News archive September 2014 - Koos van den Hout

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.