Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ros VK2FROS & Raffy VK2RF at the Newcastle Port to Port Bike Race

Ros & I participated in the Wicen supported Mountain Bike Race in Newcastle.

Weather was overcast and drizzly and raining at times.  Riders were amazingly fit, I think over 300 started and most finished the 4 days race. At the end they were thoroughly mud covered! We didn’t record any medical casualties although a couple of  mechanical failures were repaired with the aid of my trusty hex key set!

Port to Port Mountain Bike Race Website

 

 

p2p2015-RosVK2FROS-Ros at the Newcastle Port to Port Bike Race P2P2015-VK2RF-Raffy at the Newcastle Port to Port Bike Race P2P015-VKFROS- Ros at the Newcastle Port to Port Bike Race

Planetary Society Lightsail has gone quiet, they are now relying on a classic IT bug excuse!

27 May 2015

The planetary society launched a prototype lightsail last week, and it appears that a known defect may have got to them! The manufacturer advised that they may have a buffer problem about 2 days before they may have had a buffer problem! Although they continue to try and reset, they are now hoping for that classic IT excuse for crashed PC’s,  Servers, Databases, Networks etc… “Your [xxxxxx] crashed because it was impacted by a stray space particle”. Turns out this really happens, and it happens so frequently to unshielded devices like cubesats that they expect it to occur within 3 weeks!

You can still try and listen out for them on: 437.435 MHz, AX.25, FSK, 9600, call sign KK6HIT.

 

Lots more info available at Lightsail Mission Control

And here is some possible viewing times over Sydney for the next week. Unfortunately the chances of seeing it at the moment are tiny! If the sail does unfold it is expected to be very bright.

Start Max altitude End
Date, Local time Az Local time Az El Local time Az
27-May 18:00 NW
324°
18:05 NE
43°
70° 18:10 SE
136°
28-May 17:47 NW
319°
17:52 SSW
195°
88° 17:57 SE
138°
29-May 17:34 NW
314°
17:39 SW
231°
67° 17:44 SE
140°
30-May 17:21 NW
309°
17:26 SW
225°
51° 17:31 SE
142°
31-May 17:08 NW
305°
17:13 SW
223°
40° 17:18 SE
145°
1-Jun 16:55 WNW
300°
17:00 SW
222°
32° 17:05 SE
147°
2-Jun 16:42 WNW
295°
16:47 SW
221°
26° 16:52 SE
149°

received my sm1000 smart mic today

2015-05-17 17.29.20

The sm1000 is an interesting bit of technology implemented as a microphone to bring digital voice to almost any ham receiver.  The microphone implements the codec2 voice codec designed by David Rowe in hardware, replacing the need for a pc running freedv.

Im looking forward to making some cables for my ic-7100 and ft-857d and trying it out.

It was nice to see David was recently awarded at the WIA conference for his contributions to amateur radio, specifically with Codec2, FreeDV and now the SM1000.

http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?p=3125

 

Club Merchandise

A quick post to remind people that there is a variety of club merchandise available on Cafe Press. I’ll add a merchandise page to the web site just as soon as I find a cafe press plugin that actually works, in the meantime wander over, have a look, and buy something knowing a little of that purchase comes back to the club.

http://www.cafepress.com/vk2bv

 

 

Site Speedup Enabled

The WARS home page should be significantly faster now as I’ve just switched enabled Amazon Cloudfront for all media files, this provides a very fast front end cache (aka CDN – Content Distribution Network) taking the load off the (small) server we have hosting the web site.

Hopefully this will also help with the occasional ‘stalls’ we are getting due to the current t1.micro instance, which will continue until I migrate the pages to a reserved instance.

If anybody experiences any issues with this, please let me know.

Cheers

Jason.