Eugene

Repeater work

A few days ago I joined some of the local club members at one of the club’s repeater sites that just happens to be located on top of one of the buildings at work. The two repeater controllers were due for firmware upgrades, but my task was to look at the IRLP node, see if it was still running, find out what it was running, make a copy of the software and get remote access to the machine working. I’ve never done anything with IRLP before, but my job was pretty simple.

The equipment is located in the “penthouse” of a 12 story building that houses all the ventilation equipment for the building, making it a fairly noisy place. The club operates VHF and UHF repeaters each in their own cabinet.

The IRLP node was an ancient Dell computer sitting next to the repeater cabinets. After attaching a keyboard and monitor to the box, I found it running Fedora Core 3 and spitting out disk errors to the console. Trying to log in to the computer just caused more disk errors to be spit out. Rebooting confirmed that the disk was dead and unreadable. So much for working on the node. Now the job became one of hardware recovery. Took a bit more effort than I expected, but I was able to pull the hard drive and the IRLP board out of the computer. One of the other club members is going to try to rebuild the node using newer hardware, maybe a Raspberry Pi IRLP node (PiIRLP).

On the way out, I got a couple of pictures of the great view from 12 stories above Charleston. This is looking west towards James Island and West Ashley. You can see the James Island Connector in the background.

This is looking east-ish at the rest of the peninsula.

Looking east-ish from atop Rutledge Tower

August amateur radio licensing tests

In August, there will be three opportunities here in Charleston for anybody who’s interested in taking the test(s) to get an amateur radio license or to upgrade.

In addition to the regularly scheduled monthly testing offered by Trident ARC and the bi-monthly testing offered by Charleston ARS, there will be a testing session offered at the Flock to Fedora conference at College of Charleston. The Flock testing session will be held Saturday August 10 from 2-4PM in ECTR 115.

From the announcement email:

The Fedora Amateur Radio SIG will be hosting a Ham Radio VE Session at Flock 2013 (at the College of Charleston) on Saturday, August 10, 2013 from 2:00pm-4:00pm in room ECTR 115. Please arrive promptly at 2:00pm if possible, we must be out of that room by 4:00pm, as another talk/hackfest will be starting then.

We will be administering all classes of amateur radio license exams: Technician, General, and Amateur Extra. Please bring your FRN with you, or register at http://wireless.fcc.gov/uls if you do not have a license already. You will also need a photo ID. There is also a fee of $15.00 which goes to the ARRL. You can pay this via cash or check.

If you have any questions, please email us at ham-radio-exams@fedoraproject.org

We also ask that anyone interested in taking any exams please email us at ham-radio-exams@fedoraproject.org to let us know you plan on coming, but this is not strictly required.

I get to be one of the VEs!

I’m in QST!

Well, the back of me is in QST anyway. If you flip to page 82 of the latest (August 2013) issue of QST magazine, the bottom half of the page talks about the upcoming August Rookie Roundup (RTTY) contest.

Last year I got to participate in it with a few other people from the club. The accompanying photo, taken by Tom (AJ4UQ), is of me and fellow rookie Warren (KK4EVI) trying to make sense of what the software was telling us.

The only problem with the photo is the caption is incorrect, and gives the wrong call sign (and therefore name) for me and Tom. Here’s what the image caption should read

Warren Richey, KK4EVI, and Eugene Mah, KK4JRP, used the Rookie Roundup as an opportunity to learn RTTY operation by activating the Charleston (SC) ARC station in the club’s EmComm trailer. [Tom Glaab, AJ4UQ, photo]

The red bandage around my arm is from donating platelets earlier that day.

It was fun participating in the roundup last year, and I got a good introduction to the digital modes, including packet radio and even sending email using the radio. I hope we’ll be able to do it again for this year’s Rookie Roundup (August 18, 2013).

Wedding special event station

As part of the wedding festivities, Connie and I decided it would be fun to get on the radio for a special event the morning of wedding day (July 19).

We don’t have a special event call sign and are just going to operate on the radio using our regular call signs (AB4UG and NR4CB).

We’re only going to be on the radio for a couple hours (band and frequency pending, but anywhere between 40m to 6m but not 30m) from 11AM-1PM EDT (1500-1700 UTC). We’ll be self-spotting ourselves on Twitter, so follow me (@imabug) or Connie (@NR4CB) to find us. We’ll also use the #CQMahWedding and #WATwitter hash tags. We’ll stay in the general portion of 40m-12m and in the tech portion of the 10m band so that everybody will be able to join in the fun. If you’re near the radio, tune in and work us!

We’ll also make some QSL cards using some of the wedding photos so if you’d like to get one, send us a card.

Ham radio calendar

Over on the right side is a link to my ham radio calendar. It’s just an embedded Google Calendar where I’ve been putting radio related things like nets and contests that are of interest to me so that I remember them. Most of the contest type events come from the ARRL’s Contest Corral listings.

I don’t always participate in everything I list, but I like to have them in the calendar as reminders, in case the urge strikes me to go play on the radio.