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
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° |
PCBs arrived yesterday (Friday) from China.
First prototype built and tested. All looks OK.
Need to do a bit of tweaking to the sticker for the box.
Will put up a picture of the first prototype as soon as I work out how
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
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
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.
Test post from the vk2bv wet site.
Club Callsign VK2BV came 1st in the – Six Hour Portable Operation – Multiple Operator All Mode, HF Bands part of the John Moyle Field Day, operating from Tooraweenah NSW 2831.
Congratulations to all who participated. A great time was had by all!
This is the online version of a Maker Magazine previously only on paper. Should be interesting for many of us:-
WARS members having a pre contest planning exercise!
