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Don't use magnet mounts on your car for long though, it traps moisture and dirt and destroys the paint and then rusts from what I've heard. I have a Nagoya RB-CLP which is a window mount for a SMA/BNC antenna, just put a reasonably long whip like the SRH-536 on that for a quick temporary mobile antenna. Alternately if you have rails on the roof you can get all sorts of PL-259 mounts.
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Apr 14, 2013 12:35
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I use this under my mag mount to protect the paint. http://www.ebay.com/itm/300843006691
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Apr 14, 2013 12:54
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Just say NO to mag-mounts! Man up and get one of these in 3/4" so you can install a NMO mount:  Your car is a depreciating asset as it is. You should get maximum enjoyment from it and don't kid yourself into thinking you are able to maintain the value of your car.
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Apr 14, 2013 16:08
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For a little HT antenna you can also get away with those window mounts like the MFJ-310. All they'll do is get your HT antenna outside but that can be a big thing. Otherwise, drill baby drill. As noted mag and lip mounts will gently caress up the paint anyways, so why not just do it right? If you're really worried about resale and have a coupe/sedan just do it on the trunk lid, then worst case it's a few hundred bucks to replace the whole piece and your car is good as new.
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Apr 14, 2013 17:43
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Anyone know a way to use the FCC ULS to search names with wildcards, or to make it find matches containing multiple exact frequencies? I'm trying to track down a call sign or FRN for the fleet of 50+ Motorola radios we have on the same 5 business band freqs at work. The company has changed names a half dozen times and no one remembers who filed the license or when it was done. Whatever dealer was used has apparently gone out of business. The ULS only seems to let you do a name search by the first word of a licensee name, and searching by a single frequencies yields thousands of results.
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Apr 17, 2013 00:15
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Any idea how/where sites like aprs.fi and others get their raw data? Because I'm a bad son who always forgets to call home while driving cross country, I want to throw together a little google maps web application up for people to check. It'd be a heck of a lot easier then telling folks to get on aprs.fi and search for my call.
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Apr 17, 2013 00:34
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eddiewalker posted:The company has changed names a half dozen times and no one remembers who filed the license or when it was done. Whatever dealer was used has apparently gone out of business.
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Apr 17, 2013 02:51
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blugu64 posted:Any idea how/where sites like aprs.fi and others get their raw data? Because I'm a bad son who always forgets to call home while driving cross country, I want to throw together a little google maps web application up for people to check. It'd be a heck of a lot easier then telling folks to get on aprs.fi and search for my call. pre:http://aprs.fi/#!mt=roadmap&z=11&call=a%2FOH2TA&timerange=172800&tail=172800
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Apr 17, 2013 03:12
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AbsentMindedWelder posted:The FRN's are tied to tax payer ID's. I'm sure your company has a record of all their past and current tax ID's. Once you get this list, I would contact the FCC and have them do some homework for you. That sounds really promising. Thanks. In other news, I popped down the headliner in my car and found that the roof-mounted AM/FM antenna is bolted on through an NMO-sized hole, and a foot of wire tucked down the c-pillar picks up commercial radio reasonably well. I might be able to have my automotive vanity AND get my signal out!
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Apr 18, 2013 04:36
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I FINALLY got the display of my 7900R mounted. My mobile project is almost complete: I'm not super thrilled with the position, since it blocks the glove compartment. I ordered the bracket from ProClipUSA (same manufacturer as the iPhone mount you see up by the air vent). It just wedges between the stereo and the side panel. It was $30.. a bit steep for a piece of plastic. I just need to find a spot for an external speaker, since the rest of the radio is mounted in my trunk.
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Apr 18, 2013 21:00
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If you decide you want the face further out of the way, this mount works really well for putting a remote face above a rearview mirror. Still annoyingly pricey, though. http://www.blendmount.com/scangauge.html Unless your mic cable will only plug into the face. My Kenwood mic plugs into the body of the radio, so I just ran another cat6 extension from the trunk to the armrest compartment. eddiewalker fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Apr 18, 2013 |
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Apr 18, 2013 21:21
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eddiewalker posted:If you decide you want the face further out of the way, this mount works really well for putting a remote face above a rearview mirror. Still annoyingly pricey, though. Yeah, the mic only plugs into the face, and I don't really like the idea of having the radio up that high. My other option was to maybe just tape the display bracket on the panel that that cigarette lighter is on, but there's no easy access for the cable from the radio body, since it plugs into the back of the display.
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Apr 18, 2013 21:55
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As an update to my question a page or three ago about a DC-UPS, using a power supply at 13.8V to power a battery, I have now completed an implementation of this power supply: http://ludens.cl/Electron/Ps20/Ps20.html with a few additions, mainly a short circuit/overload shutdown using a second opamp, 4-wire output sensing (important for the battery charging!) and electromechanical thermal control (thermostat switches for the fans). Somewhat surprisingly, the warmest components outside of the current sense resistor (wound from resistor wire) is the rectifier and Q2, the base-driver transistor. If anyone else wants to build it as a battery charger, note that when mains is lost the opamp will drive Q2 from the battery and pull about an amp from the battery unless something blocks current from flowing through the base. In my case this is implemented with a relay that's powered by the auxillary fan power supply (which exists to let the fans run after the supply is turned off), when power is turned off or a brownout or complete outage occurs the relay disconnects the base from the opamp output. It's simple to add 4-wire sensing to the output, this is important since a typical wire might have a few hundred mV drop at several amps load, this will negatively affect the battery when it's loaded. The 4-wire sensing just means connecting the output opamp+reference+pot thingies output-ground and V+ leads to a BNC socket on the output. When no sensing is happening the voltage will drop instead of increasing, when you connect the second set of wires to the battery it will regulate based on the battery terminal voltage instead of the output terminals. For mine I added a switch to select 2 or 4 wire regulation, the 4-wire option means the battery terminal voltage is rock solid even when transmitting, where it would drop about 50mV per amp drawn (I know, my wires are too thin) in 2-wire mode. Over all I'm very happy with it, once I had the current regulator adjusted and compensated (driving a UPS tends to make things difficult) it now supplies 10A continuously and allows peaks of 20A+ for about a second before regulating it down. Short circuit current is in the order of a few tens of mA, making it fairly safe to work with. The only things I would consider improving is using an opamp (LF 356H) and voltage-reference (LM336) with a lower tempco, as built it will drift by something like 1mV per degree, meaning it's not exactly a precision supply over temperature. longview fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Apr 18, 2013 |
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Apr 18, 2013 22:16
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Has anyone attempted remote rig control/audio with linux? I had an old windows XP laptop setup with the last free version of ham radio Deluxe, which handles networked rig control; and a program I found called IP sound, that networked the audio. All my HF gear is in the basement, and this setup worked great so I could listen around, and keep an eye on the kid without having to go downstairs. I've been looking at all the ham radio apps that are sort of 'built-in' to linux, and threw lubuntu on that laptop after windows got corrupted somehow and would only boot in safe mode. I've been trying to sort out the audio portion of things before I get too far into it, but haven't been able to make much headway. The closest thing to what I'm trying to achieve that I've found is Jack Audio, which I had found for Windows as well, but I never had any luck with windows, or now on linux, getting it to network. Google has been of no help; I just get different pages of the same few sites as results for getting it setup, or of people asking how to set it up, with no real solutions or guides on how to actually get it working. From what I've seen it either works, or doesn't. Any help, or pointing in the right direction would be great!
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Apr 19, 2013 01:12
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What radio do you have? It ain't cheap, but I'm a big fan of remote rig. No PC necessary.
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Apr 19, 2013 01:35
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I've got an Icom IC-7000 and a yaesu ft-767. I looked up that remoterig stuff, and drat, you ain't kiddin it's spendy. Looking into things, I thought it would be pretty straight forward to setup, and I'm sure the rig controlling part is. I'm just having a hell of a time getting the audio portion to work. I'm also not sure if part of my problem is the testing I'm doing is between the physical PC with Lubuntu, and a VM I ran up with Ubuntu. It is entirely possible there's an issue with the VM environment in VMware versus actual hardware.
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Apr 19, 2013 01:52
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I would certainly setup a native box instead of the VM.
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Apr 19, 2013 02:21
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That's what I was afraid of. I wanted to use the VM/remote laptop setup as a test bed before I committed to putting something on this one. It's been about 12 years since I played with linux at all, so part of it is relearning how to do basic things. I am entirely impressed with how 'mainstream' it's getting. The Ham radio stuff has been there for a long time, I know, but the last time I played with it was before I got my ticket. I never took to it too much back in the day, since it wouldn't do games well. I don't do much gaming anymore, and the one thing I have been playing lately has a linux version, so I'm not going to miss anything by switching.
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Apr 19, 2013 03:51
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So you get to write some control codes to the serial device to dump out through the RS-232 on the way to a CAT interface, and surely there's an external speaker on the FT-767 (will I be shocked if I check the manual?), so the problem is wiring the computer speaker out to the mic input on the radio? Your virtual environment should be able to handle the audio device these days, but it's entirely possible that the host OS is blocking. You should be able to dump the raw audio input on the Ubuntu VM to determine if anything is working, whether from a microphone or otherwise. I feel like I'm missing a piece here, but I get the sense this is a lot easier process than me trying to run my iambic paddles directly to a USB connector (stupid complicated USB protocols; why isn't there a line protocol or raw serial mode?  ).
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Apr 19, 2013 03:59
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Maybe I'm not being clear. The way I had it set up before under windows was Rig Control- HRD server <-> HRD Client Audio IP Sound Server <-> IP Sound Client. the audio part is what I'm stuck on right now under linux. Which is the same problem I had under windows when I first looked into it. I stumbled upon JackAudio for windows, and never got it to work right, then found IPSound. Under linux Jackaudio seems to be the solution for networked audio and I have yet to get it to work right, but the documentation is lacking, and the few sources that talk about settings and things, are just copy/pasted from other sites. Maybe I'll get new perspective over the weekend, going to a hamfest outside of my local area, maybe there'll be someone a little more up on things there.
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Apr 19, 2013 05:37
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mwdan posted:Maybe I'm not being clear. Audio on Linux can be a tremendous nightmare even if you're not virtualizing it.
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Apr 19, 2013 06:06
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So the vanity call KO0OL just opened up. I'm really kinda tempted.
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Apr 22, 2013 17:33
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Because of this thread, I dug out my kenwood 70cm/2m radio from the closet, did a makeshift antenna, and started listening on the local 70cm/2m repeaters. Aaaand nothing, not a word in 4 days! And then when someone actually did make a call on the 70cm repeater, no-one answered  I guessed (correctly) that the HAM-scene has got quieter since the days I was last active, which was around 2004 or so, but for it to be so dead was a surprise. Sure I live in Finland, and started out my hobby around the millennium in a small city, but we still had a small but active club + local repeater. And now two moves later I live in the main city of this region, and it's like there's no trace of any radio amateur activity  Looks like the thread title is true, and all the old farts are bullshitting in HF. Makes me wonder if I even want to restart this hobby, if I'm going to be the only one under 50 at the club meetings  [edit] Oh yeah, my callsign is OH1HUP. JointHorse fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Apr 23, 2013 |
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Apr 23, 2013 20:13
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JointHorse posted:Because of this thread, I dug out my kenwood 70cm/2m radio from the closet, did a makeshift antenna, and started listening on the local 70cm/2m repeaters. Aaaand nothing, not a word in 4 days! And then when someone actually did make a call on the 70cm repeater, no-one answered This was pretty much my experience too, turns out they do nets and chats and stuff at various times throughout the week, but of course the days and times and which repeater isn't published anywhere, so you basically just have to have the good fortune to have your radio on and monitoring both local repeaters and just hope you hear something. I got in the habit of just leaving mine on all evening on the coffee table with the volume turned off (the display still lights up blue when it's receiving). So yeah none of it made any sense. Like apparently everyone from this city uses the 70cm repeater on a nearby island as opposed to the 2m one on a local mountain, and nobody's quite sure why, and of course there's no way of knowing this.
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Apr 23, 2013 21:58
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Hmm, we'll see. Mailed the local club, and asked when they meet etc. Gonna visit them next week and see what's going on.
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Apr 25, 2013 22:05
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JointHorse posted:Hmm, we'll see. Mailed the local club, and asked when they meet etc. Gonna visit them next week and see what's going on. Don't be surprised when only one other dude shows up and you end up going home after sitting around for half an hour comparing halfassed Chinese radios. Also hooray, the programming cable for my 5R came yesterday. Of course the USB-serial chip was counterfeit so the manufacturer's drivers didn't work, but I managed to find some counterfeit drivers for my counterfeit chip so we're all good now. In fairness the eBay seller (radioshop888) provided perfectly functional drivers for the counterfeit chip, but only for Windows, and to hell with having to run VMware to program my radio. Some dude wrote some OSX drivers that apparently don't care if the chip is counterfeit though. http://changux.co/osx-installer-to-pl2303-serial-usb-on-osx-lio/ ...if anyone who also got a counterfeit chip happens to want to use CHIRP on their Mac.
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Apr 25, 2013 23:34
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Those cables are really problematic on Windows 8 too, Prolific has dropped support for by far the most common USB-Serial adapter chip on the market (definitely within their product lines), the only official fix is to downgrade to Windows 7 (the best solution, honestly) or to crack open every device you have with a Prolific chip in it and solder in a new chip that's impossible to find anywhere since nobody has it yet. This affects genuine chips too, my Agilent multimeter interface cable is also affected. It sort of makes sense with the hardware piracy costing them a ton of sales but it sucks for the end user.
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Apr 26, 2013 23:52
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longview posted:Those cables are really problematic on Windows 8 too, Prolific has dropped support for by far the most common USB-Serial adapter chip on the market (definitely within their product lines), the only official fix is to downgrade to Windows 7 (the best solution, honestly) or to crack open every device you have with a Prolific chip in it and solder in a new chip that's impossible to find anywhere since nobody has it yet. This affects genuine chips too, my Agilent multimeter interface cable is also affected. I really need to get one of my 3.3V-using microcontrollers doing this. All of them are instantly recognized as serial ports on pretty much any OS, most have at least one onboard UART, like ten lintes of code should be more than enough for a USB-serial bridge. Not the most elegant solution, but it would let you use all manner of different connectors and stuff...
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Apr 27, 2013 03:26
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That's one of those things which I've found to be a mystery for a long time, why we need drivers for a USB->serial interface when mice, keyboards, disk drives, and audio devices are somehow all able to be standardized to one minimal class driver. You may not have all the features of your particular device available without the official drivers, but you can plug pretty much any of those devices in to any USB-supporting computer and expect them to work at some level without needing to download or install anything. Why there isn't a standard Ethernet adapter class I can sort of understand, but the lack of a standard serial class is mind boggling.
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Apr 27, 2013 04:44
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wolrah posted:That's one of those things which I've found to be a mystery for a long time, why we need drivers for a USB->serial interface when mice, keyboards, disk drives, and audio devices are somehow all able to be standardized to one minimal class driver. You may not have all the features of your particular device available without the official drivers, but you can plug pretty much any of those devices in to any USB-supporting computer and expect them to work at some level without needing to download or install anything. I've often wondered the same thing myself. I've also wondered why we need a driver for every network card. The wire protocol is well-defined. Why does every piece of hardware need a unique way to get data between your OS and the wire? Same goes for serial: this has been well defined for decades, it's just putc and getc drat it.
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Apr 27, 2013 05:54
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Well it might get slightly more complicated when mixing in parity modes and stop bits and it's still not a good reason. Of course the whole scenario is a little silly when good USB-Serial adapters put a MAX232 at the output and the very first thing it meets is another MAX232 (or a 3.3V version) at the device end. Not that I'm anti-RS-232/422 but it's pointless when most devices are 1 meter away from the host.
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Apr 27, 2013 11:33
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How do you know you've been out of the loop for too long? When you're searching info on current regulations, and find out that A> your specific licence/class no longer exists, because B> that old system with four different classes was scrapped, and C> replaced with a common European system that only has two classes, leading to the fact D> you can now work on all of the bands that are available, when earlier you were only allowed to work on 2m/70cm. So uh, yeah, that was a nice surprise! 
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Apr 27, 2013 21:28
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JointHorse posted:How do you know you've been out of the loop for too long? Go forth and bounce ailments off the moon with greybeards forevermore! Seriously though that's pretty cool. I'm real tempted to get this $180 25-watt mobile rig that some dude on the repeater last night recommended, TYT9000 or something. I'd be using it in the spare room as opposed to actually mobile, but there's a lot of repeaters I'd quite like to get on that are JUST out of reach of my blazing four watts. Of course then I'd need a power supply for it and oh god I'm into photography already I can't have two expensive hobbies at once.
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Apr 27, 2013 22:52
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Regarding the lack of a standard serial class, I think the answer is the usual: Money, profit, business, etc. At some point a bunch of pointing device companies got together and decided it was probably pretty useless to keep wasting development time on the "best way to use USB to communicate two floating point values" and just agreed on something obvious. They retained the special features for their own drivers, so your UberMoose 173B vibrates when your coffee is heated. No one makes money off of RS# standardization in USB land, so they don't bother. Manufacturers of engineering/scientific equipment using RS232 probably sell their own adapters/software so you're locked in.longview posted:Well it might get slightly more complicated when mixing in parity modes and stop bits and it's still not a good reason. Of course the whole scenario is a little silly when good USB-Serial adapters put a MAX232 at the output and the very first thing it meets is another MAX232 (or a 3.3V version) at the device end. Not that I'm anti-RS-232/422 but it's pointless when most devices are 1 meter away from the host. As I just bought my USB-to-Serial adapter, this topic is of interest to me, but I think I missed a bit of what you're trying to say here. I understand the technical design considerations for having the MAX232s in the line so the adapter is valid USB on one side and valid RS232 on the other, but I'm missing the jump to 'pointless'. Are you saying that a device 1m away is close enough for standard USB, so the MAX232 really only adds utility for RS232 devices that are 200m away? Or is the MAX232 pointless period because you might as well just use 0-5V instead of the wonky +-3-15V? What I don't understand is how they managed to completely replace serial input on computers without basic support for reading raw off the line. I think it's a bit silly that the USB subsystem is so... advanced that you have to exhibit a bevy of handshaking codes before your existence is acknowledged. I'm kinda  right now for what's going to happen when I plug in the serial adapter, but I hacked together the code last night to sense LE, DTR, RTS, CTS, CD, DSR, etc. on the line, so I have high hopes that the basic USB driver is sufficient to creating the calling unit necessary for detection.
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Apr 27, 2013 22:57
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SoundMonkey posted:I'm real tempted to get this $180 25-watt mobile rig that some dude on the repeater last night recommended, TYT9000 or something. I'd be using it in the spare room as opposed to actually mobile, but there's a lot of repeaters I'd quite like to get on that are JUST out of reach of my blazing four watts. Of course then I'd need a power supply for it and oh god I'm into photography already I can't have two expensive hobbies at once. I've looked at the 220mhz version just because it seems to be the cheapest way to get on that band with decent power, but I have no idea if anyone actually uses the few local repeaters I see in the directories. As much as 70cm seems like a strange new frontier to so many greybeards, I doubt I'd hear a peep on 220, but there's always the curiosity that maybe THAT'S where the cool guys are... (Oh, I guess you're in Europe and don't get the 1.25mhz band?) eddiewalker fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Apr 27, 2013 |
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Apr 27, 2013 23:05
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:What I don't understand is how they managed to completely replace serial input on computers without basic support for reading raw off the line. ...at the forefront of technology and radio art my hairy rear end. eddiewalker posted:(Oh, I guess you're in Europe and don't get the 1.25mhz band?) Pretty much only the US has 220MHz, which is why Japanese manufacturers were so slow to offer it on more multiband radios.
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Apr 27, 2013 23:28
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nmfree posted:What I don't understand is how it can be the year 20fucking13 and we're still having to use serial for anything. I have a very difficult time believing that it's still easier/cheaper to use serial instead of USB. As someone who does this poo poo for a living, I'll say that serial is absurdly easy to make hardware and drivers for. Have you ever seen the USB spec? That thing is loving massive. Serial is perfect when you can accept relatively low data rates in exchange for total simplicity.
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Apr 28, 2013 02:44
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I have to admit that we're getting closer to phasing it out, but for this type of simplicity, serial seems tough to beat. For dedicated transducer equipment, it's all up to the manufacturers to phase it out, and that might take forever and/or be very dependent on signal characteristics, but for the sake of the subjects of this forum, there will be some holdouts.  Right now it's still cheaper for me to solder a few wires to a crappy DE9 connector, but I do know enough of the software side that, when I'm ready to drop the money on it, I'll be able to make use of something like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi if I decide I just need my iambic paddles to go straight into the core router at work. 
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Apr 28, 2013 04:02
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I meant that using a +-15V spec when most devices don't need the robustness that the higher voltage offers is silly, most of the time straight TTL serial would be completely adequate. To clarify: the MAX232 takes a 0-5V TTL signal up to a +-15V (I think, maybe +-5), and back down again on the receiving side, there's still a USB-TTL serial interface chip that does all the hard work. Really though comparing RS-232 to USB is perhaps a bit like comparing a HF radio to a D-star or GSM network, RS-232 is from a simpler time and it's still super reliable, but it's going to have some quirks. USB is much easier for the end user but when the network falls down (or Prolific stops providing drivers) you're SOL and that old fashioned serial link is still chugging along. E: so is anyone in here familiar with the FDK Multi-2700 internals? I have the schematic and service manual, I've readjusted it for 5/2.5 kHz deviation but I'm not sure how to increase the AF gain to make up for the lower deviation on receive. I also wanted to modify the Receive lamp to only light when the squelch was opened but it's looking like the squelch is a very analog system... Second edit: if anyone wants to help, the schematic here: http://www.concept9.co.uk/NoBackup/FDK2700/KLM2700schematic1.pdf (tilt your head I guess )If I'm reading it right the audio amp is on board X-16, to the middle right, that's fed through the AF gain knob (front panel knob) on a bus from boards X-12, the AM receiver and pin 8 on X-11 (bottom left). I can't see any adjustment for the FM receive deviation and the AM receive audio is actually almost too loud. I'm thinking I'll use a LF356H (since it's a vintage radio you see) opamp and stick a little AF gain board between pin 8 on X-11 (FM AF out) and the rest of the AF bus, then I could adjust the FM gain separately from AM. There will be slightly less audio on narrow but with the gain stage that shouldn't be a problem. Third edit: yup that worked, a tiny TL072CN board with adjustable gain longview fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Apr 28, 2013 |
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Apr 28, 2013 07:57
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How does one use the ITU Phonetic Alphabet to spell the first name Charlie?
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Apr 29, 2013 00:31
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