June 30, 2003
Post Field Day Report
The RARC Field Day was a great success. I sat down and collected my thoughts about the last two days and here is what I have concluded:
- GOTA station is definitely worthwhile. It gives the newcomers a chance to get the feel of operating without the pressure to run high rates/pileups.
- Propagation was a huge factor. The 20 meter band dried up on me instantly sometime around 0600 GMT Sunday and didn't come back up until much later. That means our overnight operation didn't run up into the 1000's like we did a few years ago.
- Remember to put on sunblock.
- Working satellites close to the horizon with a handheld beam doesn't work well when you are surrounded by metal buildings.
- Having snacks available throughout the night was a practically a life saver.
- We really should do it at the same location next year
I know I had a great time. I'm certain everyone else did as well.
June 26, 2003
Jesse has a blog
Jesse just informed me that he has just set up a blog. He even has the ubiquitous First Entry.
Field Day 2003
It's almost here. I'm just so excited I cannot sleep. Just two more days until Field Day. I plan on operating from the RARC club station, W0MXW.
This is the one event out of the entire year that I look forward to. I am so enthusiastic about it as soon as it is over I start looking forward to next year.
June 20, 2003
MSNBOT
Jeremy Zawodny asked about the new MSNBOT that has been reportedly crawling the web:
According to Feedster there aren't many bloggers talking about it yet. Anyone seen this thing hit their site yet?
It hasn't here, yet. I wonder how long it will be.
June 17, 2003
HP48 Programs for Hams
Here are some programs written to run on the HP48 graphing calculator that are useful for some Amateur Radio applications. I originally had these posted on my web site when it was running on PHP Nuke. I recovered the text out of the database and did some editing to make it a little more complete. They are described in no particular order.
The first of these programs, SWR, was written by Arlen, AA0SG, to compute the SWR of an antenna system from measured forward and reflected power. Enter the forward power then reflected power onto the stack and run the program. The result should be SWR.
The book Reflections II by M. Walter Maxwell, W2DU, has a couple of programs that claim to be written for HP calculators. The language, however, does not correspond to anything that I know, at least not the HP48. As a consequence, Arlen and I rewrote them using the original program text and formulas from the book as a guide.
RjX is the first of these programs which replaces the listing in Appendix 4. It calculates exact SWR from R+jX. Enter R, X, feedline Zc on the stack in that order. The program take these numbers off and output SWR.
Appendix 7A has a program in it to determine the increase in forward power on a line that is with conjugate matching at the input. The program to do this is called C. Enter transmitter output power, line loss, and ratio of feedline to antenna impedance (hint: 3 then 1 for 3:1 SWR). The program returns the total forward power. Amazingly, it's often greater than what you started with.
The third of these is the SWRloss program used to calculate the additional power lost due to SWR on a transmission line (Appendix 8A). First enter the loss in dB followed by the SWR . The result will be something like dB LOSS: -.288 meaning 0.288 dB of additional loss on the feedline due to SWR.
ERP calculates ERP given input power and gain in dB (in that order).
Here is the text of the programs. Copy it and paste it into a plain text file called HAM (or something like that). Transferring it to your HP will create a directory of that name and all of those programs will be in there.
%%HP: T(3)A(D)F(.);
DIR
C
<< DUP2 - 3
ROLLD + / SWAP NEG
10 / ALOG DUP 3
ROLLD * SQ 1 1 ROT
- / * *
>>
ERP
<< 10 / ALOG *
>>
RjX
<< DUP 3 ROLLD /
ROT ROT / SWAP SQ 1
+ SWAP DUP 3 ROLLD
/ + DUP SQ 4 - v/ +
2 / "SWR" ->TAG
>>
SWRLoss
<< DUP 1 - SWAP
1 + / SWAP NEG 10 /
ALOG DUP2 DROP * SQ
1 SWAP - SWAP SQ 1
SWAP - SWAP / LOG
10 * 3 RND
"dB LOSS" ->TAG
>>
SWR
<< v/ SWAP v/ DUP
3 PICK - 3 ROLLD +
SWAP / 2 RND "SWR"
->TAG
>>
END
What Will it Take?
TechTV's Tech Live ran this poll this evening relating to a story about UCE.
What will it take to stop spam forever?
- Action by ISPs and businesses
- An act of Congress
- An act of God
When I voted, I was suprised to see that it was almost a tie between Action by ISP's and businesses and An act of God. Of course I didn't pay much attention to the numbers, not that they matter because a minute later when I refreshed the poll result page An act of God was now higher than the first two put together.
UPDATE: I previously linked to the shownotes, however, it is much easier to go directly to the archived version of the poll. I would have done this before, but that page was broken at that time.
June 16, 2003
Gallery Installed
I have added a picture gallery feature to my web site. At the moment the only pictures I have are some of my dog, but that will change soon.
June 15, 2003
Everyone is After the Same Thing
Since most of the visitors to my site have been coming here to see my HF Discone page, I should probably make this small disclaimer:
I never found the time to build this antenna. I have no idea if it will work at all (although, I am sure it will resonate at some freqeuncy). I have not an ounce of confidence in the accuracy in the SWR chart or the radiation pattern as I had practically no experience using any kind of NEC antenna simulation software. Furthermore, I don't even have my original notes that contained the dimensions.
Someday, I will get a bunch of Copperweld™ wire and build this thing, but the project has been put on the back burner.
Webalizer Search Engine Strings
To analyze the web traffic statistics for my web site I use The Webalizer. One of its features is the ability to create a list of search strings that have been used to find your site. Here is the list I am currently using in my webalizer.conf file:
SearchEngine yahoo p= SearchEngine altavista.com q= SearchEngine google q= SearchEngine eureka.com q= SearchEngine lycos.com query= SearchEngine hotbot.com MT= SearchEngine msn.com MT= SearchEngine infoseek.com qt= SearchEngine webcrawler searchText= SearchEngine excite search= SearchEngine netscape.com search= SearchEngine mamma.com query= SearchEngine alltheweb.com query= SearchEngine northernlight.com qr= SearchEngine search.com q= SearchEngine teoma.com q= SearchEngine abcsearch.com Terms= SearchEngine dmoz.org search= SearchEngine overture.com Keywords= SearchEngine teradex.com q= SearchEngine ask.com q= SearchEngine aolsearch query=
June 12, 2003
Getting Better
I've been playing with the CSS for a while now and I think I've got it down. Here's something I did that made my life for layout a whole lot easier:
- Got rid of the 15px margin in #content
- Made #content 68% and #links 28% wide
- Made both float left
This does a couple of things. Setting the widths makes sure there is an extra 2% of the browser canvas available for "wiggle room." Making both layers float left allows the links be longer than the content without expanding to the entire browser width at the bottom. Also, if there isn't enough room to have both side by side the links layer wraps to the bottom and both are left justified.
I'll be making more adjustments to my blog over the next couple of days for certain.
First Post
This is my first post using MovableType. I wasn't really sure that I would like it at first, but I decided I had better try it since most of the people that whose blogs I read use it too. I started out writing my own which I quickly gave up on since I would have literally wasted the entire summer away hacking away at it. I almost used BBlog which was very easy to set up and really nice, but just isn't mature enough for me. I decided that I could live without threadded comments, which was the final factor in making the move with MT.
To begin with, I installed a copy on my computer at home to play with things like the stylesheet and learn how to configure a blog. Then I copied everything over to the web server. Funny thing is on my home computer I could get BerkeleyDB to work, but didn't have the MySQL Perl module. The server had no BerkeleyDB, but MySQL works fine.
