More beacon station news

unfortuantely the ftp upload saga continues with unreliable transfers, crashing ftp programmes all compounding the local broadband issues which I can happily say are now significantly reduced.

So far I have tried the following programmes and so far I have not found one that is truely reliable all the time

1. WinSCP – A very versatile programme but…..Refused to synchronise and hung during transfers

2. FTP synchronizer – Nice and simple but manual only, needed a button press to upload but altogether very reliable. i contacted the developers but not luck

3. AutoFTP – A freeware application that is again nice and simple but suffers from the ‘AutoCrash’ feature so it’s nearly there but not quite robust enough

4. Carbon FTP – Does it all manually but not a hoot when it comes to scheduling unless you are using a different tool to schedule

5. Auto FTP Manager – Not freeware, in fact it’s $40 but if it works in the long run then I’m sure it’ll be worth it. I’ve not tried this for long enough but it seems to be working well.

6. FTP Sync Pro – Again not freeware and uses command line and windows task scheduler, massively gums up the task bar when running every hour so not a runner really. Although having said that it didn’t ever miss a synchronisation when it was running.

Not tried…yet

Peter’s Updater – looks from the description that it may work, but I think I’ve been here before

Save2FTP – Recommended by Mike, VK3AVV in a previous comment. Not freeware but it looks and sounds like a good option and it has a 30 day trials so nothing to lose really.

 

Beacon monitoring testing update

After some in house testing of the system¬†I thought I’d give a little insight as to what I’ve been doing and why. So, the background is that the station consists of an IC-703 and and old laptop connected by a CT17. The laptop is running Faros quite effectively but the ftp synchronisation was a bit of a headache as was the choice of antenna.

FTP synchronisation.

The recommendation is to use Win SCP as a tool to synchronise the gif files between the local hard disk and the website. After diligently following all the instructions I found that it was dropping the connection regularly and failing to upload the gifs. basically the software was not reliable. perhaps some setting were incorrect but essentially it wasn’t performing correctly. I found another utility call FTP synchronizer that looked a lot simpler to set up. I was right, so much easier to use, however it didn’t have a scheduled sync setting so it had to be done manually. I contacted the developer who has agreed to look into it but as he (or she) is not currently developing the software it may not go any further. So the search for a reliable piece of software thats simple to set up and use is still on.

Antenna

My QTH has a hustler 6-BTV set up in the garden, however living by the sea it has been very windy. The poor antenna is getting a beating from the salty air and the wind so it came down and a temporary diamond portable antenna is installed. As expected the results are much worse with the smaller antenna. I am investigating if it is possible to use my HFV-5 that has had a years beating on my old QTH’s roof and was badly corroded. I’ll clean it up and carry on testing.

The upshot is that the testing shall continue for another week or so

 

Portable Apps

I found this little gem over the last few days..It’s called Portable Apps¬†its a bunch of applications that run on or rather off a USB memory stick so you don’t have to carry them around with you. makes perfect sense for keeping email and documents in a format that you can use close to hand. Especially as I’m an open office¬†¬†user.

 

Beacon station active in testing

I’ve started up my beacon monitoring project with my ‘spare’ IC-703 connected to a portable antenna. Unfortunatley I have had some real problems with the computer side of the hardware with one motherboard fizzing into oblivion over christmas.

I’m still having problems with the automatic update so a tempoary page with the current data is here

 

Ubuntu 7.10

A while ago I switched our main PC over to Linux. After a number of attempts with Mandrake, Xandros and a few other flavours I found that although I’m not someone who doesn’t spend hours having a go at Microsoft and I definately don’t hate windows (I do however find Apple a little rotten) I wanted somthing that was free, open and community supported and perhaps to lend what little support I could to open source stuff in general and the noble individuals who provide free software.

So my main computer had Ubuntu 6.04 installed and things worked out quite well for a while, then a few niggles where peripherals didn’t work and that little add ons took many hours of time to install and run and worst of all I couldn’t do what I used to be able to do with windows. So it was time for a short second stab. I now have 2 drives attached to the PC, one for Linux and one for windows. I plan to run all the radio stuff of the windows drive, things like Ham radio deluxe and other utlilities that I use infrequently such as Fair Use Wizard for when I want to watch my DVD’s on my Archos PVR. All with a long term view of switching over to Linux and it improves and my needs change.

First impressions are that it is still polished and still labour intensive but there are tools like Automatix2 which do a lot for you and it still has the same look and feel that i need to get used to again. but this time the bootloader give me the option of MCE or Ubuntu which is so much better and because there are physically 2 drives I can always unplug on or cut the power with a switch

 

Beacon monitoring – station update

There have been a number of issues that have been resolved over the last few weeks, only to be replaced with new ones and I have to say that it revolves round the IT aspects more than anything else….

My router decided to reset tself and not allow any wireless connections which don’t really help, the CF card decided not to boot up without doing a ctrl, alt delete when it beeps, absolutley no idea what on earth is going on there and to top it all off the wind off the sea has been so strong over the last few days i took down the antenna and put it in the nice warm garage…lastly the roof started leaking through a vent that the builders couldn’t be bother to connect up properly so I’ll be drying out and repainting the bathroom ceiling shortly as well.

 All in all not a great week for progress, but with a fair wind the monitoring can be started in the new year fully with the time off I have planned.

 

Hustler 6-BTV tuning

During this weekends World Wide CW contest weekend where you’d be forgiven in thinking that there has been a change to the band plan I decided to finish up tuning the vertical antenna that I installed a few weeks ago so I could operate from the portions of the bands that I prefer are at the lowest SWR and hence I have the best opportunity it getting some good DX contacts over the winter.

I’d preassembled the antenna with the recommended spacings between the various traps but had discovered that the SWR varied wildly across the bands and even with a tuner (And yes I do agree with the sentiment that a tuner only hides bad set ups, but in some cases it is essential) the SWR was hard to get down to acceptable levels. On checking the spacings last night I discovered that they had almost all reduced significantly so detuning the antenna.

 Why?

Over the past few weeks we’ve had some strong winds and this may have contributed but I’m not entirely convinced yet.

Solution

Re-tighten the bolts and check again in a few weeks. Perhaps some kind of nylon spacer needs to be made up rather than relying on friction if this is going to be a problem. Hacksaw anyone!

Apart from this issue I have been very pleased with the retuned SWR, very low across all the bands and it just goes to show that quality breeds quality.

 

Software Defined Radio (SDR) Beacon Monitoring

Earlier this week I got in touch with Steve Ireland (VK6VZ) after reading his column in Radcom to see if I could get some guidance as to if there were any SDR products that he knew of to be used as a beacon monitoring station. My little project will hopefully be able to use an SDR of some sort coupled together with a small form factor PC such as a mini-itx and the Faros program to monitor beacons and provide real time data to this site across all the bands.

¬†Steve suggested that I contacted Alex (VE3NEA) the author of Faros to see if he’d got any information and it looks like there may be a partial success with a Softrock kit or if¬† am patient there is a project which is currently as a prototype board call Mercury that looks like a real prospect. So a summary so far is:

Softrock 40 – Cheap, Can be used on 14Mhz apparently, Single band only

Mercury – Large bandwidth (192KHz – These can be allocated either as one lump or as 5 off 1 Khz segments to cover all beacon frequencis according to Alex).

¬†So not quite an off the self solution available but I’ll keep on updating when I get some news. Altough it does look like a softrock 40 needs to be purchased in order to have a good look at this as an option.

 

Word to the wise

I’ve switched hosts

Installed WordPress (which I might add is excellent and now provides the ‘no excuse for a bad site even if you are an IT muppet). Using my new hosts installation tool ‘Fantastico’ which it quite clearly is

Started the sorting out process…loads to do and not much time to do it in. A load of the pages need refilling and tarting up but thanks to my current best buddies for making this possible………

Stand up www.ukwebhosting.co.uk and take a bow

Stand up www.wordpress.org and take a bow

both of you have made this really easy

 

Mobile Blogging

Well, as a first attempt at posting using my pocket pc I don’t think it went too bad