WA4USN – Page 5 – AB4UG Radioblog

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

Field Day 2013 Part 2

Decent weather, no rain and partly overcast skies kept Field Day today from being too sweltering hot and made operating tolerable. Spent the bulk of today logging, and got on the radio for the last hour of Field Day to make a few more contacts. The club managed to get a little over 500 contacts on the SSB station and I think about 80 or so CW contacts.

I was even hearing a little bit of activity on 6m through my HT, which is something I practically never hear around here. I couldn’t make out much of anything, but I was able to tell that it was Field Day activity. No idea where it was coming from though.

Having a little more radio experience under my belt made this Field Day a more enjoyable experience than last year (not that I didn’t have a good time last year). Knowing a little more about what’s going on really helps and I feel like I was able to make more of a contribution this year.

Looking forward to Field Day next year.

A view of the Charleston peninsula and Charleston harbour from the USS Yorktown hangar deck

A view of the Ravenel bridge and the Charleston harbour from the hangar deck of the USS Yorktown

Field Day 2013 Part 1

Had a most excellent time at Field Day yesterday on board the USS Yorktown with CARS. I was put in charge of IT, which meant setting up the two laptops and a little local wifi network so that they could communicate and share a log file.

At 1800UTC (2PM EDT), the chaos the activity started. I spent the first few hours in seek and pounce mode (S&P), tuning around 40m at first and then moving up to 20 and then 15m. Was able to rack up a bunch of contacts, but it wasn’t easy. Thunderstorms to the southwest and in Georgia were causing static crashes because of the lightning. I’d be trying to work some strong stations, then 20-30db of noise would just wipe everything out on the frequency for a second or two. That went on for a few more hours, and then the rest of the evening was relatively clear. Then the problem went back to trying to pick out the Field Day exchange with neighbouring stations or groups of Boy Scouts stomping by behind us drowning everything out (the usual chaos).

I stayed on the Yorktown until around 10ish. A few other club members operated and got some pile ups going. I spent some time hanging out at the CW and digital station, taking photos and helping out with the logging on the phone station.

Field Day on the Yorktown offers a great view of the harbour and the Charleston penninsula while we’re operating.

This is the CW and digital station in action. Last year the CW station was set up in the club communications trailer out on the pier, but didn’t work out so well there, so it was brought up to the ship this time. The digital station was having a similar problem with noisy bands that we were having on the phone station so I don’t think there were too many contacts being made there.

Back for more Field Day fun today until 1800Z (2PM EDT) and then breaking everything down.

If you’re on the air for Field Day today, listen out for WA4USN. It might be me that’s operating!

Field Day!

Another ARRL Field Day is upon us!

ARRL Field Day 2013 logo

Like last year, I’ll be helping out with the CARS Field Day activities over on the Yorktown. Now that I’ve got a little bit more radio experience under my belt, I’ll be able to help out more with the preparations and will enjoy playing with the radios more than last time.

In preparation for Field Day, I’ve been given the task of getting the club laptops ready: installing updates and performing maintenance, updating the logging software (N3FJP), and getting them networked together so that operators at each station can see what’s going on.

TARC will be having their Field Day activities up in Goose Creek at the Marguerite H. Brown Municipal Center.

If you’re in the vicinity of either one of these Field Day locations, stop by and check out the amateur radio operations!

Weekend radio fun

Thanks to Tom/AJ4UQ, this past Sunday I got the chance to play radio once again on the USS Yorktown operating as WA4USN. This time Connie/NR4CB/@Bionic_Nerd was there and we managed to work almost 40 contacts from 4 countries including St. Croix and Croatia (Connie was doing most of the working). I think 4 or 5 of the contacts were me operating. Whenever Connie got on the air there would be people piling up to make contact.

I also got on the air using my own call sign, but wasn’t getting any responses back. Still working on getting used to talking on the radio, but Connie was a big help with prompting me on what I should say.

It was a lot of fun getting to play HF radio again. Looking forward to getting my own rig set up one of these days.