News archive 2014 - Koos van den Hout

After a lot of digital mode contacts (QSOs) I actually talked to someone today on HF radio. I heard UR5QW calling CQ on 10 meters HF in SSB (single side band). I was trying to find interesting stations via the Websdr in Twente but I actually heard UR5QW via the radio first and answered and we had a short but understandable QSO.

Searching for interesting signals via the websdr in Twente can be frustrating: it has less local noise than I have at home, so it can be I can understand a station via the websdr but not at home.

I recently upgraded ntpd due to the vulnerabilities found in ntpd prior to version 4.2.8. This version is also a bit better in error logging, and I started seeing in the logs:

Dec 21 20:53:06 ritchie ntpd[6918]: leapsecond file ('/etc/ntp/leap-seconds.3535228800'): loaded, expire=2014-12-28T00:00Z ofs=35 (no entries after build date)
Dec 21 20:53:06 ritchie ntpd[6918]: leapsecond file ('/etc/ntp/leap-seconds.3535228800'): will expire in less than 7 days
Dec 22 20:53:06 ritchie ntpd[6918]: leapsecond file ('/etc/ntp/leap-seconds.3535228800'): will expire in less than 6 days
Dec 23 20:53:06 ritchie ntpd[6918]: leapsecond file ('/etc/ntp/leap-seconds.3535228800'): will expire in less than 5 days

Dec 28 00:53:06 ritchie ntpd[6918]: leapsecond file ('/etc/ntp/leap-seconds.3535228800'): will expire in less than one day

So I followed the documentation in ConfiguringNTP: 6.14. Using the NIST Leap Second File and upgraded to leap-seconds.3644438400 which now loads fine:

Dec 29 11:25:29 ritchie ntpd[28281]: leapsecond file ('/etc/ntp/leap-seconds.3644438400'): good hash signature
Dec 29 11:25:29 ritchie ntpd[28281]: leapsecond file ('/etc/ntp/leap-seconds.3644438400'): loaded, expire=2015-06-28T00:00Z ofs=35 (no entries after build date)

I was looking for something else on AliExpres and found this interesting gem: 1PC FT-897 /FT817/857 / PTT/headset/CAT adapter. On the original manufacturer website: FT-8x7 Headset/PTT/CAT Adapter - Windcamp Creative Technology. Although I am not that busy with voice communications, it did look to me like this might enable me to hook up a cheaper PC headset to the radio.

I was wondering why it includes a CAT (computer assisted tuning) interface. A browse of the FT-857 manual for the pinout of the 8-pin microphone connector did not give any information. The menu setting 059 'MIC SEL' has the options NOR for the normal hand microphone, RMT for the MH-59a8j remote microphone which I have and CAT for a CAT connector. The missing clue was found after some searching in Using the FT-857 Microphone Jack for Serial Control (CAT) by Bob Wolbert K6XX which lists the pinout of the 8-pin RJ45 microphone connector of the FT-857(D) in different menu 059 modes.

I created a short RJ45 cable to connect the interface to the radio. I still need to create a footswitch to act as transmit switch.

This evening there was a pass of the SO-50 amateur satellite so I wanted to give it a try again. Since the garden table is dissassembled and stored in winter I don't have a table outside to set up laptop, radio, battery and other things so I went the simple way with the directional antenna, the SO-50 channels programmed into the handheld radio and Hamsatdroid for the prediction of the pass.

I heard the satellite, but had the usual problem of understanding callsigns. I heard one callsign good enough to answer it: 2E0FKL or that's what I think I heard, I am not one hundred percent sure. He did not hear my reply.

Comparing my 3 successful amateur satellite contacts with the 264 logged HF digimode contacts shows me that satellite contacts still have a special skillset and I'm a bit out of it. Next year will bring nicer temperatures for being outside and having the laptop controlling the radio outside.

Ik denk dat Univé een betere spammer e-mail marketing bedrijf moet inhuren. Uit de tekstversie van de laatste nieuwsbrief:

Subject: Uw kans om het nieuwste boek van Jamie Oliver te winnen.

                      U  N  I  V  É
                      VERZEKERINGEN

  ---------------------------------------------------------

  U heeft een bericht van de ASN Bank ontvangen.
  Omdat uw systeem niet automatisch de HTML versie opent,
  kunt u niet de complete e-mail bekijken. Wij verwijzen
  u graag naar onze website asnbank.nl om over onze nieuwe
  website over duurzaam beleggen te lezen.

I still had the wish to submit the Weather station Utrecht Overvecht to the APRS network to get the data on the APRS maps and maybe even added to the Citizen Weather Observer Program.

APRS stands for Automatic Packet Reporting System which allows lots of information to be automatically exchanged. The most well-known one is position reporting, but there is a lot more, including weather stations.

It wasn't very hard to get this done, I just had to find the time to do it. The trigger was the mention of a new APRS server in the Netherlands at Amsterdamse APRS server - PA4TW. I played a bit with the perl modules Ham::APRS::IS and Ham::APRS::FAP. Ham::APRS::IS is for communicating with the APRS-IS network. And Ham::APRS::FAP is for parsing APRS packets. I used this module to make very sure my outgoing packets parse correctly before actually submitting them to the network (and still making a few mistakes in the process).

I used the explanation and example at APRSWXNET information by Philip Gladstone to find out what to submit and in which format. The interesting point is that wind measurements can not be omitted, but since I don't have a working wind measuring setup I have to enter the '...' values to show that the measurement is not available. And temperatures are measured in Fahrenheit so I have to convert first from my measurements.

The current outgoing packets look like:

PD4KH-1>APRS,TCPIP*:/161010z5206.6 N\00507.1 E_.../...g...t045h91b10088http://weatherstation.idefix.net/

And now the weatherstation shows fine: PD4KH-1 weatherstation on aprs.fi and Weather stations near PD4KH-1 on findu.com. Note how aprs.fi converts to degrees Celcius and findu.com stays in Fahrenheit.

Bij de Veron afdeling Centrum is vanaf 5 januari 2015 weer plaats voor enkele cursisten die de "Novice" amateur radio licentie willen behalen. Voor mensen uit de buurt die nadenken om dat een keer te halen misschien het ideale goede voornemen voor 2015!

Meer informatie: N-cursus radiozendamateur Fort de Gagel start 5-01-2015.

Interesting type of IPv6 breakage currently at the Surf office:

Wireless LAN adapter Wireless Network Connection:

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : eduroamers.nl
   IPv6 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 2001:610:188:431:9d25:9938:408e:6714
   Temporary IPv6 Address. . . . . . : 2001:610:188:431:2c5e:681:fda1:702
   Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::9d25:9938:408e:6714%11
   IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 145.96.1.57
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.252.0
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 145.96.0.1

What's missing here? A default gateway for IPv6. Which breaks any external IPv6 connectivity. And I like having external IPv6 connectivity, for example for logging into systems at home. The solution is simple:

C:\>ipconfig /renew6

Windows IP Configuration

Wireless LAN adapter Wireless Network Connection:

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : eduroamers.nl
   IPv6 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 2001:610:188:431:9d25:9938:408e:6714
   Temporary IPv6 Address. . . . . . : 2001:610:188:431:2c5e:681:fda1:702
   Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::9d25:9938:408e:6714%11
   IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 145.96.1.57
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.252.0
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : fe80::222:dff:fe84:8800%11
                                       145.96.0.1

I wonder how this happens.

Update 2014-12-15: And I got in touch with someone at SURFnet who suggested the best cause of action: see if this problem persists after the upcoming move of the SURFnet offices.

Update 2015-06-03: And now the IPv6 over the wireless network at the Surfnet offices is fixed.

Sommige slechte spam vertalingen worden van zichzelf weer erg grappig:

Ik schrijf u thismessage met tranen en verdriet en ik weet dat deze massage zal u verrassen

Loads of mail from fail2ban-SSH on two separate hosts showing random hosts doing ssh attempts for 3 accounts since 18:58 this evening. The pattern looks like:

Dec  9 18:58:04 greenblatt sshd[28304]: Invalid user ftpuser from 78.90.110.205
Dec  9 18:58:04 greenblatt sshd[28310]: Invalid user admin from 78.90.110.205
Dec  9 18:58:05 greenblatt sshd[28312]: Invalid user D-Link from 78.90.110.205
Dec  9 19:06:54 greenblatt sshd[29099]: Invalid user ftpuser from 84.19.184.65
Dec  9 19:06:55 greenblatt sshd[29101]: Invalid user admin from 84.19.184.65
Dec  9 19:06:55 greenblatt sshd[29103]: Invalid user D-Link from 84.19.184.65

And it goes on and on...

Tijd voor een DAB services scan. Nu de aanbestedingen voor de bovenregionale DAB netten lopen zal er over een tijdje wel een uitbreiding komen van het aanbod.

Lots of spam the last few days for www.omerta.cc. Since www.omerta.cc is a website where stolen credit card information is traded where you have to pay to get in I don't think they really want to advertise themselves. So this is probably a joe-job. Which won't work much since www.omerta.cc is hiding behind cloudflare.

I have noticed the lightning strike detection in Weather station Utrecht Overvecht goes completely mad when I transmit on the 20 meter amateur band. With the detector being quite close to the antenna I can understand this.

The solution will be to find a place to mount the detector in the shed. It will be lower (less reception of the radio energy of the strikes) but it will also be further away from my interference.

That also means the reading of the detector will have to be done using w1retap since that is what I use on the shed weatherstation computer. I was a bit confused whether w1retap supports this counter but I found out it's based on the DS2423 counter chip which is supported in w1retap, as part of a wind speed meter in a TAI8515 weather station, but w1retap will give the count on readout and the conversion is up to the user.

The fact I couldn't get the DSL linespeed from the Fritz!Box 7360 annoyed me a lot, especially since there is a new telephone wiring cabinet which should raise VDSL2 speeds. I went through a number of websites about getting data out of the Fritz!Box with upnp, and finally I made it work and I get the results I want:

<NewLayer1UpstreamMaxBitRate>1480000</NewLayer1UpstreamMaxBitRate>
<NewLayer1DownstreamMaxBitRate>23144000</NewLayer1DownstreamMaxBitRate>

The hint that worked for me was at MRTG en Fritz!Box 7360 (firmware 124.06.05) - tweakers (in Dutch) where it mentiones the changeover to TR-064 protocol which should be reachable over the http://192.168.178.1/tr064/tr64desc.xml url which will ask for authentication with the root username and the Fritz!Box password. More about the Fritz!Box TR-064 implementation at Schnittstellen für Entwickler | AVM Deutschland (in German) which has more documentation at AVM TR-064 – First Steps (pdf, English). This made me end up at doing a SOAP request (post) to http://192.168.178.1/tr064/upnp/control/wancommonifconfig1 which failed. All SOAP requests fail with an HTTP error code 500, but there is a separate SOAP error set in the HTTP status 500 body. I used tcpdump to look at the SOAP error body and found:

<errorCode>504</errorCode> <errorDescription>SSL needed</errorDescription></UPnPError>

The SSL port is (according to the TR-064 first steps document above) 49443 and the URL is over SSL: https://192.168.179.1:49443/upnp/control/wancommonifconfig1 and this works, giving the answers I want.

With some newsitems here on my homepage getting longer I started to feel the need to make a more blog-like format possible with items with an introduction and longer text. And titles here and there to give a better title to newsitems that deserve it. So some changes to the database format, support scripts and all the scripts generating pages.

The changes were big enough to update the version number so now it is 4.5.

It seems I am a very special person for google: the 'Birthdays' calendar which should be filled with the birthdays of all people in your google+ circles had the option to remove it from the list of calendars or unsubscribe totally. After being on the receiving end of some rants about this it is clear a lot of people don't have the option to get rid of this calendar. I found a possible workaround: How to delete the Birthdays Calendar from your Google Calendar.

Update 2014-11-28: I was happy too early: now the calendar is back (without me asking for it) and I can't disable it normally.

I recently took some pictures of the HF dipole antenna in our attic:

Attic dipole center - Center of the 10 meter/20 meter dipole in the attic

Attic dipole ugly balun - Ugly balun for the 10 meter/20 meter dipole in the attic

The 'real' current balun is ready, but needs different antenna connectors. It does use PL259 connectors but the surrounding weather cover means I can't secure the BNC - PL259 connector I use at the moment. Better cable and connectors are on order.

I also borrowed the antenna analyzer from the radio club and measured this antenna. It turned out the frequencies with the best SWR (1 to 1.1) are below the planned frequencies on both the 10 meter and 20 meter band. It was supposed to be at 28.120 MHz and 14.070 MHz, it turned out somewhere 26.97 MHz and 13.20 MHz. The good news is that means the antenna wires are too long and need shortening. I'll probably do that 'for real' when I have different antenna cable and connectors to use the balun.

The current rainy weather is reasonably deadly for any transmitting, given the report from Digital mode reception maps at pskreporter.info which states:

Monitoring PD4KH (last heard 20 hrs ago).

while I am quite sure I transmitted PSK31 CQs and answers more recently than that and the 10 meter band being open according to the same site.

The attic dipole is right under the roof so any rain making the roof tiles wet is probably dampening the radio signals. This may get interesting when there is snow on the roof. I imagine some raised eyebrows when there is an antenna shaped hole in the snow on the roof.

De forumthread RTV Rijnmond: zendamateur bergschenhoek stoort hele buurt - zendamateur.com deed mij denken aan een heel goed stuk wat ik eerder tegenkwam: Voor de buren - PD5WL. Een heel leesbaar verhaal voor de buren van zendamateurs wat op een leesbare manier omgaat met antennes, radio en eventuele storing. Het blijft natuurlijk vaak gaan om vooroordelen en emotie, maar deze uitleg is open en duidelijk zonder al te technisch te worden.

Ik heb nog geen antenne op het dak, maar al wel eens interesse gehad van een buurman waarom ik soms een antenne uit het zolderraam stak. Omdat ik nu ook actief ben op HF heb ik wel mezelf in het antenneregister gezet ook al is er niks zichtbaar: mocht er ooit iemand in de buurt reden hebben om het Agentschap Telecom te benaderen over storing die misschien over HF uitzendingen gaat dan kunnen ze simpel vinden dat ik hier soms actief ben.

Truth in e-mail virus attempts seen (note the filename) :

Subject: MDaemon Notification -- Attachment Removed

-----------------------------------------
order01.zip (order01\bot_crypted10394.scr)

Oh, and another one came through with attachment:

Archive:  order01.zip
  Length     Date   Time    Name
 --------    ----   ----    ----
   385024  11-12-14 17:00   order01/bot_crypted10394.scr
 --------                   -------
   385024                   1 file

$ md5sum order01.zip ; sha256sum order01.zip 
ad9cb44bb7d64a8c5b619a4d37e7eb97  order01.zip
ecd0ead687314c195a8072fe46fd513b46d61688c19398ec3edbfd6f92b4aca4  order01.zip
$ md5sum order01/bot_crypted10394.scr ; sha256sum order01/bot_crypted10394.scr 
509670b354f356dcd38f3d47408d9910  order01/bot_crypted10394.scr
93098ab5d8827339b17e4510676c40c79f6eb09c7cbb5cf0931100fce647a64f  order01/bot_crypted10394.scr

Lots of German text in the .scr file:

Mitgemeint7
Logistiktruppe
Landschaftsstreifen
Blumenart7
Friedensnobelpreis
Priesterausbildung
Luftmotor
Form
C:\prestigetr
chtigem\Durchmischend6\Rauchgasexplosion\VB98\VB6.OLB
Exzessiverem7
Raumverschwendungen7
Artikelstammwartung1

And I pasted the complete strings -a bot_crypted10394.scr into pastebin.

Interesting spam in my inbox lately, and I can't find one of the usual spamfighters writing about it. I don't know which language and the google translate auto detect thinks 'Slovak' but fails most of the translation.

privet. prisoedniaytes' k moei grupe vkontakte!!!! makeup ochen' deshevo!!!!!
http://vk.com/yulianna_kir
Takzhe so mnoi mozhno svyaztsya i uvidet' tekuschie raboti po
Instagram: #yuliannakir
Skype: kir_yulianna
Instagram: kir_yulianna

Vkontakte (vk.com) is a social network which has most of its visitors from eastern Europe. Vkontakte just happens to look a lot like facebook. I can find Yulianna Kir makeup artist on for example Instagram with a Russian phonenumber but it doesn't explain the spam, and trying google translate with the source language set to Russian doesn't work either.

So the reason of the spam and the profit model is inconclusive.

Interesting new problem: transmitting on 20 meter PSK31 causes the lightning strike detector of the Weather station Utrecht Overvecht to go slightly mad. If you look at the graphs it seems like there was a really heavy thunderstorm last Thursday but that's just the result of trying 20 meter PSK31 all day and making 11 QSOs (radio connections). Time to move the lightning detector to a better location: in the shed with the rest of the weather station.

Update 2014-11-08: And another side-effect: I used a really cheap gimmick USB hub to hook up the radio to the workstation because I needed an extra USB port for something else. The next thing that happened was the USB chip in the serial cable to the radio (CAT interface) completely locking up on transmitting. I also hear buzzing on speakers when I transmit on 20 meters so this is a big hint I need to change some things. At least a balun for the attic dipole is on the way.

I tried NetworkManager again because wicd was showing downsides, such as:

• Not dealing correctly when the laptop is resumed with the ethernet cable attached: it doesn't run dhcp on the wired lan which makes services which only have IPv4 addresses unreachable. Took a while to understand that one for obvious reasons.
• Making the wired network interface flap between connected and disconnected state when a network cable is inserted after boot. Solution: restart wicd first.

I tried NetworkManager again, kicked out ages ago because it fully depended on a Gnome desktop, which I don't run. But now it has nm-connection-editor and nm-cli which should make things less impossible. But after testing I found out NetworkManager is even worse for me than wicd.

As part of my job I write down security requirements in new projects. Those include 'connections between systems that transport non-public data need to be encrypted using up-to-date encryption'. At the same time, work is improving their testing procedures so new or upgraded applications come to production fully tested according to predefined testing scenarios. So now 'security' is also part of the test scenarios and I was asked to help build tests for our security requirements.

For secure websites it is easy, I use the Qualys SSL Labs SSL Server Test. But there are a lot more ssl secured connections in use, and I would like those verified too without having to expose them to the outside world. Preferably both from Unix and Windows endpoints. And automated and/or as a scenario that can be done by the responsible system administrators.

A simple websearch gave no answers but some asking around gave me SSLScan for Windows which is a windows port of SSLScan Fast SSL Scanner. It's even free, and it gives out just the reports I want:

Waving to China:

Oct 26 12:42:43 abaris sshd[4602]: User root from 122.225.109.114 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 12:43:22 abaris sshd[4605]: User root from 122.225.109.114 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 12:44:19 abaris sshd[4608]: User root from 122.225.109.114 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 16:10:09 abaris sshd[5655]: User root from 122.225.97.84 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 16:10:29 abaris sshd[5658]: User root from 122.225.97.84 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 16:11:19 abaris sshd[5663]: User root from 122.225.97.84 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 17:11:10 abaris sshd[5929]: User root from 122.225.109.215 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 17:11:41 abaris sshd[5933]: User root from 122.225.109.215 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 17:12:40 abaris sshd[5937]: User root from 122.225.109.215 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 19:02:41 abaris sshd[6434]: User root from 122.225.109.195 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 19:03:13 abaris sshd[6438]: User root from 122.225.109.195 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 19:03:55 abaris sshd[6444]: User root from 122.225.109.195 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 19:06:29 abaris sshd[6466]: User root from 122.225.109.108 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 19:06:59 abaris sshd[6470]: User root from 122.225.109.108 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 19:07:42 abaris sshd[6473]: User root from 122.225.109.108 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 19:54:45 abaris sshd[6744]: User root from 122.225.109.217 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 19:55:21 abaris sshd[6749]: User root from 122.225.109.217 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Oct 26 19:56:00 abaris sshd[6754]: User root from 122.225.109.217 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups

I guess Shaoxing Dingqi Network Technology Co., Ltd. and WENZHOU GAOJIE TECHNOLOGY CO.LTD have a problem with intruders abusing their systems to attack third parties or they might just be very interested in attacking a certain class of systems.

This evening I tried working amateur satellites again. There was a nice ISS pass at 18:19 UTC and this time it was very easy to aim the antenna since the ISS was still illuminated by the sun so it was a bright spot in the sky. But no astronaut responded to my CQ call, not even when I remarked "I can see you!".

I also looked up some more satellites that are one-way and this included the HO-68 amateur satellite. It transmits a CW (morse code) beacon and I tried to receive and decode it. Receiving works, but I can't decode morse by ear and fldigi tries but it doesn't look like valid HO-68 telemetry format as documented in the HO-68 page above.

Update 2014-10-22: I asked PA5ABW, a very experienced CW operator to listen to the recorded audio and he helped decode the transmission above into:

BJ1SA XW XW AAA TTT AUE ETT TTT TTT TTT TTT TTT TTT TTT TTT XW XW

And noted the groups of three letters can also be 'shortened digits' and decode to:

BJ1SA XW XW 111 000 121 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 XW XW

which as a telemetry report decodes to:

 CH1 PA Output RF Switch status: 111 PA2 works (beacon only)
 CH2 Transponder working status: 000 Beacon only
 CH3 Transponder temperature:    121 = +21 degrees
 CH4 Beacon RF Output Power:     100 = 100 mW
 CH5 and further: 000

Een creatieve leugen in de spam vandaag:

Je bent lid van deze mailing list omdat U ingelogd bent geweest bij Du Cap SoWifi.

Blijkbaar vraagt die wifi toegang om een e-mail adres en iemand heeft daar een adres van mij opgegeven, en krijg ik dus maar de rommel.

Interesting spam on a role-account at work from biorbyt. According to Biorbyt - Spam for science - BioSPAM they will spam addresses from scientific papers. According to their privacy policy they will not spam:

Biorbyt will not send you email that you have not agreed to receive.

but I have a hard time believing that when I get their mail on a role account related to security, absolutely not interested in

Leukemia markers optimized with FIX&PERM® flow cytometry reagent Introducing our new range of FIX&PERM® for flow cytometry and validated, CE certified leukemia markers which allows for mild, fast and simultaneous staining of both intracellular and cell surface markers.

Showing mainly that the business model of spam is that spamming 100.000 accounts for one sale is a perfectly viable business model when you're not encumbered by any ethics.

Still in the archives: another SO-50 pass recorded at 26 September 2014. Again good operating procedures, maybe some sort of locator contest was going on, since I heard several exchanges with in one go callsigns and locators. Callsigns heard: SV2KGA, S54LD, CT2GOY, S52LD, 9A3ST, SQ8RK, IW3RGK. And yes my definition of 'heard' includes listening to the announcements in the recording over and over, I did not understand them all when it happened.

Ik kijk even rond in het centrum van Uithuizermeeden op google streetview en ineens valt me een antenne op die wel erg lijkt op een antenne voor VHF II (FM omroepband) gebruik op een tijdelijke mast. Alleen staat er volgens het antenneregister helemaal niets op die plek, alleen een zendamateur aan de overkant van de straat. Het was vast een tijdelijke opstelling die ondertussen weg is.

This is really old-school: I see messages in the newsmaster mail from a newgroup/rmgroup war. Haven't seen that in decades!

god@heaven.com asks for christian.binaries.sermons
to be created.

If this is acceptable, type:
  /usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd newgroup christian.binaries.sermons y god@heaven.com

And do not forget to update the corresponding description in your
/var/lib/news/newsgroups file.

The control message follows:

..

For your newsgroups file:
christian.binaries.sermons      Christian sermons

CHARTER: christian.binaries.sermons is a newsgroup for Christian
sermons.

The newsgroup and hierarchy will not be strictly moderated per se. Spam
and heavy trolling is not permitted, however, and may be post-moderated
after the fact. The christian top-level hierarchy does not follow the
precise policies of the current free.* hierarchy. We do, however, share
a similar vision of a relatively free and open hierarchy allowing almost
anything created by virtually anyone, with few rules.

JUSTIFICATION: Christianity being one of the world's largest religions,
there are several Christian newsgroups in various hierarchies out there,
but no established central structure that combines a variety of topics,
and especially Christian binaries are fragmented in disjointed
hierarchies throughout the Usenet. This newsgroup under the free.*
mantle espouses the ideas of freedom, the liberty to create your own
group, and allow relatively free posting with the exception of spam and
heavy trolling. As Christian newsgroups are often trolled, this is a
necessary evil for the hierarchy to thrive. In this new age of
persecution and ostracization, the christian hierarchy is necessary to
unite Christians worldwide and give them a digital home.

There has been much discussion on the Usenet regarding the need for
separate Christian groups, especially topic -specified binaries groups,
which seem to be largely absent in terms of Christian media. The amount
of Christian material found in any typical web search on this subject
alone is sufficient justification for this group.

I'm not sure usenet binaries are the best way to reach christians today. The church I visit uses live-streaming with availability on a mobile 'app' and the archive is available via the church website.

It seems the Garmin GPS 18 LVC for timekeeping in the ntp server on ritchie.idefix.net is having weird issues. It stops responding with the carrier high and sometimes restarts.

$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,*1E
$GPGSV,3,1,11,01,00,098,00,02,57,048,00,24,00,210,00,25,47,265,00*77
$GPGSV,3,2,11,26,05,15

On such a 'hang' the carrier detect is high. Weird problem.

No contacts, but some other firsts in radio amateur satellites for me yesterday evening. Using the digimode interface for the Yaesu FT-857 radio I recorded a pass of SO-50 in FM mode and a pass of AO-73 (Funcube-1) in SSB mode. And I was able to understand at least one callsign in the AO-73 downlink, which is also a first for me!

SO-50 Saudisat 1c recording at JO22nc, 2014-09-25 20:30 UTC. Callsigns heard: S56SG, DF9GH, DL2EEL, DO5BK, IW3RGK.
Most of these callsigns I can only decode now with having the option of listening to the recording again and again.

AO-73 Funcube-1 recording at JO22nc, 2014-09-25 20:50 UTC. Only one callsign heard while tuning through the downlink band: DG1EA but I heard the call clearly enough to understand it right away. A first for me.

This week I seem to have a thing for completely missing or being unable to make use of good propagation conditions on the 10 meter band. I do use the WebSDR at Utwente to check the band. Yesterday I noticed some activity, including a Lebanese radio amateur who was very popular. Lebanon does not have a lot of active radio amateurs and other radio amateurs want to have contacts with as much countries as possible, including 'rare' ones.

I also heard some unlicensed transmitting music. With the 10 meter amateur band being in frequencies above the '27 MHz CB' band there is some 'export-only' equipment that can do both and unlicensed use of the 10 meter amateur band happens quite regularly.

Maybe I want to upgrade the HF antenna experiment to also work on the 20 meter amateur band. Working long distance (DX) is usually a lot easier on 20 meter, especially at night. There is a nice video about making contacts on 20 meter at night: The Fun Of Ham Radio DX - Making Friends Around The Globe - RadioHamGuy on Youtube.

I'm at home using fldigi on the latest usbaudio sound device, playing music with audacious on the internal audio device and I could do something else with the other usbaudio device. So I guess audio in Linux is finally somewhere were modern users expect it. This is with Ubuntu 12.04, I wonder what will break in newer versions...

So work made a laptop with the standard Windows 7 software image available to me and I noticed when I took it home it doesn't do any IPv6. Which is not what I want. Some searching found How to disable IPv6 or its components in Windows - Microsoft Support which has the right answers which were used by the people creating this software image. I changed the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6\Parameters\DisabledComponents registry key to 0x01 so I don't get the Isatap/Teredo tunnels.

Interesting remark in that support article:

We do not recommend that you disable IPv6 or its components, or some Windows components may not function. Additionally, system startup will be delayed for 5 seconds if IPv6 is disabled.

I guess I'll have to find another way to disable the Isatap/Teredo tunnels to make the system boot faster. I want IPv6 to work when it's available native or not at all. Some aspects of the work network make things slow when tunneling protocols are tried. Which is probably the reason of disabling it in the first place.

Update 2014-10-01: It seems this setting gets reset somehow: I am at the Surfnet Relatiedagen 2014 and just noticed the laptop has no IPv6 on the network here, which surprised me. But a check of the settings showed no IPv6 addresses at all, not even link-local. A check on my Android phone shows globally routable IPv6 addresses.

A cute Nigerian scammer in the mail today:

Attention, This message is from the supervisor central here to you. It came to my notice that you did not have money to pay cost of receiving your long waited funds $8.3M. However, I tried to use my immunity as a supervisor here to waive that fee so that you will receive your funds without any further hitch but in conclusion the authority insisted on minim $120 You advised to kindly pay only 120 today via western union transfer so that you will receive your long waited funds total $8.3M

My best guess: when the $120 is transferred there is 'just one more tiny problem' costing around $180. And so on.

This evening I tried some amateur radio contacts in the 10 meter band in PSK31 mode. And I got lucky, there were openings to North America, which was a new country for me and new distances!

Amateur radio psk31 mode in fldigi

I made psk31 contacts with KR4UA at a distance of 7069 kilometer, PA3FJE at a distance of 17 kilometer and W1AW/4 in North Carolina in the USA at a distance of 5731 kilometer. W1AW is the callsign of the US Amateur Radio Relay League which is currently 'on tour' of the US to celebrate the 100 years of the ARRL.

Update 2014-09-20: Some more 10 meter PSK31 contacts on 18 September and 20 September, including IK3WHZ and IU3BSY in Italy and RA9FHM in Asiatic Russia at a distance of 3244 kilometer. And a very enthusiast S52UF in Slovenia. This contact with Slovenia was also spotted by shortwave listener NL 13562.

And KR4UA reported not having me in the logs so that contact and distance is unconfirmed.

New messages in the wifi system logs, probably caused by the new TP-Link TL-WDR4300 access point:

[339796.577998] wlan0: associated
[339796.578154] cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: NL
[339796.614689] cfg80211: Regulatory domain changed to country: NL
[339796.614711] cfg80211:  DFS Master region: ETSI
[339796.614722] cfg80211:   (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)
[339796.614739] cfg80211:   (2402000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[339796.614754] cfg80211:   (5170000 KHz - 5330000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[339796.614769] cfg80211:   (5490000 KHz - 5710000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2700 mBm)
[339796.614785] cfg80211:   (57240000 KHz - 65880000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 4000 mBm)
[339796.795070] wlan0: Limiting TX power to 23 (23 - 0) dBm as advertised by ..:..:..:..:..:..

Vandaag heb ik weer vanaf thuis de jaarlijkse landelijke ballonvossenjacht gevolgd. Hierbij wordt een peilbaken wat radio signalen uitzend aan een helium ballon opgelaten wat uiteindelijk ergens weer neerkomt, mensen kunnen dat signaal volgen en er zijn prijzen en eeuwige roem voor de eersten die aankomen bij de plek waar het geheel neerkomt.

De ballonvossenjacht is een van de bijzondere jaarlijkse evenementen voor radioamateurs. Dit jaar werd dit evenement voor de 36e keer georganiseerd, en voor mij was het de tweede keer dat ik het geheel gevolgd heb.

Volgens mij is het in die 36 keer gegroeid tot een evenement wat multimediaal te noemen is. In ieder geval komen er allerlei aspecten van de radioamateur hobby aan te pas, zoals:

• In ieder geval Amateur Radio Direction Finding (ARDF), de sonde zend een signaal uit wat met een peilontvanger en een richtantenne te localiseren is.
• Amateur Televisie (ATV), de sonde heeft een kleine camera bij zich en zend dit uit en dit is te volgen via de PI6ATV repeater.
• De sonde heeft ook een repeater aan boord zodat radioamateurs via die repeater verbindingen kunnen maken over langere afstanden.
• Het controlecentrum is actief op twee repeaters in Nederland en op een korte golf frequentie. Heel de dag was het daar best leuk verbindingen maken maar het is ook een belangrijke manier van het controlecentrum om de radioamateurs die meedoen te bereiken.

Maar het evenement is eigenlijk multimediaal te noemen tegenwoordig, ook via andere wegen is het mee te beleven:

• Via de ballonvossenjacht website en de ballonvossenjacht facebook community en de ballonvossenjacht twitter account worden ook alle statusberichten van het controlecentrum verspreid en kan het evenement op het web gevolgd worden.
• De ATV repeater PI6ATV leverde ook een videostream via Internet met beelden van de ballon zelf, van het controlecentrum en van de hand van de held die in de Gerbrandytoren met een richtantenne zat om het signaal van de videozender in de ballon zo goed mogelijk op te vangen.

Mijn complimenten aan alle mensen 'achter' het evenement wat er vast meer zijn dan op het eerste gezicht lijkt. Er was een goed strakke regie zodat via alle communicatiemiddelen tegelijk hetzelfde status bericht over de voortgang de deur uit ging. Al met al een geslaagd evenement, ook voor mij als thuis meeluisteraar!

Update 2014-09-15: Direct na afloop is de GPS data ballonvossenjacht 2014 gepubliceerd. Daar heeft Remco PA4TW een mooie google maps visualisatie ballonvossenjacht 2014 van gemaakt. En met die .gpx file en GPS Visualizer kon ik weer een hoogteprofiel ballonvossenjacht 2014 maken (afstand versus hoogte). Het profiel 'tijd versus hoogte' was een stuk minder spannend: de ballon stijgt lineair op en in de daling is de invloed van de parachute zichtbaar.

Beelden bij deze post zijn uit de PI6ATV livestream en komen van Ballonvossenjacht 2014 - PA4TW met toestemming.

I had a chance Thursday to listen to a pass of the AO-7 satellite. Passes of this satellite take longer than those of the SO-50 satellite. The AO-7 satellite has an inverting transponder for SSB operation so I have to search for downlink signals. I heard some: mostly CW (morse code) but even some weak SSB. To weak to make out callsigns (for me) so this will need practising too, just like I had to learn to hear callsigns on SO-50 in FM mode.

Oh and another interesting thing about the new TP-Link TL-WDR4300. It does IPv6. If I read the docs correctly it can do DHCP6 with prefix delegation or tunnels. It even gives itself an IPv6 address on the LAN side when that side runs address advertising. But ...

$ telnet -6 ap 80
Trying 2001:980:14ca:2:ea94:f6ff:fe91:21b3...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

the webinterface isn't available via IPv6. Nothing in the device is available via IPv6 according to nmap.

I am used to new access-points showing up at home which make us change the channel from time to time, but after getting hickups in youtube video on a tablet for the second time in a week I decided it was time to go dual-band and higher speeds. Good advice was to look at the TP-Link TL-WDR4300 which is dual-radio dual-band with 802.11n support with mimo. The advertised 750 megabit is when you add 802.11n at 300 megabit on 2.4 GHz and 802.11n at 450 megabit on 5 GHz. I'm not setting up extra wide channels on 2.4 GHz since it is busy enough, so I won't be seeing 300 megabit on 2.4 GHz anyway. I set up the network SSID and security on 5 GHz exactly the same as on 2.4 GHz so devices can switch automatically.

The weather station computer in the shed also measures wifi signal strength, the difference is clear so the TP-Link also has a stronger signal on 2.4 GHz. The wireless card in the weather station computer can do 5 GHz, but its antenna is tuned for 2.4 GHz and there are multiple walls between the access-point and that antenna.

I had an appointment today at a to me new address. I have an Android phone so I use the car navigation available from google. The 'Car' application has the (extra?) option to navigate to my next appointment, which made the fact the invitation had the right address information very useful. I used that and found the location fine. After I arrived people asked me if I had any trouble finding it since it is in a somewhat unusual location. I would have had more problems with a map!

HTC One Tip: How to use Car mode video explaining HTC Car mode and navigating to appointments.

Lag in DNS changes: I stopped hosting a domain for someone, the last 'regular' traffic was on 20 August 2012. But some web robots have a memory of their own, the last access by a search bot was 25 October 2013.

This evening I had a bit more luck with the 10 meter band dipole I made earlier. In the log this evening: 3 PSK31 QSOs with SQ2OIC in Poland and OM1AKD in the Slovak Republic and EA3HCE in Spain.

For me the first PSK31 QSOs and the first HF contacts.

PSK31 is a data mode, so I type stuff on the keyboard. The big advantage is I can do this all remote, controlling the PC and the radio from the couch in the living room.

And EA3HCE was nice enough to confirm the QSO instantly via eQSL.cc so this is my first confirmed HF and PSK31 contact too.

Update 2019-04-15: And the contact with EA3HCE is now confirmed on Logbook of the World too!

Tuesday evening I was at the Veron region A08 club meeting and I watched as someone else played with the radio for a while. We noticed some interesting activity on the HF bands: people making DX contacts from as far as Costa Rica mixed with people clearly having a very local contact. People working distant stations (DX) usually just want to exchange callsigns and a signal report and maybe some niceties and get on to the next contact, people having a very local contact can chat on for a while talking about the weather, their car, the upcoming visit to the dentist and other items, usually called 'ragchew'. It's very funny to hear the different styles mixed.

I created the simplest possible antenna for use in the 10 meter HF bands: a dipole from recycled utp wire using some turns of coax as 'ugly balun'. I used this Wire antenna calculator to calculate the needed lengths. The choice for the 10 meter band was for a purely practical reason: this is the length I can put up under our roof easily. So I am trying PSK31 on the 10 meter band, around 28.120 MHz.

The first results the past evenings was a constant S6/S7 noise level, which leaves little space for other signals. And absolutely no response to my CQ calls.

But conditions can change, and this evening I am hearing some PSK31 traffic, and IZ3ZOW managed to copy my callsign in Italy but we couldn't make it a whole QSO. I also tried various setting for the noise reduction in the FT-857 radio to see whether that has a positive or negative influence on PSK31. I am seeing other traffic, so the 10 meter band must be opening a bit. I spotted OM0AST calling CQ from the Slovak Republic but he could not hear my signals.

Update: For me that opening didn't last longer than about 20 minutes.

In a few documents about the FM transponder on the SO-50 I noticed the use of the term PL tone where I expected the term CTCSS, for example in Operating SO-50 by Howard Long, G6LVB. I started wondering about the origins of PL tone and read the explanation on Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch System - en.wikipedia.org:

CTCSS is often called PL tone (for Private Line, a trademark of Motorola)

In amateur radio, the terms PL tone, PL and simply tone are still used somewhat commonly.

I'll keep calling it CTCSS.

An interesting new message showing for the wireless config:

[2668364.843138] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
[2668365.630995] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated:
[2668365.631018] cfg80211:  DFS Master region: unset
[2668365.631029] cfg80211:   (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)
[2668365.631046] cfg80211:   (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[2668365.631062] cfg80211:   (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[2668365.631078] cfg80211:   (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[2668365.631093] cfg80211:   (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[2668365.631109] cfg80211:   (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[2668365.631124] cfg80211:   (57240000 KHz - 63720000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 0 mBm)
[2668365.632073] cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: NL
[2668365.661681] cfg80211: Regulatory domain changed to country: NL
[2668365.661703] cfg80211:  DFS Master region: unset
[2668365.661715] cfg80211:   (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)
[2668365.661731] cfg80211:   (2402000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[2668365.661747] cfg80211:   (5170000 KHz - 5330000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[2668365.661763] cfg80211:   (5490000 KHz - 5710000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2700 mBm)
[2668365.661778] cfg80211:   (57240000 KHz - 65880000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 4000 mBm)

The message about DFS Master region is new to me, compared to the crda messages I saw last february.

Some more work on the digimode interface for the FT-857 radio: setting it up on a real circuit board, to be built into a plastic casing. This time I heard a strange ticking sound when recording audio from PI3UTR but again it seems this clicking sound is a local problem normally filtered out from the audio path of the radio. When I picked up PI3UTR on the Wouxun KG-UVD1P radio I heard the same ticking noise. New respect for the audio filtering in the FT-857, but things like this make me question the digimode interface every time I'm testing it.

Radio data interface, The interface in its case

The digimode interface is now finished, but now I need to test it with real radio signals. I don't have HF capabilities yet, and I did find PSK31 frequencies for 2m (144.610 MHz) and 70cm (432.610 MHz) but nobody answered a PSK31 CQ on those bands.

Update 2013-08-18: The whole setup together in a somewhat blurry smartphone picture:

Radio working, PC with fldigi controlling the FT-857 radio sending psk31

And fldigi doesn't mind when I control this remote over the network.

Friday evening I had time to work on the 'digimode' interface for the FT-857 radio. I set up a breadboard with the audio transformers and started making cables from the transformers to the USB audio interface. Then I added the cable to the radio on the other side. All of the earlier mentioned interfaces had resistors to regulate the signal level so I started with 12K resistors between the radio and the transformer in the radio to computer audio path. This gave me a weak signal when recording the result with audacity on the computer so I switched to a 6k8 resistor which improved audio but it still wasn't great. So the resistor was replaced by a simple wire which gave me good audio when recording from the PA00NEWS transmission on the PI3UTR repeater. I did notice some low hum while recording, but I realized that was just the CTCSS tone on the repeater output. Normally this tone is filtered out when hearing the audio through the speaker of a radio.

Testing radio data interface, The data interface for the new radio on breadboard for testing

Testing radio data interface with USB audio interface, The data interface for the new radio linked to the USB audio interface

I listened to a satellite pass today of the AO-7 satellite. This is the first time I tried listening to a single side band (SSB) satellite transponder. This adds a whole new set of problems to 'trying to hear callsigns and other information in the noise' : the very nature of single side band (there is no carrier for the receiver to lock to, it just works from the frequency the operator sets) combined with doppler shift makes it hard for me to hear anything. And there is a 100 kHz wide passband on the transponder in which multiple QSOs can be active in different fitting modes. I did hear some morse (which I can't decode) and something which sounded like a conversation but I could not make out callsigns or anything. Better luck next time, I will keep trying!

The cable and parts for a 'digimode' interface for the new FT-857 radio are on their way. Such an interface will allow me to get audio from the radio directly into a computer and audio from the computer directly into the radio. This will allow digital radio modes such as PSK31, RTTY or AFSK. These modes allow bits (text, or databits) to be exchanged over radio. The simplest interface like FT-817 AFSK cable couples these directly but based on the advice of fellow radio amateurs I will use audio transformers to decouple the computer and radio and keep stray radio signals out of my computer and any interference from the computer out of my radio and I decided to use a cheap USB audio interface. What I will build is based on Digital VOX sound card interface but without the 'VOX' part and iPhone / Baofeng interface (schema) and El Cheapo AFSK (e.g. RTTY) USB interface (for FT-8×7) - remco.org.

Update: Parts have arrived, time to build something on a development board first.

Good catch this morning on a southwest - northeast pass of SO-50: I managed to have a QSO with R1AO who operates from St. Petersburg in Russia! A distance of 1778 kilometers. This was the first QSO on satellite with the new FT-857 radio.

Update: Thanks to eQSL.cc I already have the QSO confirmed.

Oh I can agree so much with Some idiot’s been using my e-mail address for years - ars technica.

Almost all of my previous rants about the subject of other people thinking they have my address or think it's a nice spamdump were about the xs4all address I have since about a week before the official start of xs4all in 1993. But I also get the same with the gmail address I have. The usual is about someone who thinks it's the address of a relative. For example when I browse it now: about someone in the hospital, a mother explaining how to fix things with bank access from abroad (response to a scam attempt?), a forwarded mobile phone cancellation, information for a child going to study in Toronto. Or a discussion about company plans to professionalise their e-mail campaigns spam. I have also received several e-mails for a vicar.

Time to count IPv6 visitor percentage to different websites again:

Site	July 2009	July 2010	July 2011	July 2012	July 2014
http://idefix.net/ my homepage	1%	2%	2%	3%	4%
http://netwerk.pcgg.nl/ hcc!pcgg netwerkgroep	2%	2%	2%	3%	1%
http://weather.idefix.net/ weather maps	< 1%	5%	6%	7%	6%
http://bbs.idefix.net/ BBS files		1%	1%	1%	3%
http://webcam.idefix.net/ the webcam	< 1%	1%	< 1%	2%	2%
http://www.virtualbookcase.com/ The Virtual Bookcase	< 1%	1%	1%	4%	87%
http://www.camp-wireless.org/ Camp Wireless	< 1%	1%	1%	3%	70%
http://weatherstation.idefix.net/ Weather station Utrecht Overvecht					1%

Interesting numbers. Results for The Virtual Bookcase and Camp Wireless are totally skewed thanks to some IPv6 bot constantly checking the site from constantly changing IPv6 addresses .. but without privacy extensions enabled.

Method: unique IPv6 addresses seen in the whole month / total unique addresses seen in the whole month.

And a non-catch: I tried receiving the AO-73 Funcube-1 amateur satellite but no go. I thought it would be in eclipse mode after 23:00 localtime which would mean the inverting transponder would be available. I noticed gpredict was reacting weird to the AO-73 Funcube-1 transponder file I found earlier so I checked again and found a better source, installed it 3 minutes before the pass.

New catch: I heard the UO-11 amateur satellite this evening. It transmits telemetry as an AFSK signal (bits as audio within an FM signal, more info at Frequency-shift keying - Wikipedia English), although very weak. When I have a working audio interface on the FT-857 I'll try to record some telemetry signals and decode the data.

Another SO-50 amateur satellite pass early this afternoon so I had the FT-857 radio set up with the laptop. I added two ferrite cores to the CAT cable and locked them in place with tie-wraps. The cable kept working even when I transmitted a few times during the pass. Getting the radio tuned to the satellite downlink once and then having the software doing the rest of the doppler correction is quite nice.

But, no luck in making a QSO on the satellite. I heard at least M0SAT loud and clear and responded to his CQ but no contact.

Yesterday evening I tried to make some contacts during an SO-50 amateur satellite pass and twice the CT-62 USB interface to the radio crashed, with messages like:

Aug  1 20:33:15 machiavelli kernel: [48075.216289] hub 6-0:1.0: port 2 disabled by hub (EMI?), re-enabling...
Aug  1 20:34:45 machiavelli kernel: [48165.984146] hub 6-0:1.0: port 2 disabled by hub (EMI?), re-enabling...

I had to unplug and replug the cable every time to get /dev/ttyUSB0 available to rigctld again.

A few hours later the proverbial light above my head went on: EMI means electromagnetic interference, maybe transmitting quite close to the laptop is the problem.

So this evening I created the same setup and tried transmitting so I could attack the problem and see if some ferrite cores would help. The problem decided to not return, even with the CAT cable and the antenna cable laying parallel. I'm still going to use at least one ferrite core to try to keep the USB interface from crashing.

I brought the Wouxun KG-UVD1P radio today on my bicycle and listened to the PI3UTR repeater on both parts of the cycling commute. In the afternoon I heard KM6DU active via echolink on the repeater and answered his call, giving a nice QSO. It was 99% Internet and 1% amateur radio, but it was nice to be able to do this thanks to echolink.

KM6DU reported my sound was a interrupted a lot, so I stopped my bicycle and raised my radio from belt level (about 1 meter above the ground on my recumbent bicycle) to holding it up (somewhat more than 2 meters above ground) which changed the signal from lots of interruptions to clearly understandable. It's amazing what a bit of antenna height can do!

Een interresante brief van VolkerWessels Telecom vandaag: ze willen in opdracht van KPN een nieuwe "SAD-kast" plaatsen en daarvoor moet een kabel door onze grond. Het lijkt er dus op dat:
+ hele hoge VDSL snelheden mogelijk worden
- glasvezel en meer upstream snelheid er dus voorlopig niet in zit
Ik ben benieuwd. We gaan nog even contact opnemen, de voorgestelde plek voor de kast is niet ideaal, hij gaat enigzins in de weg staan voor fietsen die achterom rijden.

Update: Uiteindelijk is de kast in November / December 2014 geplaatst.

Somebody at 173.44.38.200 was trying at a very high speed to brute-force /wp-login.php for one site on my server. The downside was that there was no /wp-login.php or any part of wordpress to brute-force, but that did not seem to deter the attacker. A temporary firewall rule now rejects all attempts.

Update 2014-07-31: Next load of attempts from 217.66.216.68. And looking back in the logs shows other similar attempts.

This evening I tried another pass of the SO-50 amateur radio satellite. It wasn't as high as the afternoon pass, only 66⁰ maximum elevation. The experiences from the afternoon pass learned me to search around a bit for the downlink signal. I did not hear a lot of activity, it almost sounded to me like the transponder wasn't "armed" with the 74.4 Hz ctcss tone. This tone activates the transponder for 10 minutes, but to actually use the transponder you need to use a 67.0 Hz ctcss tone. Switching tones on the fly isn't easy when the FT-857 is controlled by gpredict, so I'll either have to control that via the computer assisted tuning (CAT) interface and rigctld or temporary switch to manual and use the memory in the FT-857 which has the different ctcss tone.

Browsing the rigtctl(1) manpage suggests a script which can set ctcss tones is quite doable.

Update: Indeed, it can be done. Hamlib can't read the current ctcss tone, but it can set it on this radio. Model 2 in rigctl is the connection to a running rigctld on localhost.

koos@machiavelli:~$ rigctl -m 2 -h
Usage: rigctl [OPTION]... [COMMAND]...
Send COMMANDs to a connected radio transceiver or receiver.
..
Commands (some may not be available for this rig):
..
C: set_ctcss_tone  (CTCSS Tone)        c: get_ctcss_tone  ()
D: set_dcs_code    (DCS Code)          d: get_dcs_code    ()
?: set_ctcss_sql   (CTCSS Sql)         ?: get_ctcss_sql   ()
?: set_dcs_sql     (DCS Sql)           ?: get_dcs_sql     ()

and it works:

koos@machiavelli:~$ rigctl -m 2 C 744
koos@machiavelli:~$ rigctl -m 2 C 670
koos@machiavelli:~$ 

And the ctcss frequency on the radio indeed changes with what I set. And I can do this while gpredict is tuning the radio.

I soldered the cable for a stereo headphone on the mono phone output on the FT-857 this morning and went to listen for the SO-50 pass with tuning done by gpredict.

And I missed half of the satellite pass because gpredict has the 'preprogrammed' frequency and the satellite downlink frequency seems to be drifting away from this frequency, far enough to fall out of the FM receiver passband. I kept hearing nothing so I switched back to manual frequency control with the doppler-shifted frequencies preprogrammed in the radio and I found it again, somewhat shifted. I switched back to letting gpredict control the frequency but used the tuning dial on the radio to find the right spot, after which gpredict kept track of what I did. I still find this an awesome feature in gpredict, the two-way tracking of frequencies.

It was as busy as could be expected on an FM satellite on a Sunday afternoon pass with nice weather, so I could not find a 'hole' in which to call CQ or answer some call I heard. The headphones do help with hearing the audio from the radio, so a good thing I made that cable.

I also managed to get CHIRP working with the Yaesu FT-857 radio. I had to RTFM: CHIRP does not use the normal CAT commands, it uses the clone mode of the radio.

First thing to try with the new Yaesu FT-857 amateur radio: get it working with gpredict for amateur satellites. What gpredict can do is control the radio via rigctld, part of Hamlib to set downlink (receive) and uplink (transmit) frequencies automatically to the doppler-shift correct frequency. I bought a CT-62 USB cable for this which is the cable for the Computer Aided Tuning (CAT) interface on this range of radios with a FTDI based serial interface on the side of the computer. I added a new radio in gpredict with:

• Radio type: FT817/857/897 (auto)
• PTT status: Read PTT
• VFO Up/Down: Not applicable

So I installed libhamlib-utils and tried to get rigctld working. At first it gave errors on communicating:

$ rigctld -m 122 -r /dev/ttyUSB0  -v -v
Opened rig model 122, 'FT-857'
ft857: error reading ack
ft857: error reading ack

And I found out the default baudrate of rigctld is 38400 bps and the FT-857 was set to 4800 bps. I tested first with 4800 bps and later changed the rate on the radio to 38400 bps and tested again. Now running:

$ rigctld -m 122 -r /dev/ttyUSB0 --set-conf=serial_speed=38400  -v -v
Opened rig model 122, 'FT-857'

The radio needs to be in 'split' mode so VFOa and VFOb can be set sepately and receiving is on the VFOa frequency and transmitting on VFOb.

The good part, especially for SSB satellite work is that gpredict will follow frequency adjustments on the transciever and will track from the adjusted frequency. With the 'lock' function enabled (L button) this will also make the uplink frequency follow downlink changes. Change the (receiving) frequency on the transciever and the transmitting frequency will be updated accordingly. This should make SSB satellite work with one simplex transciever easier.

Sofar in tests without actual satellite communication things seem to work. Next is a test with SO-50 in FM mode, probably on the high pass I see coming Sunday afternoon. A test with an SSB satellite (first trying to receive) will probably be possible later this week with the Funcube-1 (AO-73). I found a gpredict trsp file for FUNCUBE from G0HWW which has a low and a high swapped and confuses gpredict. The one at Funcube AO-73 transponder file for gpredict has this correct.

[FUNCUBE BPSK Telem]
DOWN_LOW=145935000

[FUNCUBE U/V]
UP_LOW=435130000
UP_HIGH=435150000
DOWN_LOW=145950000
DOWN_HIGH=145970000
INVERT=true

For a while I have been considering my wishes for a more elaborate amateur radio. What I want to do with it is continue and expand the use of amateur satellites, and try to get into PSK31 on HF, starting on the 20m band. So a list of must haves and should haves arose: all-mode, portable, computer assisted tuning, HF support, 2 meter and 70 centimeter and an increas of power from 5W.

Adding it all up and looking for a reasonable price I ended up considering the Yaesu FT-857(D). It's in the middle between the FT-817 (too low power, still 5 watts) and the FT-897 (too heavy: 3.9 kilograms). And a reasonable pricetag, were other amateur radio brands have nothing comparable or at a much higher pricetag. I went looking for a second-hand one and when we got back from holiday a nice one (FT-857 with DSP and installed filter, and a remote control+DTMF hand microphone) showed up from Communicatie Centrum Venhorst - Hilversum and I bought it. Picked it up this week, and I am learning using it. I listened to SO-50 this evening using this radio with a lot of wires on the table in the backyard.

Radio setup - FT-857, PC power supply for 12V, laptop, Arrow antenna: ready for amateur satellites

It was clear I also need headphones to listen to amateur satellites on this radio so I'll get the parts to connect a headphone soon. Cables for computer assisted tuning and interfacing to a computer sound card are already ordered.

This radio also allows me to access SSB satellites, so I'll have to learn how to do that.

The good news about the SO-50 pass: there were QSOs going on, the person just calling CQ and never listening to the answers was missing.

A clear sign this week I am not a system administrator anymore: I had no easy answer to "where can we find some Torx screwdrivers to open the dishwasher".

Using contacts that were from when I was a system administrator helped find the right screwdrivers and the dishwasher was opened and repaired.

Yesterday evening I gave it another try to make a contact via the SO-50 satellite. It was hard since someone was trying very hard to work the satellite with 95% transmitting and at most 5% not transmitting which did not leave much room for an answer. I heard that person loud and clear with a repeated and somewhat bored "CQ satellite" and testing noises like whistling, but I never heard a callsign!

Trying to answer that person didn't work (clearly he had a reception problem somehow) so I just started calling CQ on my own when he left a gap. Someone answered but I had a hard time understanding the callsign, I think it started with a D (German callsign) and I am sure it ended with BBE (Bravo Bravo Echo). Looking up the callsign options on QRZ showed me the most likely candidate is DG0BBE so I e-mailed him to confirm.

During our holiday in Denmark I also tried to work a few SO-50 passes. Being on a campsite with a wide open view in all surrounding directions should make things easier for lower passes which I skip at home. I tried a pass with a 55⁰ elevation and one with a 62⁰ degree elevation and I heard the satellite loud and clear. The downside was someone was whistling and calling 'o la', probably the same person as I heard here at home. And another downside is that with lower passes the distance is a lot higher and therefore my 5 watts on VHF don't make it across the FM receiver on the satellite.

I also had a look at possible LituanicaSAT-1 passes but in Denmark those all stayed low to the Southern horizon.

Update 2014-07-25: DG0BBE mailed me back, I was right I heard him, but he made a very valid point the QSO was not valid: in a QSO at least call signs and a signal report need to be exchanged. In amateur satellite work a locator is also good to have.

I am active on LinkedIn so I thought I would have a look at the LinkedIn application for android phones.

I was a bit wary of the rights LinkedIn wanted, since it keeps asking me for my e-mail username and password so it can scan my mailbox for interesting contacts. So I checked the rights for the official LinkedIn application in the play store:

This app has access to:

• Identity
  • find accounts on the device
  • read your own contact card
  • add or remove accounts
• Contacts/Calendar
  • read your contacts
  • modify your contacts
  • read calendar events plus confidential information
• Location
  • precise location (GPS and network-based)
• Phone
  • write call log
  • read call log
• Photos/Media/Files
  • test access to protected storage
  • modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
• Device ID & call information
  • read phone status and identity
• Other
  • receive data from Internet
  • read sync statistics
  • create accounts and set passwords
  • toggle sync on and off
  • full network access
  • read sync settings
  • control vibration
  • send sticky broadcast
  • prevent device from sleeping
  • view network connections

So all kinds of access so it can view personal data on the phone. I am going to skip LinkedIn on the smartphone and I'll keep using it with webbrowsers.

And the SSH probes continue and continue:

2014-07-13 07:47:18,122 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.208
2014-07-13 09:20:07,562 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.194
2014-07-13 09:41:01,783 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.223
2014-07-13 11:43:10,043 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.225
2014-07-13 17:20:16,882 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.50.163
2014-07-14 02:54:58,622 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.196
2014-07-14 05:05:52,832 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.203
2014-07-14 07:54:18,092 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.201
2014-07-14 13:45:12,782 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.50.235
2014-07-15 09:22:01,502 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.50.224
2014-07-15 19:23:42,842 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.232
2014-07-16 10:17:39,692 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.228
2014-07-16 13:05:21,982 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.215
2014-07-17 00:51:48,652 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.229
2014-07-19 03:12:20,776 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.223
2014-07-19 04:53:51,005 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.219
2014-07-19 05:13:03,234 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.229
2014-07-19 07:37:06,476 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.221
2014-07-19 09:53:11,715 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.209
2014-07-19 10:08:58,916 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.230
2014-07-19 13:21:00,134 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.194
2014-07-19 22:47:38,414 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.50.235
2014-07-19 23:06:44,675 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.234
2014-07-20 10:42:04,344 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.219
2014-07-20 15:06:40,684 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.234
2014-07-20 15:32:57,054 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.50.224
2014-07-20 18:10:09,264 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.199
2014-07-20 22:15:55,615 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.216
2014-07-20 23:43:12,894 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.211
2014-07-21 10:45:26,294 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.209
2014-07-21 13:57:00,675 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.196
2014-07-21 16:44:57,894 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.194
2014-07-21 18:01:31,085 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.203
2014-07-22 07:40:48,284 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.231

Noted before a month ago: An interesting pattern in ssh attempts showing up from China.

Update 2014-07-25:
It's also notable the attackers compensate for fail2ban. IPs that are blocked by fail2ban need only a few syn packets to find out.

# iptables -L fail2ban-SSH -nvx | grep 61.174.5
       3      144 DROP       all  --  *      *       61.174.51.211        0.0.0.0/0
       3      144 DROP       all  --  *      *       61.174.51.201        0.0.0.0/0
       8      320 DROP       all  --  *      *       61.174.51.205        0.0.0.0/0
       4      184 DROP       all  --  *      *       61.174.51.228        0.0.0.0/0
       1       40 DROP       all  --  *      *       61.174.51.234        0.0.0.0/0
       4      184 DROP       all  --  *      *       61.174.51.221        0.0.0.0/0
       0        0 DROP       all  --  *      *       61.174.51.223        0.0.0.0/0
       5      224 DROP       all  --  *      *       61.174.51.208        0.0.0.0/0
       3      144 DROP       all  --  *      *       61.174.51.214        0.0.0.0/0

Wat krijg je als je besluit je facturen voortaan digitaal te versturen terwijl je daarvoor nooit de e-mail adressen geverifieerd hebt die klanten geven? Juist, dan krijg ik de factuur voor iemand die een voor de hand liggend e-mail adres van mij ooit opgegeven heeft...

Bijgaand ontvangt u de factuur 2014-0157. Het is een digitale factuur die u kunt bekijken en afdrukken door op deze link te klikken.

Sinds dit jaar versturen wij alle facturen digitaal. Indien jullie de factuur graag per post willen ontvangen laat het ons weten.

Ik heb het bedrijf maar even op de hoogte gesteld van deze misser en dat ze digitaal factureren maar beter pas kunnen doen na een terdege controle van de adressen.

Ze reageren redelijk snel dat er een klein foutje in een adres geslopen is en dat het verder allemaal prima gaat.

Terug van vakantie: we zijn 3 weken in Denemarken geweest. Gekampeerd met onze grote tent op drie verschillende campings. Erg leuk geweest, uit kunnen rusten en genoten van alles wat we beleefd hebben. Onder andere hebben we Legoland bezocht maar ook de kliffen op het eiland Møn. Daar hebben we in 2008 ook gefietst dus het was leuk om wat dingen weer terug te zien.

• Møns Klint - nl.wikipedia.org
• Legoland Billund

The heat is on: the Weather station Utrecht Overvecht in our backyard is showing a temperature of 36.0 °C at the moment.

Compared to official observations like the ones published at Actuele waarnemingen KNMI the temperature at my weather station is a few degrees too high. This can be explained by the fact that the sensor in the backyard is in an area between houses and the fact that we live in an area with a definite 'urban heat island' where temperatures are higher than the surrounding open country.

Wardriving results 4 January 2014 - 11 July 2014: 14481 new networks with GPS locations according to WiGLE.

I don't "wardrive" on purpose now, but I leave an android device running the wigle android app on trips that can be interesting such as during holidays.

Friday evening I recorded the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact between the International Space Station in space and Focus Camp, Candriai, Italy / Euro Space Center, Redu, Belgium. I used the Arrow satellite antenna on a tripod and my Commtel com225 scanner to tune in to the downlink signal since that scanner has both an internal speaker and a line output for a tape recorder.

Recording ARISS contact - Laptop, recording ARISS contact, scanner, Arrow satellite antenna on tripod

Recording ARISS contact - Laptop with gpredict, backup radio, scanner tuned to 145.800

I had a bit of a problem setting up my laptop to have the input in line input mode, but after I fixed that I was able to record audio from the scanner while listening. The results didn't turn out very well, the antenna was in our backyard between houses which means houses are always in the way of weak signals until the object is right overhead. And the antenna is quite directional on 2 meter, so an azimuth/elevation rotor would have helped a bit in getting the best signal.

But I do have audio of some of the answers. I edited the audio to lower the noise audio level and the recording is limited to the part where I successfully recorded audio. The voice of the astronaut sinking away in the noise at the end is a bit of a "Major Tom" moment.

An interesting pattern in ssh attempts showing up:

2014-06-15 18:51:50,162 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.229
2014-06-15 20:00:04,342 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.219
2014-06-16 00:07:24,993 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.207
2014-06-16 01:37:59,232 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.211
2014-06-16 10:15:07,103 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.213
2014-06-16 14:06:48,322 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.50.224
2014-06-16 17:51:34,582 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.223
2014-06-16 23:02:56,102 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.230
2014-06-17 03:56:24,562 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.221
2014-06-17 04:25:11,755 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.197
2014-06-17 05:50:34,932 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.196
2014-06-18 03:24:28,493 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.227
2014-06-18 13:49:56,752 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.205
2014-06-18 20:15:58,272 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.220
2014-06-18 20:31:36,502 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.209
2014-06-19 10:44:56,172 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.50.163
2014-06-19 18:59:28,523 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.203
2014-06-19 19:43:35,732 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.50.235
2014-06-20 06:07:37,302 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.223
2014-06-20 08:31:06,712 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.201
2014-06-20 09:11:55,992 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.222
2014-06-20 13:43:57,563 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.198
2014-06-20 14:56:07,282 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 61.174.51.219

All addresses part of this block:

inetnum:        61.174.48.0 - 61.174.55.255
netname:        CHINANET-ZJ-HU
country:        CN
descr:          CHINANET-ZJ Huzhou node network
descr:          Zhejiang Telecom

And most from the subblock:

inetnum:        61.174.51.192 - 61.174.51.255
netname:        HANGZHOU-SRT-TECHNOLOGY-CO-LTD
country:        CN
descr:          HANGZHOU SRT TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD
descr:

More places on the web report attacks from this IP range.

Interesting change of mind from the webinterface of the Fritz!Box. First page with lynx:

   Your browser does not support XHTML frames.

   However, you can use the FRITZ!Box user interface without any
   restrictions.

But the next page says:

Welcome to your FRITZ!Box

   Log in using your password.
   Password ____________________
   Forgot your password?
   (Submit) Log In

   The functions on this page require JavaScript. Enable JavaScript in
   your browser and reload the page.

And entering the right password doesn't change a thing, I get the same page back. With debug information that shows I entered the right password...

Ages (almost a year) since I did a DVB-T service scan at home. Nothing changes in the DVB-T landscape at the moment: exactly the same multiplexes as a year earlier at the same location with the same antenna without preamp.

• DVB-T reception log 20140616 Utrecht
• DVB-T reception log 20130506 Utrecht

Mooi stukje op radio.nl: 60 Jaar radio via FM in Nederland. Waarbij 'FM radio' natuurlijk voluit betekent: radio uitzendingen in de FM standaard in VHF band II, van 87.5 MHz tot 108 MHz. Opmerkelijke zaken: FM radio is in Nederland begonnen als 'steunzender' voor een gebied met slechte dekking van de AM zenders: de eerste FM zender was voor Hilversum 1 vanuit Hulsberg.

En ook opmerkelijk is dat er jarenlang een tekort aan FM frequenties in Nederland zou zijn totdat met operatie Zerobase de frequenties opnieuw ingedeeld en toebedeeld werden. Toen was er ineens genoeg ruimte voor commerciële radio. Waarbij sommige radiostations nu steunzenders gebruiken die maar een heel klein gebied bestrijken. Zonder de toegenomen kwaliteit van FM radio ontvangers en RDS zou dit niet mogelijk zijn geweest volgens mij. Mijn wekkerradio is al 15 jaar oud en heeft moeite met het feit dat de zenders hier in Utrecht dicht op elkaar zitten. Maar die stemt volgens mij ook nog af met een afstemcondensator.

A pass of the radio amateur satellite SO-50 this morning in which I concentrated on the probable shift in downlink frequency. It turned out the shift is probably not more than 5 kHz (my radio has no 2.5 kHz steps). I tried calling CQ but no answers.

In general I am noticing now that usable passes are rare at the moment. With my limited setup and other things taking my time I have a lot of wishes for a usable pass: elevation must be over 70⁰ and the pass must be at a reasonable time in the evening or on a weekend day with no other plans. I'm not a nightowl like a lot of radio amateurs seem to be. So the week in which I made my first satellite contact with GS3PYE/P was quite special: there were 2 passes in that week matching all requirements for both locations.

The smarthub on the Samsung TV is reporting that there is no Internet connection, but everything else works. The problem:

22:05:56.403803 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 10597, offset 0, flags [DF], proto UDP (17), length 62) dhcp-21.koos.koffie.dot.39319 > greenblatt.koos.koffie.dot.domain: [udp sum ok] 17215+ A? ns11.whois.co.kr. (34)
22:05:56.902244 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto UDP (17), length 62) greenblatt.koos.koffie.dot.domain > dhcp-21.koos.koffie.dot.44212: [udp sum ok] 41765 ServFail q: A? ns11.whois.co.kr. 0/0/0 (34)

It needs ns11.whois.co.kr, which fails at the moment. So every application I try on the TV fails...

We zijn op het punt dat oplichters iemand in kunnen huren die de phishing mails in behoorlijk nederlands schrijft:

Geachte klant
Uw ICS creditcard is opgeschort, omdat er een fout is gevonden in uw creditcardinformatie.
De reden van de fout is niet zeker, maar om veiligheidsredenen hebben we uw creditcard tijdelijk opgeschort.
U moet uw informatie bijwerken om deze creditcard weer te kunnen gebruiken.

Wat is ICS?
ICS staat voor International Card Services. Dit bedrijf geeft creditcards uit aan banken, die deze weer aan hun klanten verlenen.
Alle vertrouwelijke gegevens staan op onze servers en gaan hier dan ook respect mee om.

Met vriendelijke groet,
Ruben Sloss
ICS Cards Nederland
Postadres:
Postbus 23225
1100 DS Diemen

En dan een link naar een phishing-site die gehost lijkt op een server van een hele andere derde partij waar dus op ingebroken is.

Ik weet niet of er echt een Ruben Sloss bij ICS werkt, maar die zal niet heel blij zijn.

A bit more luck on a LituanicaSAT-1 pass Saturday evening: this time I could understand at least one callsign. Hearing a known callsign helps: it was Peter Goodhall 2E0SQL. I tried answering but this failed. A mail exchange later confirmed I heard him calling so at least I heard it all right.

Success: I made a contact via SO-50 with PD5DJ. This was on a high (88⁰ degree elevation) pass of SO-50. The output frequency of SO-50 seems to have shifted a bit so I had to select the 'next' downlink frequency earlier than gpredict was showing them.

I will send a card via the QSL bureau to PD5DJ, this is my second amateur satellite radio contact.

There are great things happening at the moment: the NASA ISEE-3 satellite from 1978 is going to pass earth again in August 2014. Due to budget cuts and cleanups at NASA they decided to not do anything with the satellite. International Cometary Explorer - Wikipedia.

The first signals from this satellite were received in March: AMSAT-DL and Bochum Observatory Detect ISEE-3 Transmitters - Space College and since that moment people have been busy with it. The satellite was supposed to be switched off but it wasn't completely switched off and it receives enough solar power to overcome the lack of energy storage. A project was started named the ISEE-3 Reboot Project - Space College to get in touch with the satellite again and control it to make the course correction to return to the original orbit. With crowdfunding this project was able to get started quickly and the project received the control keys from NASA to be able to command the satellite. The first commands were successfull: Happy Dance Video: First Successful ISEE-3 Commanding - Space College when the satellite was ordered to send more telemetry data.

I'm following this story as I think it's great: commanding a satellite that has been in space for 36 years. The amateur radio angle is that recent developments in amateur radio have made this possible: the kind of specialized equipment that was needed in 1978 is now done with software defined radio and really good amplifiers.

I switched the work smartphone from a Nokia E71 to an HTC Desire.

One thing I always liked in the 'business' Nokia phones was the option to switch the 'Profile' for a set time, switching back to the previous profile afterwards. The 'Profile' is the whole of settings for ringtone, vibrate and other notification options. What I used it for was setting a quiet profile at the beginning of a meeting and having it revert back at the appointed time of the end of the meeting.

So I wanted this on Android. It was a bit of searching and asking, but I found Llama - Location Profiles which does 80% of the work: switching profiles automatically based on location (mainly using cell towers), time of day, other events. And it can do what I want: stay at a certain profile for a given time.

Around midnight last night there was a pass of LituanicaSAT-1. After my earlier attempts and the announcement it would switch off the transponder at around 01:00 UTC on 5 June I decided to give it a go at this late hour. Original announcement: LituanicaSAT-1 FM Transponder Active until June 4 - amsat UK.

I did hear traffic but it was very hard to understand callsigns (so I couldn't respond to a callsign I just heard) and I got no response to calling CQ.

So not much luck in working this satellite, but at least I heard it this time.

Na wat hikken van de verbinding naar buiten was ik er een paar maanden terug niet blij mee dat intern dan ook de IPv6 routering stukging. Dat bleek te zijn omdat wide-dhcpv6-client bij het niet meer kunnen verkrijgen van adressen via prefix delegation deze ook terugtrekt van de gedelegeerde interfaces. Vervolgens vervallen de routes naar de subnetten thuis en kan ik met clients daar niet meer werken. Maar ik wil ook met IPv6 werken als de verbinding naar buiten weg is.

Ik had als oplossing bedacht om wel een prefix op te vragen maar niet meer de interfaces te laten configureren door wide-dhcpv6-client, maar ze gewoon statisch te configureren. Uit /etc/wide-dhcpv6/dhcp6c.conf:

interface ppp0
{
        send ia-pd 0;

        script "/etc/wide-dhcpv6/dhcp6c-script";
};
id-assoc pd {
#    prefix-interface eth0.1 {
#        sla-id 1;
#    };
#    prefix-interface eth0.3 {
#        sla-id 2;
#    };
};

Alleen komt er dan een hele obscure foutmelding uit wide-dhcpv6:

Jun  3 09:26:18 greenblatt dhcp6c[6474]: add_options: /etc/wide-dhcpv6/dhcp6c.conf:14 IA_PD (0) is not defined
Jun  3 09:26:18 greenblatt dhcp6c[6474]: main: failed to parse configuration file

En bij xs4all krijg ik geen IPv6 meer als ik het niet opvraag met prefix-delegation. Dat is heel lang goedgegaan, maar met de laatste updates aan hun access-routers ging het echt mis en zat ik ineens zonder IPv6. Configuratie aangepast, ik ken ze nu weer toe. Er blijkt echt iets te moeten gebeuren met de prefix delegatie om wide-dhcpv6-client er eentje op te laten vragen.

I was looking for options for a pre-amplifier to amplify the incoming antenna signal for receiving amateur satellites in the 70cm band (430-440 MHz). Commercially available units seem to be quite expensive like this one: DBA 270 Duo-Band-Preamp. 2m + 70cm - SSB for 298 euro.

A cheap option seemed to be Low Cost 440 MHz Receiver Preamplifier Kit - Ramsey Electronic Kits for US dollar 9.95. Oh, and US dollar 57 for shipping it to the Netherlands. I'll skip. Other options sofar seem to be quite expensive or require SMD soldering. I decided I have enough problem seeing normal soldering with a magnifying glass so I'll skip SMD soldering for now.

A cheap but not ideal trick is (ab)using a cable TV amplifier: those include the 70cm band because they include everything from around 88 MHz to 1000 MHz. I found this suggested at KickSat Ground Station. So I walked into the local electronics store and found a cheap cable TV amplifier with a special sticker "does not support digital interactive TV" which means it doesn't support the returnchannel. Good, just a simple amplifier. The specific impendance in cable TV networks is 75 Ohm and I want 50 Ohm so that will probably have to be fixed too. It came with a small power supply which will be replaced with a battery like in the kicksat page.

Ik kwam wat papieren tegen van het BBS Koos z'n Doos en de vlakke scanner is weer beschikbaar, dus ik heb die papieren weer eens gescand. De rekening van de harddisk uit Februari 1993 en de kerstkaart uit December 1993 zijn nu echt goed gescand en beschikbaar in hoge resolutie.

Wat ik ook nog tegenkwam was een rekening voor een ROM upgrade van het SupraFax 14k4 modem uit December 1993. Opvallend, de aanschaf van het SupraFax 28k8 modem was Juli 1994. Ik weet op dit moment niet precies wat de reden was van de ROM upgrade, ik ga er van uit dat het te maken had met het definitief worden van de v32.bis standaard. De SupraFAXModem 14400 pagina op Wikipedia Engels geeft hierover geen informatie.

Club evening at the Veron Centrum Radio Club and I walked into the radio shack and heard W1AW calling CQ on the 12meter band from New York. It was pure coincidence the radio was tuned to that frequency and I don't know who tuned it or left it in SSB mode. I checked DXHeat DX-Cluster but did not see W1AW spotted at that frequency. I should register at DXHeat so I could have posted my spot.

The reception of W1AW was mostly ok, sometimes fading a bit. I answered the CQ using the club callsign PI4UTR.

The W1AW callsign is doing a tour of the US states at the moment as the ARRL centennial qso party. It was fun to be a small part of this. The New York part is organized from W1AW/2 Operating Event Calendar - Rochester DX Association.

An SO-50 pass came up this morning at 07:46 local time (05:46 UTC) and it looked workable: a maximum elevation of 85 degrees. So even in the busy morning schedule before work I tried working it, after preparing everything in advance to fit in the schedule. I called CQ and I heard F0FIG clearly and called him but no responses.

After testing the gps sky view it's now time to test with ntpd. First step was to recompile ntpd because the debian default package had no pps support. Recompiling on a 500 MHz AMD Geode takes a bit of time.

Results look ok for a first test:

root@ritchie:~# ntpq -p
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
+greenblatt.idef 131.211.8.244    2 u   17   64  377    1.177  101.732  63.403
*metronoom.dmz.c .PPS.            1 u   17   64  377   19.499  100.512   6.722
+auth1.xs4all.nl 193.67.79.202    2 u   11   64  377   18.403  104.008   3.669
oGPS_NMEA(0)     .GPS.            0 l    6    8  377    0.000  114.073   7.364
root@ritchie:~# ntpdc -c loopi
offset:               0.001986 s
frequency:            94.434 ppm
poll adjust:          -30
watchdog timer:       342 s
root@ritchie:~# ntpdc -c kerni
pll offset:           3.3e-08 s
pll frequency:        94.434 ppm
maximum error:        0.175258 s
estimated error:      2e-06 s
status:               2007  pll ppsfreq ppstime nano
pll time constant:    3
precision:            1e-09 s
frequency tolerance:  500 ppm
root@ritchie:~# ntpdc -c sysi
system peer:          GPS_NMEA(0)
system peer mode:     client
leap indicator:       00
stratum:              1
precision:            -19
root distance:        0.00000 s
root dispersion:      0.00749 s
reference ID:         [GPS]
reference time:       d72cb010.dc91595e  Sun, May 25 2014 20:08:16.861
system flags:         auth monitor ntp kernel stats pps 
jitter:               0.006714 s
stability:            0.000 ppm
broadcastdelay:       0.000000 s
authdelay:            0.000000 s

It will need some more calibration probably.

Update: It keeps looking nice after some calibration. Stats gathered at NTP server ritchie.idefix.net stats.

This does mean one of the old project sundial goals has been met: the weather station computer in the shed is now also a time server.

I was able to buy a real Garmin GPS 18 LVC secondhand. It's now on the roof of our shed. The first thing I want to do is repeat my plotting of GPS satellite positions from $GPGSV messages and plotting of GPS satellite positions and signal strengths from $GPGSV messages measurements with data from this unit. After that has run for a while I'll configure ntpd to get the correct time from the GPS unit and the PPS signal.

And again, the resulting plot of gps satellite positions versus signal strength is not very helpful in finding out which part of the sky is obscured.

I saw an announcement that Artsat1 Invader CO-77 aka ITF 1 was going to make a pass over Europe. I recorded it by having the laptop with the gpredict software also run audacity to record the audio from my handheld transceiver, so the audio isn't brilliant, but it's something. I reported the pass and the recorded audio to the Artsat team. This satellite is even in a lower orbit: the entire pass horizon to horizon was in 7 minutes. In the end I have 1 minute 40 seconds of usable audio, with everything the satellite offers: morse, the digitalker and AX.25 frames.

The voice says: "Konnichiha Uchu" which translates to Hello, space!.

Update: with fldigi I decoded the morse code:

*HELLO, SPACE*

Update: the pass was also recorded by PE0SAT and DK3WN: INVADER Digi-Talker active - DK3WN SatBlog including decodes of the AX.25 frames.

And the transponder file I used: /home/koos/.config/Gpredict/trsp/39577.trsp with:

[FM Downlink]
DOWN_LOW=437200000
MODE=FM

Now I have adding frequencies for an existing satellite covered, I wonder about adding an entire satellite.

At the moment my webcam at http://webcam.idefix.net/ shows no new images: there is no outside camera location available.

Weer een overgang van LituanicaSAT-1 waarbij ik geen succes had met contact leggen vanmorgen. Ooit gaat het lukken! De satelliet overgangen zijn momenteel niet op handige tijden, dus ik ben al zover gegaan om te zorgen voor een piepje om op tijd wakker te zijn voor een overgang om 08:25 lokale tijd.

Achteraf weer alles nagekeken op de radio, en daarbij ontdekte ik dat de geheugens die ik geprogrammeerd heb voor de LituanicaSAT-1 in wide-FM mode stonden. Uit de discussie op de Amsat-bb lijst begrijp ik dat wide-FM zeker een verkeerde instelling is LITUANICASAT-1 experience - Amsat-bb (nu niet meer gearchiveerd).

Direct gecorrigeerd, volgende kans beter dus.

De overgang van SO-50 aan het eind van de zaterdagmiddag heb ik goed gehoord maar het lukte me niet om erdoor te komen, volgens mij zat ik iedere keer dubbel met een ander. Ik hoorde haarscherp G0JMI over de SO-50 komen, maar terugroepen werkte niet. Een van de eigenschappen van FM is dat als een ontvanger twee signalen binnenkrijgt op dezelfde frequentie dat het sterkere signaal dan het andere signaal verstoort of wegdrukt.

Update: De LituanicaSAT-1 satelliet is ook weer uit transponder mode: LituanicaSAT-1 Telemetry Reports Requested - Amsat UK. Door onverwachte reboots is de satelliet weer terug in de instelling waarbij er alleen een telemetrie signaal is waarin digitaal de metingen aan boord van de satelliet verzonden worden. Misschien toch eens proberen die telemetrie te ontvangen.

Old-skool trying to break the Internet seems to be back:

[215681.891917] FW dropped: IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=93.180.5.26 DST=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx LEN=28 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=246 ID=54321 PROTO=UDP SPT=56957 DPT=19 LEN=8
[221447.836577] FW dropped: IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=107.170.119.239 DST=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx LEN=29 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=52 ID=0 DF PROTO=UDP SPT=45245 DPT=19 LEN=9
[232530.824743] FW dropped: IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=198.15.106.162 DST=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx LEN=29 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=52 ID=0 DF PROTO=UDP SPT=35908 DPT=19 LEN=9
[243396.453472] FW dropped: IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=74.82.47.57 DST=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx LEN=29 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=55 ID=29020 DF PROTO=UDP SPT=57933 DPT=19 LEN=9

The wikipedia page about Character Generator Protocol - Wikipedia english suggests UDP chargen can give 100 to 2000 times amplification in traffic, making it worth finding the rare host which still supports it and has enough upstream bandwidth.

Ook de motorsportschool Zolder is blijkbaar van de categorie dat als ze een willekeurig e-mail adres ergens krijgen dat ze dat dan gelijk zonder controle op een mailing list zetten voor de laatste nieuwtjes. Iemand heeft blijkbaar een adres van mij bij elkaar bedacht en nu mag ik op de hoogte blijven van belangrijke zaken als

Voor volgende week donderdag zit het vrij rijden en de sprint ook al vol. De dag nadien, op de 23ste, hebben we, buiten het niveau 2 dat reeds volzet is, nog wel wat plaats vrij. Dan organiseren we ook voor de 2de maal de Advanced Riding Training.

Gewoon domme spammers, en het bedrijf wat ze inzetten voor hun website en nieuwsbrieven heeft blijkbaar nog nooit nagedacht over dit soort fouten in adresbestanden. Het compleet ontbreken van informatie hierover op de website en het ontbreken van contactgegevens bij het whois-record geven mij het idee dat dit misschien zelfs de opzet is en niet een over het hoofd gezien detail.

An interesting development in software defined radio for amateur satellite use: Controlling gqrx from a remote host - Gqrx SDR which allows gpredict to control the frequency, mode and audio recording of Gqrx.

I was wondering recently whether it was possible to record the right signal in Gqrx, correcting for doppler shift. Now this can be done.

Momenteel weinig geluk met de amateur satellieten: de mooie hoge SO-50 overgangen zijn op tijden dat ik slaap of op mijn werk zit. En het lukt me nogsteeds niet om iets te doen met LituanicaSAT-1. Vandaag twee overgangen gehad volgens gpredict (met als het goed is de gecorrigeerde baangegevens) maar beide keren niets ontvangen via de FM transponder en niets via de baken frequentie. Nu lopen de berichten over het baken ook uiteen: op de ene plek wordt het beschreven als puur CW wat ik natuurlijk niet kan ontvangen met mijn radio, op de andere plek als FM CW waar ik in ieder geval piepjes verwacht op mijn radio. Of de LituanicaSAT-1 FM transponder aan staat is mij ook niet duidelijk, volgens een bericht van vorige week zou deze constant aan staan LituanicaSat-1 transponder remains on - Amsat-bb maar volgens een ander bericht is er nu een watchdog-reset geweest LituanicaSAT-1 reboot test - reports requested - Amsat-bb en dan kan ik me voorstellen dat de FM transponder niet automatisch ingeschakeld wordt na reboot.

Update: De radio zenders op LituanicaSAT-1 zijn momenteel helemaal gestopt om de accuspanning weer te laten stijgen volgens Re: LituanicaSAT-1 reboot test - reports requested - Amsat-bb (nu niet meer gearchiveerd). Ik denk dat een reboot nogal veel vermogen kost. De satelliet zal dus eerst wat rondjes in de zon moeten draaien voor er weer dingen ingeschakeld worden.

Free unscheduled UPS test this morning courtesy of the local electricity company this morning. As logged by the UPS:

Wed May 07 08:47:09 CEST 2014  Power failure.
Wed May 07 08:47:15 CEST 2014  Running on UPS batteries.
Wed May 07 09:27:39 CEST 2014  Battery power exhausted.
Wed May 07 09:27:39 CEST 2014  Initiating system shutdown!

The weatherstation computer for Weather station Utrecht Overvecht doesn't power up automatically, so it's not available at the moment.

It's annoying that my websites are unreachable and Internet access is down. But no money is lost, so there is no reason to invest in backup links and resilient hosting.

De DAB service scan is tegenwoordig een heel overzicht, dus het voorbeeld

NPO Nieuws24 slideshow

hoe zo'n slideshow er dan uitziet in de Noxon mediaplayer even apart. In het overzicht van zenders staan de slides er in een klein formaat bij, door erop te klikken kunnen ze groter weergegeven worden.

Tijd voor een DAB services scan. Dat heb ik een tijd niet gedaan, en ondertussen zijn er twee wijzigingen: op de DAB+ multiplex zijn de IDs aangepast om te kloppen met de FM RDS IDs, zodat ontvangers makkelijker kunnen omschakelen tussen DAB+ en FM als dezelfde service op beide beschikbaar is.

De andere wijziging is dat de NPO bij diverse services nu ook een slideshow meestuurt. Alleen komen extra diensten bij een service dus niet zo goed in de dab.csv export van Muxxi Noxon DAB multiplex inspector dus ze staan niet in onderstaand overzicht. Er is een MOT Slideshow bij NPO Radio 1, NPO Radio 2, NPO 3FM, NPO Radio 4, NPO Radio 5, NPO R6 Soul&Jazz, NPO Top 2000 en NPO Nieuws 24. Dus niet bij NPO FunX en NPO 3FM Alternat.

Vandaag een paar satelliet momenten. Met de SO-50 satelliet lukt het me al beter om callsigns te verstaan. Maar ondanks proberen op passages vanmiddag en een vanavond geen reacties gehad. Dus wel conversaties van anderen gehoord, onder andere van PD5DJ die ook al reageerde op het onderwerp op zendamateur.com over callsigns verstaan bij satelliet overgangen waar PD5DJ ondertussen ook wat mooie foto's van zijn satelliet acties geplaatst heeft.

Ook kwam LituanicaSAT-1 een keer voorbij, maar daar hoorde ik helemaal niets van en kreeg ik ook geen reactie op mijn oproepen.

Vanavond was er een overkomst van de SO-50 satelliet die redelijk te doen was. Ideaal is als de satelliet recht over komt, maar dat gebeurt natuurlijk niet al te vaak. Deze overkomst had als maximale elevatie 54 graden boven de horizon, waardoor de periode waarin ik een contact zou kunnen leggen redelijk kort was (ongeveer 5 minuten). Alleen waren die minuten gevuld met succesvolle contacten door andere radio amateurs waarvan ik het meeste goed kon verstaan. Een mooi moment om te luisteren en er niet doorheen te roepen.

Achteraf weet ik de roepletters die ik gehoord heb alleen niet meer, misschien toch eens een manier vinden om deze sessies op te nemen.

I made my first satellite QSO yesterday evening. I saw an upcoming SO-50 pass which was right overhead for me, northwest to southeast. This is the ideal direction for following a pass in the backyard. And there would also be a big overlap for when it would be in view from the Cambridge hams on Lewis Island, maidenhead locator IO68UL. That's a distance of around 1010 kilometers.

When I started to hear the satellite I heard some CQ's from different callsigns. I tried calling CQ myself once but heard no clear answer. The pass was reaching the zenith, the moment of the highest change in doppler shift. Then I heard GS3PYE/P in another contact. When that contact was over I answered with G S 3 Papa Yankee Echo, this is Pappa Delta 4 Kilo Hotel/Portable and heard the answer Pappa Delta 4 Kilo Hotel/Portable ... followed by noise.

I made a little yell which made my wife come out to see what was happening. But there was still the question whether my callsign got across and logged as a valid contact. That was answered minutes later: the contact was visible in the 2014 - Lewis Logbook - Camb-Hams DX blog. I will send a QSL card and request one.

Not really distributed SSH scanning this morning:

[Fail2Ban] SSH: banned 61.174.51.219
[Fail2Ban] SSH: banned 61.174.51.224
[Fail2Ban] SSH: banned 61.174.51.223

Whois data:

inetnum:        61.174.51.192 - 61.174.51.255
netname:        HANGZHOU-SRT-TECHNOLOGY-CO-LTD
country:        CN
descr:          HANGZHOU SRT TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD

I had a look at creating a simpler QSL card which I could print with my own printer. I still want 4 cards per page. The earlier qsl card designs are nice and an inspiration for when I get around to having cards printed. But I want a few things different, like a mention of my amateur radio website http://pd4kh.idefix.net/, on the card. And space for notes about contacts. And when I use my own printer and heavy enough paper I want to print 4 cards per A4 page. Having 4 the same cards on one page meant wanting to use \LaTeX and a \newcommand so I define the card once and use it four times all of them on the same printer page. I found A QSL card backside made in LaTeX - DJ1YFK's Ham Radio Stuff which has a nice QSL card design in \LaTeX which I could use with some adjustments. This \LaTeX file defines the page size as 14cm*9cm landscape, the official size of a QSL card. I first tried changing this to an a4 page with 4 14cm*9cm \fbox in it, but this didn't give me the right result. I now create 4 pages of 14cm*9cm and create an A4 page from this with:

$ pstops -pa4 "4:0L@1.0(30cm,0)+1L@1.0(30cm,14.85cm)+2L@1.0(40cm,0)+3L@1.0(40cm,14.85cm)" qsl.ps qsl-4.ps

Which has about the right result: 4 cards on one page. No frames around the cards yet.

I use the coloured Veron logo, but it prints fine in grayscale on my black and white printer.

I just noticed: LituanicaSAT-1 FM transponder test - Amsat UK which mentions an upcoming test of the FM transponder on LituanicaSAT-1 tomorrow April 24th between 13:30 UTC and 15:00 UTC. And I may be able to at least listen to one pass in that time period, there is a pass for me between 13:55 and 14:05 UTC with max elevation 47⁰. Would be really nice if the transponder would still be active the next pass since that will be at max elevation 84⁰.

After updating gpredict does know about the orbital elements of Lituanicasat-1 but not about the transponder. So I added that myself. The format of the .trsp files isn't very complicated, so I created /home/koos/.config/Gpredict/trsp/39571.trsp with:

[Mode V/U FM Voice]
DOWN_LOW=435175500
UP_LOW=145950000
MODE=FM, PL 67.0 Hz

Update: .. no signal. I received nothing and heard no response to my CQ. I notified the LituanicaSAT-1 team of my experience. Who quickly answered with the question 'are you tracking the right satellite'.
Which was indeed the problem: Gpredict had the name 'LITUANICASAT-1' for Norad catalog number 39571 but it is now 39569. I also renamed the transponder file to /home/koos/.config/Gpredict/trsp/39569.trsp. Searching for LituanicaSAT-1 finds a few more places where it is listed with Norad catalog number 39571 so I guess there has been a change in the listed information.

Using strikeout a lot so I hope I won't add to the confusion.

Combining a websdr with fldigi gives me great views of PSK31 traffic, but this evening I also tried receiving APRS, with the audio routed from the java plugin to fldigi using padsp multimon. This crashes a lot, but disabling the scope helps, padsp multimon -s SCOPE. But the 2 meter signal from HF/VHF/UHF WebSDR at the Maxwell Foundation in Eindhoven was too noisy and had interference from other signals to decode anything. I have listened to 2 meter stations via this websdr just fine so I think this could work when the current interference is gone.

Another ISS pass and I was already aware the orbit may be changing a bit since gpredict and hamsatdroid were disagreeing on the time of the pass.

And indeed, the ISS pass started around the later time from gpredict. I heard the AFSK data clearly. The signal from the ISS is strong enough that I can receive it most of the pass with the arrow antenna just pointing directly up. Maybe I can use this to record an entire pass and decode the AFSK data.

I guess celestrak.com (used by gpredict by default) is better up to date than amsat.org (first option in hamsatdroid). Since hamsatdroid can also use the celestrak.com data I switched to this source. The fun part is that satellite names aren't the same. 'SO-50' according to amsat is 'SAUDISAT 1C (SO-50)' according to celestrak.

A bit of searching later found the right incantation to make gnuplot adjust color based on a third value (signal level in my case). It isn't very complicated:

set size square
set angles degrees
set polar
set grid polar 30
set xtics axis 0,30
set ytics axis 0,30
unset border
unset param
set xrange[-90:90]
set yrange[-90:90]
set rrange[0:360]
set trange[0:90]

set title "GPS satellite tracks"
set xlabel "Azimuth"
set ylabel "Elevation"
set terminal png size 600,600
set output "gpsazelsig.png"
plot "gpsazelsig.dat" using 1:2:3 palette notitle

But the resulting plot isn't very helpful for my original question: in which direction radio signals are obstructed. There are some obstructions in the Southwest, but they are comparable to what is in the Northeast.

I want to get an idea of the 'radio shadow' around our backyard to get a better idea of the minimum elevation to receive from and transmit to amateur radio satellites. Since there still is a gps receiver on the roof of the shed and the earlier ntp experiments aren't running at the moment I decided to stop ntp and log the $GPGSV GPS satellites in view messages from the gps unit. My idea is that the radio signals from GPS satellites get obstructed by houses at least the same as UHF signals, so a GPS satellite reception plot will be interesting. Something like the VisualGPS plot I made at a previous house with a different GPS unit. Note that the plotted satellite tracks are way outside the plotted contour which I recall was a nice approximation of the view during the test.

Now to get this data plotted with gnuplot in a polar plot. I found out the orientation of $GPGSV messages (true north is 0 degrees, east is 90 degrees, south is 180 degrees, west is 270 degrees) does not match the azimuth range available by the polar plot in gnuplot (0 degrees is to the right, 90 degrees is up, 180 degrees is to the left). And the horizon is 0 in $GPGSV messages and maximum range in gnuplot. Time for some perl massaging of the $GPGSV lines to gnuplot orientation:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

while (<>){
    chomp;
    if (/^\$GPGSV,\d+,\d+,\d+,([\d,]+)\*[0-9A-Z]{2}$/){
        my @fields=split(/,/,$1);
        while ($#fields>0){
            my $sv=shift @fields;
            my $elevation=shift @fields;
            my $azimuth=shift @fields;
            my $signal=shift @fields;
            if ($signal){
                warn sprintf "SV %d elevation %d azimuth %d signal %d\n",$sv,$elevation,$azimuth,$signal;
                $azimuth=90-$azimuth;
                if ($azimuth<0) {
                    $azimuth+=360;
                }
                printf "%3d %3d\n",$azimuth,90-$elevation;
            }                   
        }               
    }           
}       

And indeed we have data:

SV 33 elevation 27 azimuth 205 signal 38
SV 29 elevation 83 azimuth 100 signal 44
SV 31 elevation 48 azimuth 227 signal 45
SV 21 elevation 47 azimuth 169 signal 44
SV 25 elevation 29 azimuth 122 signal 41

And azimuth/elevation in a file that gnuplot can handle:

245  63
  8   9
283  40
226  44
326  64

The azimuth/elevation data, modified for gnuplot. And the next step is a gnuplot plotscript:

set size square
set angles degrees
set polar
set grid polar 30
set xtics 30
unset border
unset param
set xrange[-90:90]
set yrange[-90:90]
set rrange[0:360]
set trange[0:90]

set title "GPS satellite tracks"
set xlabel "Azimuth"
set ylabel "Elevation"
set terminal png size 600,600
set output "gpsazel.png"
plot "gpsazel.dat" using 1:2 notitle

Which indeed gives a nice plot of some recent data.

Main conclusion: this sirf star II gps is 'too good' for this application. For example, one measurement:

SV 5 elevation 4 azimuth 86 signal 37

Satellite 5 seen at an elevation of 4 degrees above the horizon in easterly direction with a signal/noise ratio of 37 dB. There are high buildings (4 floors) in the easterly direction so I think I'm seeing the gps receiver being way too good at this.

The good part is that I'm not the first one to think of this: GPS Skyline: A Panorama in 1.6GHz Microwave-"Light" which suggests I need to find the right cutoff value for my type of GPS unit.

Modern times, attacks on hosts via both IPv4 and IPv6:

Apr 15 15:23:56 greenblatt kernel: [4741660.011622] FW reject: IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=175.44.9.137 DST=xx.xx.xx.xx LEN=48 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=115 ID=6517 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=49363 DPT=21 WINDOW=8192 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
Apr 15 15:23:57 greenblatt kernel: [4741660.370701] FW reject: IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=175.44.9.137 DST=xx.xx.xx.xx LEN=48 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=115 ID=8371 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=49363 DPT=21 WINDOW=8192 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
Apr 15 15:23:58 greenblatt kernel: [4741660.768693] FW reject: IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=175.44.9.137 DST=xx.xx.xx.xx LEN=48 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=115 ID=10428 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=49363 DPT=21 WINDOW=8192 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
Apr 15 15:23:58 greenblatt kernel: [4741660.924225] FW reject: IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=2002:af2c:0989:0000:0000:0000:af2c:0989 DST=xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx LEN=68 TC=0 HOPLIMIT=120 FLOWLBL=0 PROTO=TCP SPT=50764 DPT=21 WINDOW=8192 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
Apr 15 15:24:01 greenblatt kernel: [4741662.117101] FW reject: IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=2002:af2c:0989:0000:0000:0000:af2c:0989 DST=xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx LEN=68 TC=0 HOPLIMIT=120 FLOWLBL=0 PROTO=TCP SPT=50764 DPT=21 WINDOW=8192 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
Apr 15 15:24:07 greenblatt kernel: [4741664.510439] FW reject: IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=2002:af2c:0989:0000:0000:0000:af2c:0989 DST=xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx LEN=68 TC=0 HOPLIMIT=120 FLOWLBL=0 PROTO=TCP SPT=50764 DPT=21 WINDOW=8192 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0

Same source via IPv4 and IPv6 with 6to4.

It has been ages since I wrote about pump'n'dump spam where spammers try to inflate prices of stock for their own personal gain. It looked like the problem had almost gone away, but the last few weeks one stock is spammed again. Someone is set on making a profit or at least investing money in minimizing the damage with the RCHA stock (Rich Pharmaceuticals, Inc) and has been at it since at least 4 April 2014 now.

Dynamoo has a good write-up: RCHA / Rich Pharmaceuticals, Inc pump-and-dump spam - Dynamoo with graphs. Stock price and volume is following the pattern of a pump and dump scam.

Even the company itself is now reporting about the spam: Rich Pharmaceuticals Warns Investors of Unauthorized Spam Stock Promotion - Press release via Reuters. I consider the stock market a form of gambling anyway so I'll skip the links to "serious" stock advice about the RHCA stock.

When documenting something I have to look up the full path of some file and have it ready for cut-and-paste. I found out the easy way to canonicalize a filename:

koos@greenblatt:~$ readlink -f ../../etc/radvd.conf
/etc/radvd.conf

This evening had no high Saudisat SO-50 passes at friendly times but it did have a nice overhead ISS pass around 22:15 localtime. I noticed the AFSK signal later than I expected according to the azimuth/elevation calculated by gpredict and reception stayed fine when gpredict said elevation had dropped to about 1 degree above the Eastern horizon. There are high buildings in this direction, so I guess the orbit has changed a bit compared to the latest data I had. AFSK reception was fine, maybe I should try to record the outgoing audio somehow so I can decode it later.

I have programmed the ISS region 2 voice frequency from the ISS Frequencies - ISS Fan Club into my radio so I could hear voice communications or even try to make a contact when the ISS is overhead. Reading the Recorded ISS radio contacts - ISS Fan Club page shows some radio amateurs have been trying that for 2 years before succeeding so it won't happen easily.

Trying to hear and work the SO-50 satellite as PD4KH portable has one downside: certain types of weather don't agree. The first pass this evening was really nice, straight overhead. But closer to earth there were serious rainclouds overhead causing a downpour so I opted to skip that one. A pass later in the evening started dry so I went outside. During the pass it started to rain again a bit so I had to dry my laptop after I was done! It was a low West-North pass and those are harder to follow from our house. But I did hear some voices and I think I understood at least one callsign, but checking the live oscar satellite status page shows no callsign matching what I think I heard.

Update 2014-04-08: Another nicely timed West-North pass, without rain this time. I heard some interference, including someone who decided that whistling at the satellite was a good idea. Probably taken directly from the "what NOT to do with amateur satellites" handbook.

The pages maintained by Mike Rupprecht DK3WN about amateur satellites have some realaudio samples of good and bad use of the amateur satellites: SaudiSat 41, 42, 50 - Mike Rupprecht - Amateurfunk Betrieb über FM Satelliten - Mike Rupprecht - Amateurfunk I don't agree with the quoted statement by LA2QAA in the last article of being proud of never using the "easy" FM amateur satellites. A more positive approach is needed in my opinion.

One "mental" switch I have a problem with: with the squelch completely open I hear noise when I'm either not listening to the satellite or the satellite is not in use by another amateur. With listening to "earth" FM repeaters at normal squelch settings I'm used to noise meaning that someone is trying to use the repeater but failing. This means pressing the transmit button when hearing noise on the satellite is a bit "unnatural" to me.

The fact I can't get status information from the fritz.box such as linespeed in a way I can use in scripts annoy me, especially since the linespeed changed tonight (to 22381 down 1402 up). I'd like to at least have access to those statistics for my pretty graphs again. I did find Universal Plug and Play How to get Status-Information from the FRITZ!Box which uses the Perl Net::UPnP::ControlPoint module. The downside is this module wants to discover upnp devices by itself via multicast. So I need to setup a specific route for 224.0.0.0/4 from the server. It does discover the Fritz!Box, but thinks it has no further information:

$ ./get_upnp_info.mcast .
Device = FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7360

No possible actions. Digging a bit into the code reveals the problem is probably in the XML parsing bit. Changing the xml parser to search in namespace urn:dslforum-org:service-1-0 gives a tiny bit more:

$ ./get_upnp_info.mcast .
Device = FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7360
URL = http://192.168.178.1:49000/l2tpv3SCPD.xml
urn:any-com:serviceId:l2tpv31::GetInfo:ServerInstanceId = 0000001F8BF6F4502F99CFB2F71DC374ECD623A957E08803247CDC9AD3856FF4DDA943C535C22E937DE07643AB2A6BBFEC45DED2FBF0E95AC5C2B3B28699F07
urn:any-com:serviceId:l2tpv31::GetInfo:ServerIP = 192.168.178.1
urn:any-com:serviceId:l2tpv31::GetInfo:RemoteEndIds = fritz.box:guest

But no DSL upstream and downstream yet.

I ordered and received an Arrow Antenna: hand held portable dual band 2m/70cm Yagi satellite antenna. It came in last Saturday afternoon. And now I constantly look at the amateur satellite trackers on my laptop and tablet to see when passes come up for satellites that I can receive in FM. First receiving: I don't want to be the proverbial alligator on the amateur satellites (all mouth and no ears).

Our house being in a quite built-up area means when the elevation doesn't get above around 20 degrees there will not be a lot of chance to receive the satellite.

What I am looking for is satellites I can receive (and work) with the FM handheld transceiver. I focus on Saudisat-1c, the International Space Station and Oscar-11. Oscar-11 is an older amateur satellite but I could be lucky with receiving telemetry in AFSK format.

This evening had an 'easy' pass of Saudisat-1c usually known as SO-50, straight over my head. The obvious upside is: no buildings in the way. The less obvious upside: a shorter distance to the satellite, less signall loss. With headphones to hear the incoming audio in both ears I was able to hear callsigns. I'm not sure I heard a complete QSO. What I learned was that the moment the reception is clearest (shortest radio path) is also the moment of the biggest Doppler shift in receive frequency.

I also had a reasonably easy pass Saturday evening. I reported both passes to the OSCAR Satellite Status page by KD5QGR.

Update 2014-04-04: This evening I heard the AFSK1200 noises from an ISS pass! Amazing how fast the enormous mass of the International Space Station flies across the horizon. In 6 minutes it passed from azimuth 218⁰ (southwest) to 80⁰ (north of east).

Deze configuratie is ondertussen achterhaald: de firmware updates voor de 7360 maken telnet toegang en een startup script in /var/flash/debug.cfg onmogelijk. Mijn huidige configuratie staat in Xs4all VDSL met DrayTek Vigor 130 VDSL modem en PPP eindpunt op Linux (ubuntu) server.

Mijn configuratie is natuurlijk gebaseerd op PPPoE passthrough op Fritz!Box 7360 voor XS4all VDSL maar ik gebruik (Ubuntu) Linux.

Mijn huidige /var/flash/debug.cfg op de Fritz!Box 7360:

sleep 120
killall dsld
sleep 10
brctl addif lan ptm_vr9
ifconfig ptm_vr9 up

De Fritz!Box 7360 hangt aan een 802.1q geschikte switch die vlan 2 native en vlan 6 tagged accepteert op deze poort. Uiteindelijk komen beide vlans uit bij de server, en die heeft voor deze vlans de volgende configuratie in /etc/network/interfaces:

iface eth0.2 inet static
        address 10.0.0.150
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        broadcast 10.0.0.255
        up ifconfig $IFACE -multicast
        up ip addr add dev eth0.2 192.168.178.11/24

auto eth0.6
iface eth0.6 inet static
        address 0.0.0.0
        netmask 0.0.0.0
        broadcast 255.255.255.255

De configuratie voor eth0.6 geeft een foutmelding maar resulteert wel in een beschikbare eth0.6 zonder IP adres erop.

Voor de ppp sessie heb ik in /etc/network/interfaces:

auto pppoe
iface pppoe inet ppp
        provider xs4all-vdsl

Dit start dus pppd met als configuratie /etc/ppp/peers/xs4all-vdsl, deze file is natuurlijk grotendeels afgeleid van de adsl/pppoa naar pptp configuratie die ik eerder gebruikte. De inhoud van /etc/ppp/peers/xs4all-vdsl:

plugin rp-pppoe.so modem
user koos@xs4all.nl
noipdefault
ipv6 ,
ipv6cp-use-persistent
defaultroute
persist
maxfail 0
noproxyarp
ipparam xs4all
lcp-echo-interval 10
lcp-echo-failure 3
pty "pppoe -I eth0.6"
mtu 1492
mru 1492

Vervolgens moet er IPv6 adresruimte aangevraagd worden via DHCPv6 met prefix delegation. Om dat proces te bespoedingen geef ik vanuit /etc/ppp/ipv6-up.d/dhcp6 een SIGHUP naar dhcp6c met

#!/bin/sh

kill -HUP `cat /var/run/dhcp6c.pid`

De configuratie van wide-dhcpv6 in /etc/wide-dhcpv6/dhcp6c.conf voor prefix-delegation naar eth0.1 en eth0.3 :

interface eth0.1
{

};
interface eth0.3
{

};
interface ppp0
{
        send ia-pd 0;

        script "/etc/wide-dhcpv6/dhcp6c-script";
};
id-assoc pd {
    prefix-interface eth0.1 {
        sla-id 1;
    };
    prefix-interface eth0.3 {
        sla-id 2;
    };
};

Vervolgens wil ik nog een extra uitgaand adres toevoegen voor uitgaand verkeer en verkeer voor de toegekende /48 adresreeks wat ik verder intern niet kwijt kan niet weer de ppp verbinding opsturen. In /etc/ppp/ipv6-up.d/outgate:

#!/bin/sh

ip -6 addr add 2001:xxx:xxxx:xxxx::13/128 dev ${PPP_IFACE}
ip -6 route add unreachable 2001:xxxx:xxxx::/48

Met een fritz!box gaat het voorlopig niet lukken om de mtu/mru weer naar 1500 te krijgen. De keuze is dus om op andere plekken hier rekening mee te houden. Voor IPv6 staat nu in /etc/radvd.conf:

interface eth0.1
{
   AdvSendAdvert on;
   AdvHomeAgentFlag off;
   AdvLinkMTU 1492;
   prefix ::/64 {
                AdvOnLink on;
                AdvAutonomous on;
                AdvPreferredLifetime 604800;
                AdvValidLifetime 2592000;
   };
};

Dit voorbeeld neemt automatisch de door wide-dhcp6c ingestelde adressen over. Dat heeft een nadeel: bij elke DSL hik raak ik ook intern alle IPv6 adressen en verkeer kwijt. Ik ben dus overgestapt op het met de hand instellen van de adresreeksen.

En in de iptables regels:

ip6tables -t mangle -A FORWARD -o ppp0 -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN -j TCPMSS --clamp-mss-to-pmtu

iptables -t filter -A OUTPUT -o ppp0 -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN -j TCPMSS --clamp-mss-to-pmtu

All spammers lie, but some more obvious than others:

   ____________________
   [1]<< VIP SHOP HERE >>

   [2]PRIVACY POLICY | [3]TERMS OF SERVICE | [4]NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK

   You are currently subscribed to the PfizerFactory Newsletter as:
   *****@****.nl. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, [5]click here.
   (c) 2005-2014 PfizerFactory. All rights reserved.
   3000 West Alameda Avenue, 2090, Burbank, CA 91523

References

   1. http://1D.medicjkyei.ru/?r=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx8D546D23D6D8
   2. http://1D.medicjkyei.ru/?r=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx8D546D23D6D8&EFA8B103CB
   3. http://1D.medicjkyei.ru/?r=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx8D546D23D6D8&1B98E653B7
   4. http://1D.medicjkyei.ru/?r=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx8D546D23D6D8&20E1AAF40D
   5. http://1D.medicjkyei.ru/?r=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx8D546D23D6D8&9EE36C9B1C&unsubscribe=*****@****.nl

No I didn't and I'm not going to follow that "unsubscribe" link. Interesting how this spam shows up on lots of sites that seem to automatically convert e-mail into website posts.

Looking at the DSL spectrum of the new VDSL modem I noticed the used frequencies overlap with spectrum used by AM broadcast stations. With a few stations in the area that transmit at reasonable amounts of power, I thought this might be a source of interference. Someone who lives close to the AM transmitter near IJsselstein has noticed the carrier containing 675 kHz isn't used, the frequency of the nearby AM transmitter. Found at HF-dichte modem/router gezocht - zendamateur.com forum in Dutch

When I searched whether someone had looked into this matter before me I found A VDSL tutorial by Frank Sjöberg which notes:

The main source of RFI is believed to be amateur radio (HAM) transmitters. This is because they can be located just a few meters from a telephone line and the transmitting power can be relatively high - up to 400 W in the UK and 1.5 kW in the USA. Even though AM broadcast transmitters use much higher transmit power, they are usually not located so close to the telephone wires. The number of active AM transmitters is also quite small compared to the number of amateur radio users, especially in Europe. Furthermore, AM-broadcast transmitters always transmit the carrier wave, which makes them more stationary and easier to deal with, compared to amateur radio users that can change frequency often and mostly transmit single side-band (SSB) modulated signals.

From a DSL viewpoint amateur radio is indeed unpredictable and a strong source of interference. Time for fiber.

I don't transmit on HF yet, so I don't have any personal experience yet. Looking at the signal/noise ratio graph from the modem there may indeed be a small dip in signal/noise ratio around 675 kHz.

Eerste stap met het VDSL modem, een Fritz!Box 7360 is een firmware upgrade (om zo betere VDSL snelheid te halen). En wat blijkt, het modem wil perse via z'n "eigen" internet verbinding updaten, en op de avm site staan de updates ook niet zomaar ter download. Na wat zoeken, het is een 7360_v1, en dus staat de firmware in ftp://ftp.avm.de/fritz.box/fritzbox.fon_wlan_7360_v1/firmware/english/. Upgrade gereed, nu de rest van de VDSL config waarvoor ik de telnet poort open moet zetten.

Telnet open zetten gaat met een analoog telefoontoestel. Daarna kan het /var/flash/debug.cfg bestand aangepast worden. Hoewel ik de meeste instructies uit PPPoE passthrough op Fritz!Box 7360 voor XS4all VDSL gebruik vond ik de aanpak in xs4all-pppoe-fb7360/debug.cfg at master · antonyantony/xs4all-pppoe-fb7360 · GitHub net even mooier, dat script blijft rondjes draaien tot de zaak goed opkomt en houdt daarna de status in de gaten.

Update 2013-03-28: Ergens in de config zat een fout die er een puinhoop van maakte en toen moest ik zelfs een recovery image gebruiken om weer toegang te krijgen. Dus maar in kleinere stapjes de zaak weer geconfigureerd. Nu werkt het, ik werk nu met de iets simpeler stapjes in /var/flash/debug.cfg.

Oh en de lijn statistieken: 21899 kilobit down, 1436 kilobit up, VDSL2 profiel 8b. Ik ben benieuwd of DLM hier nog dingen aan verbeterd (meer upstream mag). Grappig was dat de vantevoren verwachte waarden waren ~ 18000 kilobit down, ~ 4000 kilobit up, dus de lijn gedraagt zich in eerste instantie anders.

Due to some current events I am interested again in receiving ADS-B signals from aircrafts, I started with ADS-B on the rtl-sdr stick in August 2013. I still have dump1090 working, and I built a colineair antenna based on the design mentioned on SBS-1 & SBS-3 Mode-S / ADSB Virtual Radar : User Forum xx • View topic - How tu build antenna for sbs-1?. Old electric wire was easy to adopt for this target. The result is clearly visible, I can now see high-altitude aircrafts from beyond Eindhoven and Den Helder.

But I also noticed the most 'interesting' aircrafts are the ones that do not show location information in the dump1090 console display. Some are gliders, such as

Hex    Flight   Altitude  Speed   Lat       Lon       Track  Messages Seen   .
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4849c6 PH1280   2025      0       0.000     0.000     0     73        0 sec

But others will send high numbers of messages and when I search on the Hex ModeS code I find them listed as militairy aircraft.

Hex    Flight   Altitude  Speed   Lat       Lon       Track  Messages Seen   .
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ae0403 DUKE37   15000     0       0.000     0.000     0     1840      0 sec

Update: It's remarkable that 'lower Dutch airspace' closes at 23:00 localtime. After that time I see nothing below flightlevel 30000 feet (my guess). Looking at Flightradar for Schiphol shows maintenance vehicles and a few late arrivals.

Update 2014-03-24: Ok, one more extra interesting signal:

Hex    Flight   Altitude  Speed   Lat       Lon       Track  Messages Seen  .
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4d03cd NATO01   31075     0       0.000     0.000     0     3225      0 sec

One of the Awacs radar airplanes operating from NATO Air Base Geilenkirchen is active, as announced. Lucky you can't hear those very well when they are at 31075 feet. It doesn't announce its location but I think an Awacs radar airplane is perfectly capable of avoiding any plane...

Update 2014-03-25: And the other Awacs plane manages to not get out of range longer than 60 seconds (timeout in dump1090 for tracking a flight), leading to a very high number of messages from one flight:

Hex    Flight   Altitude  Speed   Lat       Lon       Track  Messages Seen   .
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4d03c9 NATO02   29000     0       0.000     0.000     0     83597     0 sec

De snelheid van de Internet abonnementen van XS4ALL gaan omhoog. Om daar echt iets aan te hebben moet ik over op VDSL, dan krijg ik ook meer upstream snelheid. Ik heb dus vanmiddag de klantenservice van XS4ALL gebeld voor een omzetting naar VDSL en een bijpassend modem. Daarvoor moet ik wel een jaar klant blijven maar dat was ik zondermeer van plan.

Natuurlijk wil ik zo snel mogelijk het 'endpoint' van de verbinding met XS4ALL weer naar de thuisserver greenblatt hebben. Dat gaat met een VDSL modem iets anders, ik kan inspiratie vinden via PPPoE passthrough op Fritz!Box 7360 voor XS4ALL VDSL. Als ik het verhaal goed begrijp moet ik daarvoor ook vlan 6 vanuit het modem doorzetten naar het systeem met pppoe. Om remote beheer van het modem te houden is dan ook een untagged vlan nodig.

Update 2014-03-22: Snelle service: het VDSL modem is binnen, tegelijk met de brief dat de omzetting van de lijn vrijdag de 28e zal zijn.

Gisterenavond op de clubavond van de Veron afdeling A08 Centrum eens gespeeld met PSK31 op HF (20m band).

PSK31 is een 'digitale mode' waarin tekst (letters en cijfers) in een smalbandig radio signaal uitgewisseld worden. Er is dus altijd een computer met geluidskaart nodig, maar met de huidige stand van zaken kan elke moderne computer dat.

Ik had al eens eerder succes met het decoderen van PSK31 verkeer maar nu heb ik ook zelf PSK31 contacten gemaakt. Ik heb dat gedaan onder de roepletters van het clubstation, PI4UTR omdat dat de standaard instellingen zijn van de PSK31 software. En het is natuurlijk handig dat onder toezicht van een amateur met F-licentie het volle vermogen gebruikt mag worden.

Ik heb daar op de standaard PSK31 frequentie op de 20meter band 14.070 MHz gekeken naar verkeer, gereageerd op oproepen en zelf ook een paar keer CQ geroepen waarop gereageerd werd. Dat leverde contacten op met: RK6LN (Rusland), UX7MX (Oekraïne), IZ8DSY (Italië), IZ8OFO (Italië), IK7NXU (Italië), IZ8GUH (Italië), EA3KU (Spanje), UX5IQ (Oekraïne), PY2MR (Brazilië), CT2KCK (Portugal), UT5AJ (Oekraïne), RW0LBZ (Rusland), CT2JBK (Portugal)

Na een van de reacties op een CQ kwam zelfs een tweede reactie van een andere amateur, voor mij een indicatie dat ik leuk bezig was.

Een mooie score, de afstand tot de Brazilië was ruim 8200 kilometer volgens de gebruikte software, MixW. Dit is software voor digitale amateur radio modes en logging onder Windows die beschikbaar is op de club. Als ik zelf iets met PSK31 wil doen ga ik natuurlijk richting Linux met Fldigi.

Het ging bijna allemaal met de macro functies in MixW. Ik zou zelf ook wel eens uitgebreidere verbindingen willen maken waarin ik wat meer tik maar het was ook duidelijk dat er veel radioamateurs op zoek zijn naar korte verbindingen waarin ze wat basisgegevens uitwisselen en dan doorgaan naar het volgende contact voor in de log.

Een voordeel wat de digitale modes hebben waarmee je met je toetsenbord werkt: dat kan in relatieve stilte. Ik kan me helemaal voorstellen dat ik 's avonds met een slapend kind in de buurt liever wat zit te tikken dan zit te praten in een microfoon.

I upgraded my Dell Latitude D630 laptop from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04. That upgrade was needed, support on Ubuntu 10.04 desktop expired months ago.

Just like in the upgrade of the desktop system thompson I had to reconfigure X to allow my personal .xsession to go through and some other minor things. Almost everything seems to work at the moment.

Ik ben weer naar de Landelijke Radio Vlooienmarkt geweest in het Autotron in Rosmalen, gisteren 15 maart. Ik heb gekeken naar een antenne voor satelliet-werk maar niet echt iets goed passends gevonden, dus ik ga toch maar eens kijken wat de verzendkosten zijn voor de Arrow Antenna: hand held portable dual band 2m/70cm Yagi satellite antenna. Volgens diverse reviews de ideale antenne voor werken met amateur satellieten. En een goeie richtantenne voor 2m/70cm, die in de 'Backpack' uitvoering ook nog prima mee te nemen is.

Wat ik wel aangeschaft heb is het Veron cursusboek voor het F-examen. Het goede voornemen is duidelijk om dat cursusboek door te gaan werken en dan met behulp van proefexamens te gaan bekijken of ik nog op een echte cursus wil om het te vervolmaken of dat ik voor een examen voor de F-licentie ga. Geen haast, maar wel iets om aan te werken.

Update: De arrow antenne is besteld en geleverd.

Article about the enforcement by the FCC (US department which manages radio frequency spectrum) of radio interference cases: FCC Agents Trace Radio Interference to Doorbells, Videogames, Blankets - Wall Street Journal.

Even a source of interference which has potential to cause more problems than just a fine for radio interference shows up in the article:

Radio hobbyist Tom Thompson of Boulder, Colo., last year tracked a signal using a homemade contraption. After knocking on the suspect's door, he traced it to ballasts on marijuana grow-room lights. He says he built a filter that the grower agreed to use.

Found via HamRadioDaily

Yesterday evening was spent repairing some other stuff and soldering a cable from 2.5mm jack to 3.5mm jack so I can use normal headphones on my Wouxun KG-UVD1P. Using full headphones with audio in both ears helps me listen to amateur satellites. The usual approach to amateur satellite listening is to disable the squelch so one can hear the first bits of signal coming out of the noise. But this noise is somewhat annoying to any people nearby. So, headphones to the rescue. This evening I tested this setup. I looked at upcoming passes with gpredict and found out satellites HO-68 and FO-29 were going to make a pass shortly after another. So I was outside (in the cold..) waving with the antenna of the radio, but heard nothing. I knew the HO-68 FM transponder was probably not working and the FO-29 only has SSB so the radio wasn't going to make much of it. I checked with gpredict what passes of 'easier' amateur satellites like SO-50 are going to happen later this week.

Having the 'radio window' in gpredict open with the doppler shift correction makes tuning a lot easier.

Tijd voor weer eens een DAB services scan.

Eigenlijk geen grote veranderingen, de enige opvallende nieuwe aanwinst is een extra service van de NPO, "3FM Alternative". De Noxon mediaplayer kapt dit af tot "NPO 3FM Alternat".

Er kwam een nuttige tip van Miquel van Smoorenburg van xs4all voorbij:

Er is voor IPv6 geen MSS-clamping nodig als je radvd een MTU van 1492 adverteert op je LAN. Dat is ook wat de Fritzbox doet, en voor zover ik weet gaan alle OSen daar correct mee om.

Dus in radvd.conf:

interface eth0.1
{
    AdvSendAdvert on;
    AdvHomeAgentFlag off;
    AdvLinkMTU 1492;
    prefix ::/64 {
        AdvOnLink on;
        AdvAutonomous on;
        AdvPreferredLifetime 604800;
        AdvValidLifetime 2592000;
    };
};

Brilliant xkcd recently, number 1337: Hack - xkcd.

Hackers (1995) - imdb movie database

Misschien komt er ooit een upgrade naar glasvezel of VDSL, en dan is het heel prettig om te lezen dat andere mensen al de details hebben uitgezocht, bijvoorbeeld voor de combinatie van een Draytek Vigor 130 VDSL2-modem en een MikroTik 2011UiAS-2HnD router achter een XS4ALL VDSL aansluiting wat Harold Schoemaker keurig heeft beschreven.

De volledige lijst VLAN tags:

• vlan 4: IPTV, untagged aanbieden aan de settopbox
• vlan 5: VoIP bij KPN (XS4ALL biedt dit aan als onderdeel van de IP dienst)
• vlan 6: IP (IPv4/IPv6) via een PPPoE sessie

Vandaag is het precies 34 jaar geleden dat 27 MHz communicatie in Nederland werd geintroduceerd, 27 MC artikel op de nederlandse wikipedia. Ik luister wel eens met een scanner naar 27 MHz verkeer, erg vermakelijk.

Sharing my earlier experiences with the hidden telnet interface on the Netgear GS716T switch was appreciated by someone else with a Netgear GS110p switch: "Hidden" CLI interface on Netgear GS110TP. So I guess this is a feature on multiple netgear switches.

And that article made me look at the firmware version, finding in the release notes for the newer version:

New Features:
* Add IPv6 management, IPv6 ACL, and IPv6 DiffServ support.

I like that feature a lot! And indeed, after upgrade and setting the IPv6 management address:

I noticed in the logs of the weather station computer ritchie:

[770336.506717] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
[770336.906545] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated:
[770336.906567] cfg80211:   (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)
[770336.906585] cfg80211:   (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[770336.906602] cfg80211:   (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[770336.906619] cfg80211:   (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[770336.906635] cfg80211:   (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[770336.906652] cfg80211:   (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)

But I'm in a specific country (the Netherlands) although the access-point is old enough to not transmit the regulatory domain information. I found out I can update the default in the client using:

root@ritchie:~# iw reg get
country 00: DFS-UNSET
        (2402 - 2472 @ 40), (3, 20)
        (2457 - 2482 @ 40), (3, 20), NO-IR
        (2474 - 2494 @ 20), (3, 20), NO-OFDM, NO-IR
        (5170 - 5250 @ 40), (3, 20), NO-IR
        (5735 - 5835 @ 40), (3, 20), NO-IR
root@ritchie:~# iw reg set NL
root@ritchie:~# iw reg get
country NL: DFS-UNSET
        (2402 - 2482 @ 40), (N/A, 20)
        (5170 - 5250 @ 40), (N/A, 20), NO-OUTDOOR
        (5250 - 5330 @ 40), (N/A, 20), NO-OUTDOOR, DFS
        (5490 - 5710 @ 40), (N/A, 27), DFS
        (57240 - 65880 @ 2160), (N/A, 40), NO-OUTDOOR

This changes maximum power, bandwidth and frequency ranges. And indeed in dmesg:

[770977.623611] cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: NL
[770977.715887] cfg80211: Regulatory domain changed to country: NL
[770977.715909] cfg80211:   (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)
[770977.715926] cfg80211:   (2402000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[770977.715941] cfg80211:   (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[770977.715957] cfg80211:   (5250000 KHz - 5330000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm)
[770977.715972] cfg80211:   (5490000 KHz - 5710000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2700 mBm)
[770977.715988] cfg80211:   (57240000 KHz - 65880000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 4000 mBm)

Now I wonder about the flags... NO-IR = no initiating radiation the device may not transmit on a frequency until it has received beacons on the frequency. DFS = Dynamic Frequency Selection which is mainly avoiding collision on the 5 GHz wireless band with weather radars.

More information about this subject at Regulatory - Linux Wireless.

I almost started to digres in my last post getting an APRS report out using an android device, aprsdroid and a wouxun radio about the privacy implications but decided to separate that issue. It works, and I am not going to invest in it.

APRS is nice, but for me it has privacy implications: it reports my position in real-time which is more than I want to share with the world, even as an amateur radio experiment. I know there are people who will post their bicycling tours or runs on-line as they happen but I don't like publishing my wereabouts, especially not in (near) real-time. Enough people can browse the mobile telecom location registers as it is.

So I think I'll leave the APRS location experiments at this and I'll go look at other amateur radio stuff. There is enough to play with!

I know APRS is bigger than just reporting location. Getting my weatherstation in Utrecht Overvecht to report weather to the APRS citizen weather observer program is on my wishlist.

Again playing a bit with APRS and aprsdroid. No luck with using a 3.5mm to 3.5mm audio cable, the vox on the wouxun KG-UVD1P does not trigger at all. I did test with the audio from aprsdroid near the microphone of my laptop and decoding it with multimon, and that works:

AFSK1200: fm PD4KH-7 to APDR12-0 via WIDE1-1 UI^ pid=F0
=5206.  N/00507.  E$/A=000162 http://pd4kh.idefix.net/

The 'audio through the air' method works with the radio right next to the internal speaker of the android device: with some fiddling of audio settings on the android device and vox settings on the wouxun I can send out a position report and it shows up on the aprs network! Wouxon vox level at 5, audio output type "music", audio level medium.

The pink square is because I don't give out a very precise location on purpose.

After getting the gps running in the shed I noticed a bit of variation in the output location as logged from the NMEA $GPGGA strings in the clockstats file. And reading Tom van Baak testing the MG1613S GPS Receiver noting the variation in location made me decide to do a bit of plotting of location on my own. As Tom notes, plotting distance in meters gives a better idea of scale. So I wrote a bit of perl to massage the lat/long pairs into X/Y meters from a starting point. I was lazy: I used the first measurement as starting point. The resulting X/Y pairs are graphed using gnuplot.

• holux gr-213 in the shed wanderings, 2 days Interesting first results with the GPS module inside the shed so the roof adds extra signal loss and reflections.
• holux gr-213 with the antenna on the shed roof wanderings, 2 days The better reception seems to help a lot, notice the difference in scale.
• holux gr-213 with the antenna on the shed roof wanderings, 6 days the range does not change much over 6 days.

Update: I'm a security specialist, not a programmer: I found some errors in the routines that convert output from the GPS to degrees to meters. Fixed them, so the first graph has been redrawn using data from 17 and 18 Februari.

Since the old gpskit gps was showing problems in ntp tests earlier I decided now that the weatherstation computer is up and running on the alix.1c board to try a different gps unit: The Holux GR-213 GPS I still have from earlier wardriving.

Not much of a succes sofar. First the GPS did not get a lock at all. I was expecting a delay in acquiring a lock since it hadn't been used in over a year but after a day and a half it still wasn't locking. So I moved it a bit which led to a lock (blinking led). But ntpd was still not using the GPS_NMEA driver. When I had time to have more of a look than just the graphs at NTP server ritchie.idefix.net stats I noticed ntpd was still seeing GPS_NMEA as a falseticker. Which is about right, when I look at the peer stats the GPS_NMEA clock has an offset of about 500 milliseconds(!!) compared to the rest.

To my best knowledge I can find the right offset with 'enable calibrate'. But documentation is very minimal on this matter: Reference clock drivers - ntp 4.0.99k documentation has:

The recommended procedure is to enable the function, let it run for an hour or so, then edit the configuration file using the time1 values displayed by the ntpq utility and clockvar command.

With 'enable calibrate' on I see after a long run:

ntpq> peer
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
+greenblatt.idef 131.211.8.244    2 u  137  512  377    1.012    1.780  87.722
*metronoom.dmz.c .PPS.            1 u  166  512  377   18.297   -1.207  46.401
+auth1.xs4all.nl 193.67.79.202    2 u  119  512  377   16.604   -1.104  27.267
xGPS_NMEA(0)     .GPS.            0 l    4   16  377    0.000  -529.94   3.286
ntpq> clockvar
associd=0 status=0000 , no events, clk_unspec,
device="NMEA GPS Clock",
timecode="$GPGGA,210752.000,5206.6230,N,00507.0976,E,1,06,1.5,-0.1,M,47.1,M,,0000*7F",
poll=762, noreply=0, badformat=0, baddata=0, fudgetime1=0.000, stratum=0,
refid=GPS, flags=0

So even after running for a long time with clearly an offset between the other clocks and the reference clock there is no change in the suggestion for the time1 factor, still showing 0.000.

Remarks in [ntp:questions] enable calibrate? suggest 'enable calibrate' will only work when there is a PPS signal available, and confirm the lack of documentation and samples I found.

The Holux GR-213 also does not have a PPS signal to the outside at all, so I can't use a PPS signal anyway.

Update: Some sleep, thinking and reading later: first of all, time1 is the PPS time offset and time2 is the gps message offset, found by reading ntpd documentation Generic NMEA GPS driver.

So I started looking for the right offset with the 127.127.20.0 driver in noselect mode. After some testing I found a reasonable answer with:

# GPS as time source without pps
server 127.127.20.0 minpoll 1 maxpoll 4
fudge 127.127.20.0 time2 +0.544

And now things look better:

ntpq> peer
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
+greenblatt.idef 131.211.8.244    2 u    2   64   77    0.956   -2.252  41.400
*metronoom.dmz.c .PPS.            1 u    5   64   77   17.921   -2.236   1.190
-auth1.xs4all.nl 193.67.79.202    2 u    3   64   77   16.254   -2.750   0.880
+GPS_NMEA(0)     .GPS.            0 l    2    8  377    0.000   -5.916   1.100

I decided to try aprsdroid on my android device. First and easiest should be to select the option AFSK via Speaker/Mic and I hoped it would work when the speaker and microphone of the portable radio are near the microphone and speaker of the android device. No luck: no transmitted APRS packet was found via aprs.fi call PD4KH and no incoming packet was decoded. I guess there was too much distortion and interference. I looked at the aprsdroid settings a lot since I noticed outgoing audio seems to be fixed at the highest volume, which can also be an issue.

In the video Get Started with APRS for only $30! - youtube.com video a simple cable from the android device to the radio is used, so it can be done.

Going for a solution like an Mobilinkd is more expensive, but maybe interesting in the long run when I want to do more with APRS. For now, an interim solution would be nice: building the right cable to get audio from the radio to the android device and back. I found the specs for such a cable at iPhone / Baofeng interface bouw en schema - PA4TW which can be adjusted for the android device and Wouxun. And PA4TW has used it for APRS in Aprs via porto en iPhone - PA4TW.

Old analog telephone equipment can be a source of 600 ohm 1:1 transformers, so I guess some old equipment will have to donate those when I go for such a cable.

The webcam image at webcam.idefix.net is getting popular at the moment due to the use by nedWeer.nl peaking at 0.5 requests/second.

Since the image is imported from a different server in a proxying setup this was causing quite some traffic on my adsl line. The image doesn't update every second, so I had a look into caching possibilities with apache 2.2. I wanted to use the memory cache for just this one object but I started with the disk cache because it's easier to debug and see the files on disk. This didn't work, and I could not figure out why. I followed the instructions found in apache2 - Apache Reverse Caching Proxy - why isn't it caching? - stackoverflow.com but still no caching happening.

I set up a separate virtual server with the logging set to level 'debug' and found the following interesting line in the log:

[Thu Feb 06 16:24:59 2014] [debug] mod_cache.c(370): (12)Cannot allocate memory: cache: Cache provider's store_body failed!

This looked more like a memory cache problem than a disk cache problem. But the memory cache wasn't configured at all. I decided to remove the memory cache support completely and that fixed things with the disk cache. The debug log suddenly had the right messages:

[Thu Feb 06 16:25:59 2014] [debug] mod_cache.c(633): cache: Caching url: /camwindow.jpg

Now the webcam image is cached for 120 seconds. Which saves some traffic on the ADSL line.

Update 2013-02-10: Requests still going at about 0.5 requests/second at busier times. The proxy reduces the impact on ADSL traffic and ping delays.

SIP scanning going on again, probably related to Security advisory: suspected telephone misuse in fritzbox systems. My Internet provider xs4all uses fritz!box devices by default and I already heard about one case of abuse.

The SIP scan in tshark:

Frame 376 (457 bytes on wire, 457 bytes captured)
    Arrival Time: Feb  5, 2014 18:00:07.447662000
    [Time delta from previous captured frame: 36.927214000 seconds]
    [Time delta from previous displayed frame: 0.000000000 seconds]
    [Time since reference or first frame: 6100.139111000 seconds]
    Frame Number: 376
    Frame Length: 457 bytes
    Capture Length: 457 bytes
    [Frame is marked: False]
    [Protocols in frame: sll:ip:udp:sip]
Linux cooked capture
    Packet type: Unicast to us (0)
    Link-layer address type: 512
    Link-layer address length: 0
    Source: <MISSING>
    Protocol: IP (0x0800)
Internet Protocol, Src: 188.138.41.34 (188.138.41.34), Dst: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)
    Version: 4
    Header length: 20 bytes
    Differentiated Services Field: 0x00 (DSCP 0x00: Default; ECN: 0x00)
        0000 00.. = Differentiated Services Codepoint: Default (0x00)
        .... ..0. = ECN-Capable Transport (ECT): 0
        .... ...0 = ECN-CE: 0
    Total Length: 441
    Identification: 0x0000 (0)
    Flags: 0x04 (Don't Fragment)
        0... = Reserved bit: Not set
        .1.. = Don't fragment: Set
        ..0. = More fragments: Not set
    Fragment offset: 0
    Time to live: 53
    Protocol: UDP (0x11)
    Header checksum: 0x475e [correct]
        [Good: True]
        [Bad : False]
    Source: 188.138.41.34 (188.138.41.34)
    Destination: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)
User Datagram Protocol, Src Port: 5079 (5079), Dst Port: sip (5060)
    Source port: 5079 (5079)
    Destination port: sip (5060)
    Length: 421
    Checksum: 0xc761 [correct]
        [Good Checksum: True]
        [Bad Checksum: False]
Session Initiation Protocol
    Request-Line: OPTIONS sip:100@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx SIP/2.0
        Method: OPTIONS
        [Resent Packet: False]
    Message Header
        Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 62.75.212.215:5079;branch=z9hG4bK-1039150734;rport
            Transport: UDP
            Sent-by Address: 62.75.212.215
            Sent-by port: 5079
            Branch: z9hG4bK-1039150734
            RPort: rport
        Content-Length: 0
        From: "sipvicious"<sip:100@1.1.1.1>;tag=3532356663346361313363340132393433303934303439
            SIP Display info: "sipvicious"
            SIP from address: sip:100@1.1.1.1
            SIP tag: 3532356663346361313363340132393433303934303439
        Accept: application/sdp
        User-Agent: friendly-scanner
        To: "sipvicious"<sip:100@1.1.1.1>
            SIP Display info: "sipvicious"
            SIP to address: sip:100@1.1.1.1
        Contact: sip:100@62.75.212.215:5079
            Contact Binding: sip:100@62.75.212.215:5079
                URI: sip:100@62.75.212.215:5079\r
                    SIP contact address: sip:100@62.75.212.215:5079\r
        CSeq: 1 OPTIONS
            Sequence Number: 1
            Method: OPTIONS
        Call-ID: 37933976157019277147119
        Max-Forwards: 70

Source IPv4 was 188.138.41.34, Plusserver AG. Interesting pointer at IPv4 address 62.75.212.215, a different IPv4 range at Plusserver AG.

De eerste QSL-kaart is binnen! Van het contact met PD6SHELL een leuk kaartje.

In searching for information about the Alix 1.c bios upgrade I'd like to do I came across mention of flashrom, a command line utility which can do firmware flashing for a lot of systems right from the commandline. No more long downtimes due to being busy with bootable floppies, cd's, usb sticks or slow update programs.

Initially the program gave a warning on ritchie, but with one "I am sure what I am doing" option:

root@ritchie:~# flashrom --programmer=internal:laptop=this_is_not_a_laptop -r oldbios.bin
flashrom v0.9.6.1-r1563 on Linux 3.12-1-486 (i586)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org

Calibrating delay loop... OK.
========================================================================
WARNING! You may be running flashrom on an unsupported laptop. We could
not detect this for sure because your vendor has not setup the SMBIOS
tables correctly. You can enforce execution by adding
'-p internal:laptop=this_is_not_a_laptop' to the command line, but
please read the following warning if you are not sure.

Laptops, notebooks and netbooks are difficult to support and we
recommend to use the vendor flashing utility. The embedded controller
(EC) in these machines often interacts badly with flashing.
See http://www.flashrom.org/Laptops for details.

If flash is shared with the EC, erase is guaranteed to brick your laptop
and write may brick your laptop.
Read and probe may irritate your EC and cause fan failure, backlight
failure and sudden poweroff.
You have been warned.
========================================================================
Proceeding anyway because user forced us to.
Found chipset "AMD CS5536". Enabling flash write... OK.
WARNING: unexpected second chipset match: "AMD CS5536"
ignoring, please report lspci and board URL to flashrom@flashrom.org
with 'CHIPSET: your board name' in the subject line.
Found SST flash chip "SST49LF040B" (512 kB, LPC) at physical address 0xfff80000.
Reading flash... done.

Checksums for the saved bios file match with the bios image I have from the last upgrade.

I had a closer look at the available PC Engines alix 1.c bios updates and noticed alix0.bin and alix2.bin images in the .zip file. A bit of searching found 3D3 BIOS-Upgrade: Which one is the right file? - PC Engines support forum which lists alix0.bin for alix.1 systems and alix2.bin for alix.3 systems. Should work with the provided sb.com.

The change to the new weatherstation computer also means the powerline network is now gone. And I mean gone, not just disconnected "just in case". The adapters are back in a crate. And this should mean the HF spectrum should look nicer than in my earlier measurements. Future measurements may confirm this.

The weatherstation computer now uses Wi-Fi to talk to the rest of the network. Since the access-point is on the same ground level the signal quality is good and speed is high enough.

Today there was time to change the computer in the shed to ritchie, the alix 1.c based system. The system decided this was a great moment to run into the "system won't boot without monitor present" issue. I found a funny workaround: I disabled the video memory. This does mean the display doesn't work at all, but at least it boots. I'll do a bios reset and upgrade sometime in the future. The PC Engines alix1c product page lists possible problems with a vga boot hang as fixed in a newer bios.

After that the system started working nice, talks to the weather station hardware and Weatherstation Utrecht Overvecht is back up.

This system with a standard power usage of about 5W will be 'greener' than the replaced older PC. There is a free serial port for a gps, but since the gpskit gps was showing strange problems in the ntp server test I decided to take that gps back inside to have a look whether that can be used or I want to search for some other gps unit to have my own home time server. Maybe the wardriving gps unit.

Some sort of plastic container to keep all the electronics together and shielded is also a good idea.

Spammers liegen, zelfs als ze de spammers zijn voor het Algemeen Dagblad:

Vorig seizoen bracht het AD, als partner van Feyenoord, het 'Feyenoord doeboek' uit. U heeft dit doeboek destijds in de webwinkel van het AD besteld.

Het adres waar ze naar mailen heeft zich ooit geregistreerd voor de volkskrant website, meer niet.

Ik vraag me nu wel af met wat voor kwaliteit ze de nieuwsbijlage van hun 'krant' vullen als de afdeling marketing zo omgaat met de waarheid.

Originating IP 146.185.54.163 waar ook geen abuse contact voor te vinden is.

Mooie tekst van Arnoud Engelfriet op Wat nou als jailbreaken mijn telefoon juist veiliger maakt? - Ius Mentis:

Overigens erger ik me wezenloos aan de trend om dienstverlening ‘producten’ te noemen. Een product doet pijn als het op je tenen valt. Mobiel Bankieren (of gratis reizen buiten de spits) doet dat niet, dus is het geen product.

Een mooi verhaal over een enthousiaste jonge beginnende radio amateur die met wat hulp mooie dingen aan het doen is: PI4RCG sponsort Lithouwse novice zendamateur LY5AT, door PA3FYM.

Terug van een snowboard vakantie in Fiss, Oostenrijk! Perfect weer gehad, zowel met zon als met verse sneeuw.

I had a look what software is available for predicting satellite passes in the ubuntu ham radio software repositories.

predict-g1yyh in an xterm

I found PREDICT satellite tracking and orbital prediction program which does all the calculations given recent Keplerian elements which are available from sources like Keplerian elements at Amsat and Current NORAD Two-Line Element Sets at celestrak. Predict comes in two versions: predict in a version from May 2006 and predict-g1yyh. They look a bit different but the calculations are the same in the end.

Important part (to me) is the software also does the calculations for doppler shift. Doppler shift does occur measurably in radio signals when the two stations have a high enough speed difference between them. Since amateur radio satellites are low earth orbit satellites, the speed is measured in kilometers per second and the shift is there and should be taken into account. Shifts in the 70cm band are high enough that you need to retune the radio. As visible in the screenshot predict does calculate the frequencies when the satellite is visible.

gsat graphical client for predict screenshot

The interesting part is that predict and predict-g1yyh can also run as a server program where clients can access the data. One of the interesting clients is gsat from package predict-gsat. With gsat a world map is plotted with the home location and the satellite footprint visible and the data for antenna direction and doppler shift is shown.

gpredict screenshot main window

I also found package gpredict which is totally not related to predict. In my opinion gpredict has a more modern interface (it's gtk+ based) but it lacks support for doppler shift. This makes it somewhat less interesting for radio use.

gpredict screenshot radio control with doppler shift.

Update: gpredict can support doppler shift when it thinks it can control a radio. Configuring a radio with RX only support will make the 'Radio Control' window available where you can select the satellite and its services when it is known to gpredict under 'Target' or enter the uplink and downlink frequencies of the satellite by hand, select 'track' and see the result of the doppler shift calculations.

I wanted to experiment a bit with rtl_tcp on ritchie which has linux kernel 3.12, and after inserting the stick I noticed the following in the syslog:

[405465.908104] usb 1-3: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci-pci
[405466.052247] usb 1-3: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=2838
[405466.052274] usb 1-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[405466.052293] usb 1-3: Product: RTL2838UHIDIR
[405466.052310] usb 1-3: Manufacturer: Realtek
[405466.052328] usb 1-3: SerialNumber: 00000001
[405466.217234] usb 1-3: dvb_usb_v2: found a 'Realtek RTL2832U reference design' in warm state
[405466.285098] usb 1-3: dvb_usb_v2: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer
[405466.285208] DVB: registering new adapter (Realtek RTL2832U reference design)
[405466.348588] usb 1-3: DVB: registering adapter 0 frontend 0 (Realtek RTL2832 (DVB-T))...
[405466.378308] r820t 0-001a: creating new instance
[405466.390283] r820t 0-001a: Rafael Micro r820t successfully identified
[405466.397306] Registered IR keymap rc-empty
[405466.397785] input: Realtek RTL2832U reference design as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0f.5/usb1/1-3/rc/rc0/input5
[405466.404262] rc0: Realtek RTL2832U reference design as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0f.5/usb1/1-3/rc/rc0
[405466.449642] IR NEC protocol handler initialized
[405466.453552] IR RC5(x) protocol handler initialized
[405466.459768] IR RC6 protocol handler initialized
[405466.470835] usb 1-3: dvb_usb_v2: schedule remote query interval to 400 msecs
[405466.471385] IR JVC protocol handler initialized
[405466.474504] IR Sony protocol handler initialized
[405466.481423] IR SANYO protocol handler initialized
[405466.483311] usb 1-3: dvb_usb_v2: 'Realtek RTL2832U reference design' successfully initialized and connected
[405466.483477] usbcore: registered new interface driver dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
[405466.493045] input: MCE IR Keyboard/Mouse (dvb_usb_rtl28xxu) as /devices/virtual/input/input6
[405466.498074] IR MCE Keyboard/mouse protocol handler initialized
[405466.501562] lirc_dev: IR Remote Control driver registered, major 251 
[405466.510997] rc rc0: lirc_dev: driver ir-lirc-codec (dvb_usb_rtl28xxu) registered at minor = 0
[405466.511017] IR LIRC bridge handler initialized

It has valid drivers as dvb-t receiver and ir receiver now! That's not what I wanted, I want raw usb access for rtl_tcp. Time to blacklist certain modules:

blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
blacklist rtl2830
blacklist rtl2832
blacklist lirc_dev

And now no drivers get loaded and rtl_tcp has raw usb access again after updating the udev rules.

No success with gqrx using a remote rtl_tcp: audio was stuttering and frequency changes were visible in rtl_tcp but didn't really happen, there was a huge lag. Traffic between the system running rtl_tcp and gqrx was going over a wireless network, a linux router and a wired network. Bandwidth was not a problem.

I was considering running one rtl-sdr stick with the HF convertor in the shed so it would have less interference but that doesn't seem feasible at the moment.

Vandaag moest ik wat dingen met de auto doen. Daarmee kon ook de porto mee met de raamantenne aan de buitenkant van de auto. Dat werkte prima, PI3UTR was prima te volgen en een QSO maken lukte ook zonder problemen. Met dezelfde porto en hetzelfde vermogen waarmee ik op de ligfiets er maar moeilijk overheen kom lukte het met een net iets hogere antenne die zeker rechtop zit prima.

I use fvwm2 as window manager on an ubuntu system. This means that applications that use the gnome style libraries run fine, but it can be a bit harder to find the settings. I was playing with pavucontrol (another gnome app) when I noticed the setting 'system sounds volume' made the boingo noises come back when a window popped up such as a thunderbird password window or an gnome-ssh-askpass window. The definitive solution is to start gnome-conf-editor and disable boolean /desktop/gnome/sounds/event/sound/event_sounds. Silence again. Sound can be nice when playing music or viewing video but I don't want a sound every time I have to type a password/passphrase.

Uit de mail:

Dat u de inhoud van deze nieuwsbrief niet direct kunt lezen komt wellicht door de instellingen van uw browser.

Browser? Welke browser? Er is geen browser. Dit is een e-mail bericht, en ik kijk er naar met mutt.

Searching for the print header - COM port cable in the PC parts junk box for the new weatherstation on the alix.1c board gave 5 of them, 2 with db9 connectors and 3 with db25 connectors. I tested them all with a real telephone modem. In total 3 worked, 2 didn't but that may be because there are two different standards for it.

Wardriving results 3 May 2013 - 3 January 2014: 14554 new networks with GPS locations. All wardriving in this period using the WigleWifi app for Android.

Current todo list new weatherstation installation on ritchie:

• Set up udev rules for libusb access by non-root user so w1retap can run. Done, via a w1retap group. ✓
• Get w1retap to run on the system. Done ✓
• Get backups running using the amanda system. Done ✓
• Add serial cable from alix1c COM2 header to outside. I found out that there are two types of cables for this and the "Intel" version won't work. So if the PC parts junkbox has these cables they still need to be tested. Done ✓
• Get the conrad serial port weather station running on that port. Done ✓

That should get things moving to a level comparable to the current setup.

And the wishlist for improvements:

• Something to put the system in so it is in a good place in the shed and somewhat shielded from temperature/humidity influences.
• System statistics gathered. Wishlist: cpu load and states, processes, temperatures and voltages mainboard, temperature disk, entropy, ntp stats. ✓
• Logging done in a way data will be on the home server and interruptions of the network link will be handled. I'm starting to use the term telemetry to describe this process of gathering timestamped data, preparing it for transmission over maybe flaky network links and processing it on the server. Partly done, some data is still gathered in the 'old' style.
• A working gps receiver so it can work as a standalone time server.
• Get the rain meter of the conrad weather station set up.
• Get the wind speed meter (anemometer) of the conrad weather station set up.
• Get the wind direction meter set up.
• Upload the available weather information to the CWOP (citizen weather observatory program) using APRS-IS.

Ik was vandaag op de heuvel Hettenheuvel in het Bergherbosch bij Braamt. Ik had de porto mee en op een kant van de heuvel met zicht naar het westen probeerde ik PI3UTR te ontvangen wat lukte. Niet storingsvrij maar duidelijk genoeg om de callgever te verstaan (Q3). De repeater openen lukte niet met de 5W porto. Volgens het hoogtebestand Nederland is de hoogte daar 70 tot 90 meter.

Ik heb daarna eens aan deze link gerekend in Radio Mobile online en gezien dat van PI3UTR naar deze locatie line-of-sight precies door de bomen van de heuvelrug gaat. De afstand was dus iets meer dan 81 kilometer.

Dit geeft wel aan waarom deze repeaterfrequentie gecoördineerd moet worden met Duitsland: het Bergherbosch is nog net niet in Duitsland, maar het scheelt weinig. Op een hoge locatie aan de andere kant van de grens of bij condities zal deze zeker te ontvangen zijn.