Bikerscum - Patrick St. Jean

I finally got around to setting up the 2m/70cm vertical that I bought almost two years ago. It's now in the attic, at about 30 feet, being fed by about 40 feet of LMR-400. I've tested it on both 2m and 70cm and it's getting out with no SWR problems and good coverage. Now all I've got to do is set up the 2m and 70cm HO Loops to get a little side band action.

I managed to break the feed line for my APRS station's antenna, it disconnected from the connector while I was loading the Jeep up for the drive up to Illinois in December. I've been a little bit of a slacker and haven't gotten around to fixing it. Well, on the way home from work today I stopped off at Tanner Electronics and picked up the parts I needed to get a new connector on the feed line. After a quick spin around the block to make sure the transmitter was still working I buttoned everything up and am able to send position reports again.

Getting this to compile was a little tough. There's a few things to do in order to build it.

First, in tqsllib and TrustedQSL, you'll need to edit the 'configure' scripts in both directories. In each one you'll need to change the library paths for zlib, expat, and libcrypto from lib to lib64 in the checkzlibdir, checkexpatdir, and checkssldir functions.

The bigger problem is in the TrustedQSL package. There's a couple lines of code in crqwiz.cpp that don't play nice with 64 bit compilers. Use this diff to patch the crqwiz.cpp file. After that it'll build and run just fine.

I've signed and submitted a file and LoTW parsed it successfully with this patch applied to tqsllib-2.0 and TrustedQSL-1.11.

It arrived this morning, and I've powered it up, done a full reset, and started programming repeaters in. I'm thinking I'm going to have to get ahold of someone with a better antenna because this thing just can't consistently hit repeaters that it should be able to. I'm hoping there's no internal damage, but the fact that I can't hit 444.150 from 183 and Empire Central with 5 watts is not making me feel all that good.

It's official. I'm a jinx. I put together the new Windows XP machine last night out of a spare Athlon 2000+ that I had laying around. Well, I powered it up this morning to finish patching it and the CPU let the magic smoke out. Literally smoked the CPU.

So I went to Fry's at lunch and picked up a 2.8GHz Celeron-D, a new motherboard, a gig of ram, and a new video card. No more used parts!

Then the real fun started. This was my first XP installation and I had to call Microsoft and read off a 48 digit number and get one read back to me in order to reactivate the installation. That's just stupid. Maybe the next version of Windows can move back to a hardware dongle instead of this crap.

So it's finally up and running and will be undergoing a burn-in for the next few days. Then the HAM Radio apps go on so that I can get the rest of the shack put together. PSK-31's a must!

If you're selling an ICOM T-81A, I'm looking for one. The 1.2GHz bug has bitten and this one will take the place of my current HT and give me two more bands at the same time.

Since it's the first of the month and I'm a little bored, here's some of my favorite books:

• Astronomy
  
  • Mike Weasner's excellent Using the Meade ETX
• HAM Radio
  
  • The ARRL Repeater Directory
  • The ARRL HF Digital Handbook
• Motorcycles
  
  • Sit Down, Shut Up & Hang on: A Biker's Guide to Life
  • A Biker's Guide to the Open Road: Ride It Like You Stole It
• Orthodoxy
  
  • The River of Fire
• Sci-fi
  
  • Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote In God's Eye
  • Anything by R. A. Salvatore
  • David Weber's excellent Honor Harrington series

Link: http://www.ham-com.org/

Today was spent shopping at Ham-Com. I needed to pick up some small parts to get my last few antennas set up. So I've now picked up an MFJ-916BN duplexer, a couple N connectors, some Power Poles, and some 10 ga. power cable.

Now I've just got to run the cables for them!

Link: http://www.amsatindia.com/hamsat.htm

HAMSAT was launched today and should be operational by June. It's going to be mode B, but since it's not showing up on Heavens Above yet, I don't know if there are going to be any orbital passes over the US.

I pulled the control cable and soldered the new plugs on each end this afternoon. It appears that about 50 feet of CAT-6 plus the stock cable works just fine. I was a bit concerned about voltage drop with the length of cable.

Next I've got to get the RigBlaster connected...