Antenna switch label

After working some 40m PSK this evening, I found I had to move the switch positions around a little. With the updated configuration, I can work someone off the Vee, and then make one switch movement to get to the vertical for DX. Doesn’t sound like much, but in a QSO or contest, this allows for quick change in antenna take-off angles. The label is a custom label template in Microsoft Visio.

Switch label

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The chores before the storm…

With the upcoming snow storm that’s predicted to hit the Northeast US in the next few hours I decided to move my Ameritron RCS-8V antenna switch to it’s permanent home so it doesn’t get buried under the supposed 18″ of snow. I used my new RG8/U cable to connect it into the shack.  I swept the 110 foot coax run with .3 db loss at 1.9mhz and 1.1db at 29.7.

RCS-8V switchSweep160msweep10m

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DLARC Hamfest

Tonight was the 2010 DLARC mini hamfest which brought a great turn out to our monthly meeting. I’m pretty psyched to have come home with about 300 feet of RG8/U. Coax is a non-stop necessity in this shack… At least for the time being. All in an effort to convert from my RG8x to support an upcoming amplifier purchase. For those not in the know, RG8x is a smaller diameter 50 ohm coax cable that serves the HF world very well, but usually has a maximum power rating of 300-500 watts.

Rg8

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..the festivities continue..

The morning of the last NAQP (North American QSO Party) I put up an 80 meter inverted vee using an Alpha Delta Delta C center insulator hoisted 50 feet up a tree in my backyard. Seeing as how successful my results were on 80 meter, I added a 40 meter vee about 8 feet below it. The balun of choice was from Hy-Power Antenna company. KU3X, Barry the owner happens to be a fellow club member of DLARC and offered a bunch of information on antenna design.

Since I now have 3 antennas in the backyard and only 1 cable running to the house, running outside in the rain or snow to flip antennas got old quick. Hence my recent purchase from a ham on QTH.com. I was lucky enough to acquire a used Ameritron RCS-8V, 5 antenna remote switch for a very discounted price. I ended up using 100 feet of CAT5 cable as a temporary run between the control box and relay box outside. When my permanent cable arrives next week, the plan is to bury it and a run of RG8U coax out to the  relay box. Ultimately a 40 meter delta loop will also makes it way to this switch as well as a 40/80/160 meter off-center dipole around 60-70 feet.

For now I can switch between to 2 vee’s and vertical from the laziness of my own chair.

Rcs-8v

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Christmas in January!

It’s like Christmas in January here at the N3QO station. Dave, K3GMT made a station donation of an Astatic D-104 microphone for Laurie’s Heathkit Rig. After wiring it up and cleaning up the switches, it makes for some nice compressed audio and matches the rig nicely.

D104

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DX packet cluster

This morning on my way to work I was successful at receiving WT3Q’s DX packet cluster which displayed perfectly on my TM-D700. I had a weak signal some of the way causing dropped packets, but overall it worked well. I plan on spinning up an RF node in Pottstown in the next couple weeks to hopefully fill in the shadowed areas.
TM-D700 DX packet cluster

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DXspider US callsign database

While troubleshooting the filtering functions of my DXspider installation, I found there was very little documentation on how to get filtering to actually work. For the uninitiated, browse to the bottom of this post if you only require an updated version of usdbraw.gz from 12/23/09.

First I started with G1TLH’s download documentation. It references a file named usdbraw.gz which was unfortunately unavailable at the time. After a brief google search, I found the file, expecting it to only contain states and cities, but instead it IS the US FCC callsign database. The newest one I found was from 2004. Importing this database would make state filtering spuratic at best since so many new callsigns have been issued in the US of the course of the last 5 years and DXspider would only filter callsigns it knew about.

The FCC provides a daily updated database archive on their site available for download. Their database structure by itself is not compatible with DXspider and requires massaging of the data to ready it for import.

A huge find in this process was G1TLH’s USDB generation script. Dirk’s script takes the compressed FCC archive and converts it into DXspider format which happens to be output as usdbraw.gz.

Taken that process, then reverting back to the download documentation, then importing the database renders a newly up-to-date reference to apply state filters against.

This is great, but new callsigns are generated daily and I wanted to keep DXspider as up-to-date as possible with little to no administrative intervention from me. Introduce a little scripting and the use of cron.

My shell scripting skills a disasterous at best but it does function as advertised. I named my script usdb-update.sh and wrote it in /spider/local_cmds. It seemed to be the most obvious place for it at the time. Now let’s step through the script:

  • We start with the usual shell scripting stuff. Let’s set variables to our paths. Just in case one day we want to move all this stuff to a new location, it makes life a little easier.
  • #!/bin/sh
    SPIDERDATA=/spider/data
    SPIDERPERL=/spider/perl

  • Let’s download the the FCC database via wget and store it in /spider/data. Don’t mind formating below…
  • wget -P $SPIDERDATA http://wireless.fcc.gov/uls/data/complete/l_amat.zip

  • I placed Dirk’s script in /spider/perl will all the other scripts. Let’s call that script against our newly downloaded FCC database and convert it into something DXspider can understand. This actually creates the usdbraw.gz file you’ve probably been scavenging the internet for. It stores it in /spider/data
  • $SPIDERPERL/gen_usdb_data.pl $SPIDERDATA/l_amat.zip

  • Now take that output and create the USDB from it.
  • $SPIDERPERL/create_usdb.pl $SPIDERDATA/usdbraw.gz

  • Now cleanup our mess. Disk space is valuable.
  • rm $SPIDERDATA/l_amat.zip
    rm $SPIDERDATA/usdbraw.gz

    At this point if all has gone swimmingly you have the US callsign database waiting for you in DXspider. We now have to load it to make it available to our cluster users.

    Telnet to your cluster, login as your privileged callsign and load the database:
    load/usdb

  • OK we’re functional, but let’s automate it starting in reverse. Edit your /spider/local_cmd/crontab and append the following entry:
  • 30 5 * * * run_cmd('load/usdb')
    So my cron entry above executes the command load/usdb within the cluster environment every day at 5:30AM GMT.

    Since the previous cron entry only works within the cluster environment, I need to execute the data collection process external to DXspider.

  • Log into the shell of your DXspider server as the sysop user and create your crontab (typing crontab -e).
  • [sysop@dxspider1 ~]$ crontab -e
    Append the following entry into the sysop user’s crontab
    00 5 * * * /spider/local_cmd/usdb-update.sh

  • Save and close your cron.
  • I’ve decided to run the usdb-update.sh we detailed earlier at 5:00AM GMT. In practice I’ve found the data collection and processing only took 5 minutes so to execute the actual load of the database in DXspider 30 minutes later was plenty of time. This allows for internet or server slowness. Feel free to set these times however it suits your needs.

    Below are the files I’ve referenced in the above documentation:
    G1TLH’s gen_usdb_data Perl script and my data collection script

    usdbraw.gz created 12/23/09

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    N3QO DXSpider

    Over the last few days I’ve been working on setting up a DX cluster at my home QTH. Initially I started working with AR-Cluster, a very solid Windows cluster application. I’m thinking I may utilize this for the local VHF DX feed I have planned.

    In the meantime I’ve been playing around with DXSpider running on Linux. I’m slowly realizing how powerful the whole DX cluster platform is beyond simple DX spotting of stations. This evening’s task was to introduce the US FCC amateur callsign database, which I will write a document on shortly. So far it’s a success. Feel free to use the cluster for your DX clustering needs. If you’re curious to the amount of traffic it moves, click the statistics link above.

    Telnet: dx.n3qo.com:7300

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    Linux and Ham radio bond

    The latest Linux Journal magazine features ham radio. How cool is that?

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    -.-. – -.- -.. . -. …- – – -.- – - -

    On Dec 11, my Bencher BY-1 paddle arrived and I’ve been practicing code ever since. So far I can send around 20 WPM, but I’m having a hell of a time decoding. For the non-hams, the title says CQ de N3QO.

    image

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