My brother in law need some help getting to Sweden.

He has been accepted in a renewable energy program in sweden.

He’s been doing a real good job in school and I think this is a good program for him to be in.

He has set up this awesome website to try and collect money to help him on his way. Take a look and donate if you can.

Check out his blog here  http://dhstrongheart2sweden.com

Wow life has again gotten busy. An interesting side effect of weaning my son is that I sleep a whole lot better now. I dont wake up in the mddle of th night to work on radio projects.

I’m actually a bit dissapointed in myself, so heres whats on the chopping block then:

• strip components off the amplifier
• make a printed circuit board for the amp (as per n8wwm’s suggestion)
• Find a cheap place to order some coax
• make the rf probe that I saw a schematic for. This will allow me to measure ouput wattage.

We will leave it at that, please stay tuned for lots of sdr fun.

Well k6hx decided to move his grabber down to 40 meters. So when I went home for lunch I put in the right boards and let it rip.

The frequency for qrss is at 7.00080 - 7.00090 this is in the extra part of 40m. Luckily for me I just happen to hold those privileges.

So I let it rip all day down there putting out the usual qrss 3 , didn’t expect much to happen.

When I got home I was chatting with the boys on irc and wy7usa said I was coming in 30 over and abliged me with this capture.

We are pretty sure thats me, hes in Alpine Wyoming 581 miles.  . It’s a very nice print.

Thanks for the spot there Eric.

As a side note . I had been a bit worried about the 30m paf board because the icom 718 was showing the 40m paf kicking out at 20 on the smeter and only getting up to about 10 on the s meter on 30 meters. As I switched down to 40 to check my output I realized that the pamp was on  on when I was in 40m band but turned off when I went over to 30 meters… Kooky icom rigs… go figure. I haven’t confirmed that that’s what is going on but I’ll double check it tomorrow.

I’m not too sure if I’ll leave it on 40 tomorrow but its a good possibility.

73s de nm5dv.

Well I Feel as if I have to explain myself. I have had a pretty crazy couple of weeks. My oldest son was getting a bit out of control with the nursing. His second birthday is coming up and me and my wife took the opportunity of her brother in law going out of town to ween him. She left me and him at the house and took my daughter and herself out of town for the week.

Me and my son has some real good bonding time and I believe that our experiment was a success. He has never slept in his own bed before and was keeping us up all night long.

He is now sleeping in his bed in his own room and hasn’t nursed in over two weeks.

It was tough for the little guy and I’m very proud of him. An interesting side effect is that he is now talking quite a bit more than when we started.

After that was over I had to go back to work .. even in the three days that I took off from work I had a lot of catching up to do.

I think I have finally gotten some breathing room and me and the wife realized just how much we love each other. Vincente seems happy too and we are moving along.

Here is my list of weekend projects:

1. work on getting a 30m inverted v up.
2. work on getting the beacon i/q input put onto an mp3 (rocky just seems to freak out about once a day and this will simplify the beacon)
3. Make an rf probe so I can measure output of the beast.
4. Find some cheap coax solution
5. Find an enclosure for the hole I drilled in the wall where my antenna feed goes out.

I’ll be posting a bit more often now 73’s de nm5dv.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

The lof on the software was set for 40 meters but I was really on 80.

So the band was edge to edge.

I came back to check it out the band on Saturday and Sunday and it was dead.

73s de nm5dv.

73s de nm5dv

Well after some disappointment with my rig, for some reason I forgot to jumper a jumper on the attenuator bypass circuit and ran my freshly fixed 40 meter paf board with no antenna hooked up to it.  But luckily everything seems to check out fine.

So I was pretty mad at myself and the rig always seems to start acting funny around when stuff like that happens. Stops oscillating and I have to tap the micro controller that controls the crystal to get it back in order. So anyway after questioning weather I had also trashed the 30 m paf with the same stupidity (as I noticed that it was txing with slightly less s units on the 718) I decided to just leave it running.

I could faintly see myself on k6hx’s grabber so I figured there might just be some antenna connection stuff going on. I recently bolted the keyer / lp board down signifying that I didn’t intend to work on it anymore as it was functional. So that process was a bit intrusive. drilling mounting holes and moving the board around quite a bit.

Any way ….. the point here is that saturday morning I get an email from aa5ck. Here is what it read:

Hi Dan

I happened to check the VK6DI grabber  yesterday afternoon shortly
before we lost propagation and besides VK2ZAY, Dave, and my signal it
sure looked like it might be yours right in the middle but I couldn’t be
sure.

I wasn’t aware of anyone else around your freq that it could have been.
Did you happen to check the grabber a little earlier than about 0056Z
when propagation might have been a little better?

This was  the first time I’ve had my MEPT on during this time period and
the first time I’ve payed a lot of attention to the VK6DI Grabber so I
may not be up to date on what has been happening, I know Dave has been
making the trip.

Dave had a good signal, mine, not so much. I was running 122mw to a wire
vertical.

73….Ted….aa5ck

Hey sorry you didn’t catch the bus down there, but I’ll give some credit on the power.

and here is the attached photo

It is “barely” there. Truly only the spot a father could see, Great eyes aa5ck.

Qrz site calculates the distance as 10018 miles. Not bad for 600mw erp.

This spot and the recent episode of solder smoke have convinced me to join the knights qrss. Not sure why I haven’t joined before.

I was so happy I finally got around to fixing up the 40meter paf board. I have developed a bad habit of sticking the boards in while the rig is on. If the board goes in on the wrong pin it will send 12v into the t202 and burn that up as well as burn the trace coming from one of the jumper pins over to the transformer. I wired a piece of magnet wire to replace the printed circuit board trace and rewound t202.

I got home and turned it on. Boy was it working. I had a qso with n5rkd across tow and got some decent signal reports. He said I have some sideband issues but nothing major. Not to mention the band was really open, I was so happy to be back on 80 and 40 because this is generally the time I have to operate.

Another thing I noticed is that on the icom 718 I could see that it was pushing the smeter up to about 23 which is .. 3 s levels over what it does on 30 so I think I might have some issues on 30 or it could just be the antenna matching up on the different frequency.

Here is a screen shot of 40 meters data portion of the band. you can see the full 96 khz of my delta sound card working.

I actually fired up the 718 a few weeks ago to operate some psk on 40 and it was very hard for me to go back to regular operation. By regular operation I mean no sdr operation. You can only view about 10 khz of the spectrum and the desense you get from operating a regular rig is amazing. Here you can see the 96 khz of spectrum and very beautiful signals.

I checked out 80 meters later on in the evening and boy was it hopping. The phone segment of the band was wall to wall signals and the data portion looked like it was just warming up.

I called up k6hx to see if he wanted to try some digi and we both had an unfortunate series of events after that. He erased some source code he had been working on and I forgot how my output lpf board worked.

I forgot that there is a jumper to by pass the attenuator and if its not in bypass mode the antenna doesnt get hooked up.

I hope I didn’t refry my 40 meter board. I couldn’t figure out the problem until I looked at it with fresh eyes in the morning. I’ll test everything out today as I have brought the rig into work. If everything checks out I might take the downtime to install some header type connectors on the rig for its external connections.

I”m taking next week off to spend some time with my boy so heres a list of stuff I want to accomplish today:

• install the header external connectors
• install some sort of amplifier connection point on the antenna and start looking at how I’ll switch that in and out.
• bolt down the lpf output board
• get rid of the two aligator clips for power.
• bolt down the serial connector
• clean up the led connectors (very messy open hot wires)
• build the bpf boards for 160 meters and 10 -15 meters.