After my earlier stories about amateur radio at the Trintelhaven location Kees PA5Z wanted to go there too to test a dipole antenna for 80 meters that wasn't going to fit in his garden. I felt like taking the fibermast again and the linked dipole on 40 meters, an endfed antenna and enough rope to be able to hang it in some tree.

So we loaded radios and antenna material in a car and drove over there. Weather was nice, not too hot. We were hoping to get on one of the grassy fields of the site, but most of the site was taken up by the trucks and equipment for the work going on.

Antenna at Checkpoint Charlie restaurant, picture by Kees PA5Z

So we settled for the far end of the parking lot, away from the restaurant Checkpoint Charlie. We saw that Checkpoint Charlie had a big antenna themselves, most likely an antenna for the 11 meter (27 MHz) band.

The 80 meter dipole set up by PA5Z, picture by Kees PA5Z

Kees soon found a frame around a garbage can which could hold the aluminum mast for the middle of the dipole. It all worked fine on the 80 meter band. The dipole antenna became a bit detuned when there was a big truck parked right next to it. We were at the edge of the parking lot so it could happen.

PE4KH behind the radio at Trintelhaven, picture by Kees PA5Z

I set up my fibermast and used the rubber strips to lock the elements, because it was windy. I set up the linked dipole for the 40 meter band. There wasn't a lot of room for the guy wires and after a while one came lose making the fiber mast fall over. Some damage: one corner of the balun broke and the antenna wire came lose. But with a simple fix it was up again. Later one element collapsed because one rubber strip wasn't tight enough.

I made only five contacts on the 40 meter band. Propagation wasn't cooperating a lot. Kees did not hear a lot on the 80 meter band until later in the day when some Dutch amateurs where in a conversation. Kees was able to report in and get some signal reports.

PE4KH with Arrow Antenna at Trintelhaven, picture by Kees PA5Z

I also took my Arrow Antenna and a handheld radio to try and receive a pass of the Fox-1D satellite. But I heard no signal. It did make for a nice picture, trying to receive the satellite standing on the dike.

Noticed in the recent logs, lots of variations on:

Jun  6 19:15:41 gosper sm-mta[22475]: x56HFc06022475: <mail@some.domain>... No such user in domain 
Jun  6 19:15:41 gosper sm-mta[22475]: x56HFc06022475: <support@some.domain>... No such user in domain 
Jun  6 19:15:41 gosper sm-mta[22475]: x56HFc06022475: <reply@some.domain>... No such user in domain 
Jun  6 19:15:41 gosper sm-mta[22475]: x56HFc06022475: srv-eml.info [185.222.211.11]: Possible SMTP RCPT flood, throttling.
Jun  6 19:15:41 gosper sm-mta[22466]: x56HFCbH022466: <financeiro@some.domain>... No such user in domain 
Jun  6 19:15:42 gosper sm-mta[22473]: x56HFVoi022473: <biuro@some.domain>... No such user in domain 
Jun  6 19:15:42 gosper sm-mta[22468]: x56HFItg022468: <michael@some.domain>... No such user in domain 
Jun  6 19:15:42 gosper sm-mta[22471]: x56HFPIC022471: <chris@some.domain>... No such user in domain 
Jun  6 19:16:51 gosper sm-mta[22466]: x56HFCbH022466: lost input channel from srv-eml.info [185.222.211.11] to MTA-v6 after rcpt
Jun  6 19:17:16 gosper sm-mta[22475]: x56HFc06022475: <jobs@some.domain>... No such user in domain 
Jun  6 19:17:17 gosper sm-mta[22475]: x56HFc06022475: <wh5gkoxp5wqk@some.domain>... No such user in domain 
Jun  6 19:17:18 gosper sm-mta[22475]: x56HFc06022475: lost input channel from srv-eml.info [185.222.211.11] to MTA-v6 after rcpt
Jun  6 19:17:18 gosper sm-mta[22475]: x56HFc06022475: from=<20tv13b4bu0h2107@europcar.ua>, size=0, class=0, nrcpts=1, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA-v6, relay=srv-eml.info [185.222.211.11]

All from the same IP, trying a lot of addresses (and failing), with a retry later trying all those addresses again.

After the migration to the new homeserver was finished I found out I had to run backups on a separate computer: misconfigured backups so the old idea of backups to a cloudservice is on my mind again. I've looked into this before: Backup to .. the cloud! and I still want to backup to a cloud-based service which has a webdav interface and is based on owncloud. With some searching I came across How to synchronize your files with TransIP’s STACK using the commandline.

I'd like the outgoing bandwidth to be limited so the VDSL uplink isn't completely filled with the backup traffic. Installing owncloud-client-cmd still has a lot of dependencies on graphical stuff, but doesn't install the GUI of the owncloud client. In owncloud-client-cmd I can't set the bandwidth limits, but I can set those in the graphical client. But after a test it shows that owncloud-client-cmd doesn't read .local/share/data/ownCloud/owncloud.cfg for the bandwidth settings.

At least with the VDSL uplink speed and the wondershaper active the responsiveness of other applications at home never suffered. Maybe specific rules for the IP addresses of the cloud service could ratelimit the uploads.

I saw some parts in a site that were creating errors and trying to maintain old PHP code was an annoyance again. So I set up the project to port it all to mod_perl to be able to support it again.

Not an easy project, and it will take a while. First work was on understanding the mod_perl registry which keeps scripts and perl interpreters running in Apache. I noticed I was getting old errors from scripts which is because the mod_perl registry doesn't automatically reload scripts (to save file actions). This is not ideal on a development server and can be confusing on a production server. Solution: enable Apache2::Reload with

        # enable perl
        AddHandler perl-script .pl
        PerlResponseHandler ModPerl::Registry
        PerlInitHandler Apache2::Reload

Now to write the right perl code...

After getting a satellite contact via SO-50 the next thing was to get it in the log correctly. I followed the instructions from Logging Satellite QSOs with Logbook of the World - Amsat, logging the contact in the tqsl program, uploading that log to Logbook of the World and importing the logfile (ADIF) into CQRLOG later.

But later I found out that CQRLOG now supports satellite logging after enabling it in the preferences. Since version 2.3.0 satellite support is included.

This evening I checked 'Sky at a glance' in gpredict and saw a nice SO-50 pass come up. It was a southwest - northeast pass with a very high maximum elevation. So a good chance to listen to the satellite for a while. I took the Arrow antenna together with the Wouxun handheld radio outside, which I programmed for the SO50 frequencies when I started with amateur satellites years ago.

I started hearing the satellite right after it got above the houses. I heard one familiair callsign: Peter 2M0SQL. In a silent moment I answered his call, he heard me fine and we had a contact.

My first satellite contact since August 2014 and directly someone in the log who I really wanted to get in the log.