Hmm…upgrades…
I recently started playing FFXI again, which caused my old and busted laptop (Sony VGN-N320E) to get all cranky about it. So, I ended up throwing together a new computer. Behold!
CPU: AMD Althon™ 64 X2Dual Core 6000+ (3.00GHz)
Mobo: Biostar MCP6P-M2
RAM: 4GB Crucial DDR2 PC6400
Video: EVGA GeForce 9400GT (1GB) (2 DVI out, 1 TV out)
HDD: Western Digital 80GB SATA II (7200RPM)
Case: ChenMing Micro-ATX cube w 300W power supply
Optical: LiteOn CD-RW/DVD-ROM
Monitor: Lenovo L195W 19″ LCD
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium
About the only thing it’s missing is a media reader, which may be in the first batch of updates. The video card can access 1GB of system memory, giving it 2GB total to play with. Windows Vista Home Premium sees all 4GB of memory, so it’s not exactly squished for space. The system is not designed as a long term storage vessel, merely the speed demon to handle the heavy lifting. I’ve got a 500GB RAID 1 NAS handling the storage problem, which may go to 1TB soon. The computer is a compromise, as my self-prescribed budget for everything was $800, because that was the “I could buy this same computer for the same price and get a free printer” point, so I wanted to see if I could do it.
I want to color calibrate the LCD at some point. Yes, I know, LCDs are not the most ideal medium to view “true to life” color accurate items, but since I work primarily in digital mediums, and I’m not a highly paid graphic artist, so this is an acceptable level of accuracy. And mine does a pretty darned good job as is, I’m just curious to see how “off” it is.
What would you change/upgrade if you could? Let’s be reasonable: realistic upgrades, not “If you had $500 to spend on this one part, do it!”. No pictures because it’s just a computer. Seriously. It doesn’t glow or blink or anything. It just does stuff. And no, “You’re not getting the most out of that computer with windows, run linux, n00b” is not a reasonable suggestion.
What I like about the IC-7000
First, a brief disclosure: this is not an unbiased review. This is just a brief recap of the things I like about the radio. And I’m sort of an Icom fanatic, so any “review” would be inherently biased.
Having used the IC-7000 on several occasions, both in my apartment and in the field, I think I can offer a brief review of the pluses and minuses. I have not used it on the HF bands, so I can’t comment on its abilities there. I simply don’t have the technology to string up the antenna required to make that work in a truly unbiased environment. Living in an apartment forces you to make a few compromises in terms of antennas. I have had a chance to use it with a GP-9 (2m/70cm dual band vertical), so I can comment on its performance on those two bands. That being said, let’s begin.
The IC-7000 has a beautifully designed front panel. Some of the buttons could stand to be a little bigger (gloved fingers at 3am when you’ve been up for 20+ hours are a little “big” for buttons a quarter of an inch across). The navigation is fluid, once you know where everything is. Those people who argue that “everything’s buried under menu after menu!” haven’t actually read the manual, in my opinion. I figured out most of the basic “get on the air” commands without the manual and managed to bring up more than a few of the advanced options once I’d read the manual once or twice. Or thrice. You absolutely positively must bring the manual with you to any operation. There’s a reason it’s 70 or 80 pages and full-sized.
Your options on 2m/70cm FM are rather limited: the bandwidth filters are fixed, but they’re all more than sufficient. I was working the handhelds at our recent AdventureTrek with the broadest filter setting and the pre-amp engaged. With the pre-amp off, I couldn’t begin to even hear them break squelch, let alone the actual communication. Part of this is probably thanks to the 16′ antenna on a 15′ mast, but I know that my other radio wasn’t having a whole lot of luck with the same antenna.
The radio has a feature that I was pretty excited about, but also a little bummed about: priority scanning. We were using two frequencies at AdventureTrek. One was the “local” repeater (read: 30 miles away) and the other was a simplex frequency. I had the “A” VFO keyed to the repeater and the “priority” monitor keyed to the simplex frequency. The handhelds were primarily working simplex, but this was something I wanted to play with. The downside is this: when someone transmits on the “priority” channel, you need to manual re-tune to the “priority” frequency. Or, keep the “B” VFO set to the priority and remember to switch back. If the radio could “hold” the priority frequency long enough for you to key up, that would be awesome. I transmitted on the repeater frequency more than a couple of times before I figured this out. It’s fortunate that the repeater was lightly (read: never) used, because I would have gotten more than a few “What are you talking about?” replies, I imagine.
The other thing I don’t like is the mounting position of the mic plug: on the bottom of the detachable faceplate. With the radio sitting on a desk, you can’t have the mic plugged in and not have the little kickstand up.
That’s about all I can think of at the moment…if any more rants or raves come to mind, you’ll be the first to know.
Just…just stop…please?
Okay, Verizon. I get it. FIOS is awesome. So awesome you have to tell me about it. Three times a week. But, check this out: I live in an apartment complex. That’s that little “Apt….” deal in my address. The chances of me getting fiber are slim and/or none. Not because I don’t want it (oh, yes, I do), but because I don’t own the building. I don’t even own the interior. If you want to market FIOS to me, sell the property managers on upgrading all of the buildings (or at least D building) to FIOS, then send me your little cards. Oh, and I’m not even in a service area for FIOS yet. Despite being 1/2 mile from the CO (even less by Point A to Point B).
Oh, and you can stop telling me about how wonderful your high speed internet is. I know it’s wonderful. I’m already a customer. And paying for the fastest service I can get. Seriously, would a “IsCustomer” column in your mailing list database slow you down?
Look, when I buy a condo, I’ll harrass the HOA until they let me get FIOS, then I’ll happily give you all of my moneys for the fastest service I can afford. Then promptly violate the Terms of Service by hosting my email server and LAN parties from my condo. Sorry, but with that kind of bandwidth, you seriously won’t notice. You probably wouldn’t even notice over DSL.
The one thing I already don’t like about this condo that I’m looking at is the lack of a deck. It makes putting up an antenna kind of a pain in the butt.
I’m popular?
One of my Flickr photos shared under a CC license just got picked up by Schmap Portland. Check out my particular photo here. My photos are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution license, which basically means you can do whatever you want with the photo as long as you tell people where you got it from.
Whee?
KD7QWZ is now K7AKM
As of whenever the FCC processed the application last night, my callsign changed from KD7QWZ to K7AKM. I’ve been itching to get a shorter call for a while, and I wanted to wait until after I was fully upgraded, as I didn’t want the Technician->General->Extra process to get thrown off by my callsign suddenly changing midstream. I’m still updating all the relevant places (it’s not as bad as changing your name, but it’s still a bit of work).
Got my IC-7000 a few days ago–this radio, combined with my new Comet GP-9 antenna (a 16′ antenna on a 15′ mast) lets me pick up stations and repeaters I couldn’t even hear the carrier from on my TM-271A and the little mobile magnetic mount. I’ve got a G5RV Multi-Bander that I’m going to try and set up at AdventureTrek.
Speaking of which, AdventureTrek 2008 is coming up. My HF radio and antenna will be going with me, so I’ll see if I can finally get onto the HF bands. I don’t know what I’ll be monitoring, but I’ll be using the 1×1 callsign K7A as well as my regular call K7AKM (I almost typed KD7QWZ…). This will be the first time on HF, so I don’t know how well I’ll do, but if you do manage to contact me, I’ll be signing my QSLs via LoTW (physical QSL available on request?).
Well, here goes something…
It’s a packet station mounted in a 4U equipment rack from the local musical store. I’ve managed to consolidate everything save power (and the antenna) into the rack, so as long as I have either 12VDC or 120VAC, I can run this thing. The radio is still powered off akaline AAs, as I’m having some issues with the NiMH battery pack that I need to resolve. All told, it cost me about $150, and took me a few hours to sort out.
The one thing I’m still sorting out (aside from power management) is that with the laptop drawer open, it’s a little front heavy, so I don’t know if I’d trust it to balance by itself on a table. Ideally, your table is deep enough that this is a non-issue for you. The only other resolution I could think of would be to add some sort of weight to it to keep it stable.
I probably could have gone with a 1U rack drawer and been set. With the 2U drawer, the laptop is in there low enough that I’d want to throw an external keyboard and trackball in the bag for prolonged use, but if your purpose is “Display APRS with little interaction”, then it’s probably fine. The other concern is that the drawer is just barely deep enough for the laptop with the back end hooked up. You could probably resolve this with a USB docking station and just have the USB cable and power poking out of the back, but your mileage may vary. I’ve got the cables ziptied down so they don’t interfere too badly, but this may change if I need to reposition the laptop.
The TNC is bolted to the 1U rack shelf and the radio is velcroed down. There’s enough give in the audio cable that I can pull it out and play with the settings on the radio. Given as I pretty much expect to set the radio frequency once when I first start operations, I don’t need regular access to the front panel of the radio.
If you’re interested in reproducing it, I bought everything at Guitar Center. Here’s the list:
- Ace KRC4 4U rack bag (184298800) – $55.99
- Raxxess ESD2 2U rack drawer (1544030000) – $69.99
- Raxxess UNS1 1U rack shelf (8545858000) – $19.99
- Raxxess PTWS25 25pk rack screws (8575962000) – $3.99
Ideally, the shelf and the drawer would come with screws, but I find that this isn’t always true or you want everything to match, so buy extras.
Check out the Flickr set here. If you have questions, drop me a line or leave me a comment.
2M J-Pole and a musing…
I built a 2M (144MHz) J-Pole this afternoon with about 54″ of 300-ohm ladderline and 25′ of RG-6 coax. It works beautifully for packet operations, so I think it’s going to go in the bag for that. I won’t go into the details of building a j-pole, as the instructions are just about everywhere (see one set of instructions here) , but it took about 5 minutes to build.
It took a little tuning, but the SWR at 146.000MHz is in the neighborhood of 1.5-1.2:1, which is pretty much acceptable, as far as I’m concerned. I’m going to reserve it strictly for packet/APRS use, as I’ve got a much nicer antenna for use with the voice rig, but now I’m not playing “Well, do I want to talk or do I want to do packet work?” like I was before.
Reading an article in QST, I had an inspiration to use a portable rackmount case to install the packet station, in order to make it both portable and presentable. I’m going over to one of the local musician’s shops tomorrow to look at the cases, but I think it’s going to be either 4U or 6U, with a pullout drawer for the laptop, a shelf to mount the radio/TNC/power distribution, and a set of cooling fans to make everything nice and cozy when needed. Maybe even a little LED light for those overnight operations. I’m going to make sure the wiring inside the case is presentable, and I’ll try to minimize the number of wires that need to exit the case to two (antenna and power). Set that up on a table, open up the front and back panels, turn everything on, run the J-Pole out to a suitable location, and it almost looks like you belong there. I’ll detail this project a little more once I’ve got everything figured out.
Packet operations for dummies…
So, we had a class a few days back on how to run a packet station. Ken, N7QQU, makes it bloody easy to understand, and coming from a technology background, I picked it up in no time at all. But it seems that packet operations still confuses a lot of amateur radio operators, and I don’t quite understand why.
I’ll cover how to set up a packet station in another article. The thing that I think hangs people up is, “What now?” It seems like a lot of people (including some experienced amateur radio operators) still think that manually interacting with the terminal window is the only way to send packet messages.
Unless you’re really motivated and like typing your packet messages into the terminal windows by hand, join the 20th (21st?) century and use a program like Outpost. I can safely say I wouldn’t be the least bit interested in packet if it weren’t for this program. It reduces packet traffic to a process as easy as sending and receiving email, and I love it. Need to send an NTS bulletin? It’s got a message builder that will even determine where the message needs to go. Want to send a bulletin? Just tell Outpost that you’re sending a bulletin. Once the message is ready to go, Outpost takes care of all the boring stuff–opening up a terminal window and typing everything in.
You can set it up to automatically access the BBS, retrieve your messages, local bulletins (even narrowing down which types of bulletins you want), and NTS traffic (if you want to insert it into the local voice network or, gasp, deliver it), and then send your outgoing traffic. It even allows e-mail style “reply with the body of the message” so that you can follow your conversation.
All in all, Outpost is a lifesaver. Packet messages take about 30 seconds of airtime, whereas a voice message of the same length ties up the frequency for 5 or 10 minutes. If you’ve got a lot of traffic to send, this quickly grows into insanity.
Setup is a little bit of a bear, but the documentation is fairly thorough and if you managed to set up APRS, you can set up Outpost.
Outpost. Get it, learn it, love it.
2m packet operations…
Okay, so APRS is APRS. LiveStrong was LiveStrong. Fun, but APRS misbehaved, so we were sort of reduced to voice checks with other sites. Oh well.
I’m now up and running on 2m packet, for those who care. I’m KD7QWZ@K7IQI.OR.USA.NOAM. Not that you should need to enter anything beyond KD7QWZ@K7IQI, but sometimes it happens.
As far as the next thing on the purchase list, we’re looking at the Icom IC-703+ and/or the Kenwood TM-V71A :D
The sad state of APRS…
So, the sound card interface is on hiatus. I broke down and bought a TNC, so this has been moved to “proof of concept” priority at this point. But, now that I’ve got the TNC and am running APRS, there’s something drastically amiss: it’s stuck in the late 90s/early 00s. I downloaded a program whose release date was 2004 because the author died and nobody has maintained it since then, and it was the “recommended” solution. How come we can’t build a better APRS program? At least one that interfaces with recent versions of the mapping software out there. I, at least, would spend money for working software that doesn’t look like it’s trapped in Windows 98. And for maps that aren’t 5 years old. Sure, we’re not using APRS for turn-by-turn, but there’s been more than a few changes in the Portland area in the last 5 years.
But, maybe I shouldn’t complain. Free is better than nothing, in the end.
And I want a new callsign. KD7QWZ is looooong…especially phonetically…but the list of calls available to Extra operators gets shorter and shorter every day…
