Lest you all think I’m merely a robotic automata without any sense of sentimentality or soul, I present the following. Thanks Alex for the link.

Lots and lots of good information, rather Euro-centric (they seem to have lots more fun with satellites than we do here in the states) but I’m impressed by the depth and breadth of the information contained therein. Found it while searching for information about a helical cavity filter.

Weather Satellites

Addendum: You can read about the island on Wikipedia.

Try reading some of this drivel.

Rebel Science News

In about a month, the ANDE satellite (otherwise known as NO-61) will deorbit. Last night I was out hunting for it, and heard a single AFSK packet which didn’t decode properly. It’s pretty hard to bounce something off it since it only wakes up for 1s out of ever 15s looking for packets. This satellite was apparently launched from the space shuttle after docking with the ISS early this year, and has limited battery power and no solar cells, so it’s understandable.

I’d really like to get one packet through it before its ultimate demise, or at least to successfully decode a packet from it.

In any case, there is a website that tracks the telemetry etc… for it.

Just a link to a webstore that carries stuff of interest to amateurs interested in APRS tracking. They have a chinese import HT for $90 that might be good.

Argent Data Systems – APRS Hardware

Causes of Death Are Linked to a Person’s Weight – New York Times

About two years ago, a group of federal researchers reported that overweight people have a lower death rate than people who are normal weight, underweight or obese. Now, investigating further, they found out which diseases are more likely to lead to death in each weight group.

Interestingly, the study found that while overweight people did have an increased chance of dying of heart disease, they were not significantly more likely to die of cancer, and in fact seemed to be overall less likely to die of diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimers.

I mention this article not especially because I think that being overweight is a good thing (technically, my weight has creeped back up into the level of “obese”, and I’m not especially happy about that) but merely to mention that the entire concept of what is an ideal weight is the subject of some serious, reasonable debate, and if you are currently deemed overweight, there likely is no actual rational reason to panic. We all should watch what we eat, limit our portions, manage our stress and get exercise. More than that? We probably shouldn’t panic.

This guy is now in our lobby at Pixar. You should be seeing him next June on the big screen.

Yep. Another earthquake. I had just gotten of the phone with Carmen when I felt the slow, periodic roll of an earthquake. The shaking was relatively slow but fairly large in magnitude, and persisted for nearly ten seconds. The cat was not particularly happy with the shaking either, and he meowed to be let out (but then immediately came back for more food). Apparently the quake was of quite reasonable size: a 5.6 in the South Bay.

I usually shrug these things off, but this was actually big enough to be noticeable and a little disturbing. Hope all of you out there are fine.

Well, I’m not much for operating really, but I have been trying to work up the courage actually talk on the AO-51 amateur satellite.  It was down from October 18th, but today was back up and running the repeater.  I am still using a handheld Arrow crossed Yagi, so my hands are pretty busy, but I’m slowly calming down enough to keep the satellite in the pattern of the antenna, and tonight, I decided to try my luck on the westward pass of AO-51.  The westward passes are a little calmer than the eastern passes.

Of course, all was not perfect.  For some reason, I was picking up a huge amount of interference from the little VN-120 recorder that I used so successfully last time.  Nevertheless, I set it up, and aimed the antenna to the south where I expected the satellite to show up.   Soon, there was some traffic, and I heard NH7WN, who is in Honolulu.    I haven’t double checked this, but I am pretty sure that Honolulu is just at the limits of what we can hit from the San Francisco Bay area.  (A quick calculation shows that the distance is about 2400 miles).  Pretty damned good.

Here is the MP3 early in the pass: NH7WN via AO-51

I then was getting some horrible screeching interference from the little recorder.  Not sure what was going on there, but I didn’t like it, so I switched the recorder off.  Sadly, that means I have no record of my first QSO via AO-51.  I’ll get that worked out soon.  My adrenaline was pumping, and I called out a callsign.   For the life of me, I don’t remember which one it was.   K7WJS?  Not sure.  How pathetic is that?  I’m afflicted by an inability to remember people’s names unless I write them down, and when your hands are full of an HT and an antenna, it’s impossible to write them down.    The second call was K6YK, John in Stockton, which is much closer than Honolulu, but still fun.

Just after that, I started to lose the satellite.  There are hills to the north behind me, and the tree cover isn’t ideal either, so I called it a night.    I’m gonna have to work on getting a better setup for this.  The things I think would help are:

1. a tripod for the antenna and HT ala K7AGE
2. a light, for these outdoor passes
3. a clock that reads in both local time and UTC
4. a recording solution that doesn’t put hash on the line
5. less caffeine, to calm me down during the pass.

Anyway, I’m gonna send off some emails and call it a night.

[tags]Amateur Radio, AO-51, Satellite[/tags]

I spent yesterday wandering around Pacificon. Nothing too exciting to report: I picked up a book or two, no major purchases. The QRP related activities were a lot of fun, and I managed to win a bid for a BLT tuner kit from qrpkits.com . Oh, and I decided to try to upgrade my Technicians license. A month ago, I had read most of the General class license pool, and was taking online tests, and scoring in the 80s or so. Last night, I reread about 60% of the question pool. I ended up missing only a single question. It was free to try to take the Extra exam too, so I gave that a try. Sadly, I didn’t do as well (missed a passing grade by three questions). Still, upgraded to a General, hooray for me!

I’m gonna head out to the swap today (for which I am certainly too late to get any bargains) and hang out for a little bit.

[tags]Amateur Radio[/tags]

From the AO-51 status page:

AMSAT – AO-51 Control Team News

At 1848Z 11 OCT over Europe, the software on AO-51 crashed, shutting down both transmitters. Subsequently the repeater and BBS will be down for several days while the command stations reload. Sorry for any inconvenience.

I’m bummed.

Well, there is no post-season joy for the A’s this year, but as I glance in the left margin, I recall one of the most incredible games I’ve ever attended: the 12th inning victory of the Athletics over the Red Sox secured by Ramon Hernandez’ bases loaded, two out bunt. It was the most ludicrous, crazy, bizarre play I can ever recall seeing. Awesome.

brainwagon » Game of the Year — Oakland 5, Boston 4 in 12

[tags]Baseball[/tags]

I recorded some in Audacity. Here you can see the spectrum display. It wheedles back and forth between two tones which are clearly visible. You can also see some considerable fading in the signal. Them’s the breaks of propagation.  If you look really closely, you can see another, weaker signal in the spectrum directly below it which fades out entirely as the band conditions change.

Well, i was playing with the TenTec some more, and noticed that it wasn’t very mechanically stable . The VFO wanders considerably just from the capacitance of objects in its vicinity, by as much as a couple of hundred Hertz. It’s time to get this thing mounted permanently in the box I ordered for it. I’m not sure that will help, but it certainly won’t hurt either.

I sat down for a few minutes, and typed up some raw PostScript to design the front panel and the base pattern, along with markings for all the holes in the case. I’m betting the holes in the circuit board are #4 screws, which require a 7/64th inch hole, and the potentiometers in the front require 5/16″ pilot holes. I’m going to print these out on big label stock, and then cut them and mount them on the case as patterns for drilling.

Don’t know if this will be useful to anyone else, but here ya go.

PDF Template for TenTec 1056

I still have to figure out what other connectors to add. I suspect i’ll put a regular SO-259 to connect the antenna, sockets for an external speaker or headphones, and maybe a BNC connector for adding an external frequency counter. But this is a good start.

[tags]Amateur Radio[/tags]

Well, I feel stupid. After days of figuring out why I was getting an ugly feedback squeal coming everytime I tried to plug in my TenTec 1056 into something. Finally, today, on a total lark, I swapped out the cable. And… voila. Worked perfectly. So, here’s some Morse code recorded directly from my radio (recorded using GarageBand):

Recording from my TenTec 1056

Addendum: You could read the morse directly from this spectrogram that I made of the resulting audio this improved spectrogram that I made of the resulting audio. You can see the obvious strong signal at the bottom, but at least three or four other signals scattered up in frequency from there.

[tags]Amateur Radio[/tags]

Addendum: the two loudest signals in the above translate to:
= SEE U R IN MN EARL BUT NOT SURE WHERE BIGFORK IS LOCATED = I LIVED IN MN
MANY YEARS AGO
and
BUT I GUESS WHEN WE GET MORE IN TO WINTER THINGS GO BTR AT LEAST NOT SO MUCH QRM = HR ON 40 ES 80 SU