The AI Onset

 

The Ham Station, slightly idealized

Amateur Radio Operator

Imagine a seasoned amateur radio operator:

• A weathered face: Lines etched by years of experience and countless hours spent tuning dials.
  
• A cluttered shack: Filled with vintage equipment, antennas, and a variety of Morse code keys.
  
• A calm demeanor: A patient listener, always ready to offer advice or share a story. 
  
• A deep knowledge: A wealth of technical expertise, from understanding radio wave propagation to building custom antennas. 
  
• A global network: Connected to a worldwide community of fellow hams, exchanging signals and forging friendships across borders. 
  

This operator might be found in a quiet corner of their home, their radio crackling with life. They could be participating in a worldwide contest, chatting with a friend in a distant land, or simply enjoying the solitude of the airwaves.

(AA6E + Gemini AI, 9/12/24)

Plus ça change... Time to check in once more.

This blog needs some attention!  It has been over a year now.  The Blogger service is changing, and the world of social media is evolving drastically.  I've just cancelled my Twitter account, which draws a close to that small chapter in my life.  Elon is now free to drive things into the ground without my help.

I've dumped Instagram and Facebook, also.  The idea is to reclaim as much of my time as I can, free of the morbid stuff on the Internet.   That should allow me to concentrate on more important things.  That, or I can just enjoy a bit of peace as I enter deeper into codger-hood.

This old-fashioned blog is an interesting case. I can write what needs to be written, at whatever length.  Comments are welcome.  It should remain mainly technical with an amateur radio focus, but there will be tangents.

Let's see how it evolves.

A Death Foretold (Toshiba)

Eleven years is nearly an eternity for computing hardware.  In my IT glory days, we said that a 3 year old PC was effectively at its end of life.  We tried to budget for a 3-year replacement cycle, but it often stretched to 4 years. The technology zoomed ahead so fast that an older computer would barely run the latest operating system and fancier software applications.

That's easy to say when we're talking about other people's money, but for myself, I try to stretch my investments when I can.

Toshiba L645D

The last laptop computer I acquired was this Toshiba L645D.  In 2010, it was already an economy model selling at a hair under $500.  With its "triple core" AMD processor, you got Windows 7.  Upgraded to dual boot Ubuntu Linux, it served for presentations and other uses for a good 10 years.

Not forever, though.  Recently I brought it out for some reason and found that its battery would not take a charge.  (I was on my second battery.)  OK, new batteries are available for about $25.  I got one, and verified that it would charge up normally, according to the LED indicators.  So I pushed the power button, but apart from a few LED flashes nothing more happened.  No display, no boot.

OK, there's another battery to check.  The "CMOS" battery is a 3-volt lithium cell, like the one that probably lives in your PC.  You have to unbutton your machine and dig for it.  I dug for mine, but it popped up and out and into the internals of the laptop.  Oops.  That means I have to disassemble the machine -- not a simple task.  Fortunately, there are good instructions at ifixit.com for just this system.

I got it apart and found the battery OK, and I was set to put in a new one.  But the battery holder was a flimsy plastic item that I had broken when I removed the old battery.   Yikes!  Amazon had a replacement that seemed compatible, so I ordered it and waited a couple of days.  (10 of them for ~$7.) Removing the old holder and putting in the new one required some semi-precision soldering, but it seemed to go alright.

Reintegrating the laptop parts (a 20+ step process) went not quite as smoothly as the disassembly, but well enough.  I only had one small screw left over.

Alas, the Toshiba did not come to life!  I am now reflecting on why I would put so much time into a system that at best would still be obsolete.

At least I do have a new battery pack and an 11 year old 320 GB SATA hard drive for the junk box.

On the air with new antenna!

You can see our new 86 ft inverted-V-non-resonant dipole on top the "Whitfield" building at Evergreen Woods, our new QTH.  Fed by 400 ohm ladderline to our 2nd floor apartment at the right, it was a long slog to get installed.  Lots of help from friendly facilities staff, however.  A 4:1 balun connects our ladderline to either the Flex-6500 directly or through a Heathkit SA-2060A Antenna Tuner.

First test shows it's a good 40 M antenna, easily matched with the built-in ATU of the Flex-6500.  Other bands can be a challenge, but the SA-2060A will tune this system over 160 - 6 M -- at least if you're willing to crank those knobs!

My first on-air test was on 80 M with the SA-2060A.  This is a difficult match, because the 86 ft dipole is close to a quarter-wave at 3.6 MHz.  Does it work?  I set it up with WSPR at 5 W transmit power to see what came back.  Partial results of the first few minutes:

Timestamp	Call	MHz	SNR	Reporter	RGrid	km	az
2019-11-18 02:36	AA6E	3.570022	-24	HB9TMC	JN46lj	6279	55
2019-11-18 02:38	AA6E	3.570021	-24	PA0O	JO33hg	5815	48
2019-11-18 02:36	AA6E	3.570022	-24	TF1VHF	HP84wl	4091	34
2019-11-18 02:34	AA6E	3.570025	-27	KA7OEI-1	DN31uo	3263	284
2019-11-18 02:34	AA6E	3.570023	-18	VE6JY	DO33or	3250	309
2019-11-18 02:38	AA6E	3.570022	-27	KX3DX	DM79	2723	276
2019-11-18 02:34	AA6E	3.570022	-25	N6GN/K	DN70ll	2697	279
2019-11-18 02:34	AA6E	3.570022	-26	N5SNT	EL09wq	2618	249
2019-11-18 02:38	AA6E	3.570018	-25	KI5WA	EM11jk	2435	251

So I think we pass.  Best DX is HB9TMC in Switzerland, 2279 km = 3901 miles, with a Kp index of zero suggesting OK propagation..

I had been worried about interference from our building HVAC and other systems. It's there, but so far it's no show-stopper.  My first tests, inside the apartment, were a total disaster, but being 20-25 feet above the roof gets rid of most of it.

Casing the Environment

We have completed our move to Evergreen Woods, at least to the point of unpacking many of our boxes of "stuff".  Time to check out the Electromagnetic Environment. 

It's not all good or all bad. The fact is that we're inside a fairly large complex of 249 apartments and commons buildings.  We are in a rural/suburban setting, but the buildings have complex systems for HVAC, data networks, and power distribution.  So we expect a somewhat challenging RFI situation for HF.  You see one example above.  All the peaks (separation ~106 kHz) seem to come from one source that probably gets here via the AC power line.

I am using a Flex 6500 SDR as an RFI receiver with an EMCO 6502 active loop antenna.  The antenna sits at my new second-floor operating position, not far from some metal objects that probably affect the measurements.  The proposed antenna site is on the roof above the third floor, which is probably (hopefully) a somewhat better location!

Zooming in to get some finer detail, we see three of these peaks in the 40 M band:

A working hypothesis is that these may come from the building elevator system, with the glitches occurring during elevator motion.

This 106 kHz frequency comb is not quite fatal for ham radio, because in most cases you can choose an operating frequency away from the RFI.

There seem to be several sorts of RFI that become visible at various operating frequencies and various times of day.  Some of them are quite broad (no narrow spectral peaks), and some are impulsive, like ignition interference or PLC-type digital signaling.  The Flex 6500 has several noise blanking options that are at least partially effective.

The antenna is probably going to be placed above the flat roof shown below:

A diagonal run of about 100 ft looks possible, using 20 ft masts.

Stay tuned for further developments!

Migrating from Branford to North Branford CT

AA6E moving on, see my web site: https://aa6e.net/nw/index.php/13-senior/25-aa6e-in-transition.  The big shack picture is fading into history.

We are thinking about quality instead of quantity here, as far as the ham activity goes.

Beginning of the End for FB

I killed off Google+ last year and started a little tradition.  Today, I've killed off Facebook.  At least, I'm deleting my personal account at FB.

Why would I do that?  Glad you asked!

• Facebook has a near monopoly position in social media.  Benefiting from the "network effect" ("value" increases as the square of the number of users increases), FB has triumphed over all its competitors in the medium-long-form sharing segment.
• Monopolies are generally bad.  Anti-trust law evolves much more slowly than technology.
• Facebook governance is effectively in the hands of one individual, who shows little appreciation for the public interest or the social impact of his company.
• As a "free" service, users are persuaded to share way too much data with the service, often thinking it's just a matter of keeping up with friends or touting our lifestyles to the world.
• Facebook makes lots of money by packaging and reselling our data to commercial or political interests.
• For many users, Facebook is addictive.
• The Facebook model especially encourages evil forces (read Russia or US ultrapartisans) to influence our political system, spreading rumors and all kinds of divisive false information.
• Facebook has very little "quality control".  There are weak attempts to suppress pornography,  political abuse, and illegal conduct, but these are not very effective.  For FB, quality control means reduced profits.
• Apart from the shady business model, Facebook has a serious "signal to noise" problem.  Over time, your friends (and friends of friends) can easily overwhelm your news feed with irrelevant and distracting (to you) material.  As a reader, you have little control over what you see in your news feed.
• The selection algorithms are obscure to users.  They are meant to keep you engaged and clicking, but not to be useful.  It can be really hard to return to a particular item you remember seeing a few hours ago.

None of these points are particularly original, I know.  But you did ask!

I'm still here on Blogger (another "free" service).  It's part of Google, and Google is another collector and reseller of my data, I know.  Especially when I use Android, Drive, or Maps, or many other services.  I use Twitter, too.  Twitter is short form (mostly), and I seem to be better able to filter what I read.  And there's Amazon, and there's even Reddit, and more.

Antennas, cheap

We are going to be taking down the ham antennas, because we're moving to a retirement community.  This happens.

On the positive side, our new community is interested in supporting amateur radio (to some extent?), and we may have a chance to develop a new "farm".  See my article on ham radio in retirement communities.