News archive April 2016 - Koos van den Hout

This does not work as planned in mutt:

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Shows as

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I consider it testing at the moment, but you can visit https://idefix.net/. The mixed-content warning will not go away soon since I partly depend on images and audiofiles from sources not (yet) available via https.

A while ago I already pondered preparing links in my websites for https. With Let's Encrypt I can get free domain validating certificates for TLS encrypting my traffic. Even the subjectAltName extension is supported to get multiple domain names on one certificate. But it took me a while to really get around to implementing the rest and testing the results.

The standard way of using letsencrypt is a bit too much 'for dummies' to my taste. The suggested and supported method for using Let's Encrypt uses the standard Let's Encrypt client which is very good at modifying apache configurations on it's own.

I would like free certificates, but not at the price of letting that script do things to my webserver configuration. So I asked around and someone pointed me at letsencrypt-nosudo with the brilliant introduction:

I love the Let's Encrypt devs dearly, but there's no way I'm going to trust their script to run on my server as root, be able to edit my server configs, and have access to my private keys. I'd just like the free ssl certificate, please.

Exactly my thoughts. So I used that script, got my brain around what was happening and now I have a TLS certificate for a number of my private domains.

Uit de inbox:

Behandeld door : Factuur Internet
Direct tel. nr. : 082 - 453 75 39
Openstaande vordering, BELANGRIJK!
Geachte e-mail@example.com
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Blijft betaling uit, dan zijn wij genoodzaakt cliënt te adviseren om over te gaan tot het opstarten van een gerechtelijke procedure. De kosten die hieruit voortvloeien zullen geheel voor uw rekening komen. Voor directe betaling en meer informatie over deze vordering gaat u naar onze website U kunt hiervoor de gegevens gebruiken die op de factuur staan vermeld. U kunt hier ook terecht voor overige vragen.

Opvallende dingen:

• Er staat een 7-cijferig nummer in wat onzichtbaar gemaakt wordt met <font size="1" color="white">, dit nummer komt een aantal keren terug.
• Het rekeningnummer is ongeldig en lijkt absoluut niet op het rekeningnummer van Intrum Justitia Nederland
• Het telefoonnummer is niet van Intrum Justitia en wordt vaker gebruikt in valse e-mails

De link wijst naar iets anders wat weer redirect naar een downloadlink bij dropbox. En uiteindelijk komt er een zip file met:

Archive:  Factuur 00891884-937473.zip
Factuur 00891884-937473.pdff
  inflating: Factuur 00891884-937473.pdf.exe

Meer informatie van Intrum Justitia zelf via Valse e-mails misbruiken naam Intrum Justitia.

Geen DX deze keer maar gewoon nieuwe services bij MTVNL en wat verschuivingen.

Volgens Efteling Kids Radio terug via DAB+ in Amsterdam - radio.nl zal MTVNL op den duur de optie om aparte versies per regio meer gaan inzetten. Volgens radio-tv-nederland.nl is het al zo dat de versie in Eindhoven alleen Radio JND als DAB+ service heeft (terwijl die er hier in Utrecht dus ook bij zit).

Outgoing QSL cards

Radio amateurs are supposed to keep a logbook of all contacts (although it is not a legal requirement anymore!) and part of the amateur community likes confirming contacts with QSL cards. The term QSL is from the Q codes in radio which date back to radio telegraphy on ships. QSL as an answer means I am acknowledging receipt. I have my own QSL card for my old callsign PD4KH and I will need a new batch for PE4KH some day.

To save on the costs of sending those cards there are QSL bureaus in the world. I submit my cards to the Dutch QSL Bureau via my radio club and eventually cards for me end up at my radio club. I have sent out numbers of QSL cards and received numbers of QSL cards.

2016-04-23 03:28:14,406 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 179.43.141.220
2016-04-23 05:27:04,412 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 179.43.141.211
2016-04-23 07:38:12,542 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 179.43.144.8
2016-04-23 07:42:12,342 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 179.43.144.24
2016-04-23 09:29:20,761 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 179.43.141.198
2016-04-23 09:41:55,910 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 179.43.141.229
2016-04-23 09:49:40,855 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 179.43.144.21
2016-04-23 09:50:02,385 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 179.43.144.15

But this time from the Arabic Emirates.

This afternoon was a contact between Wellesley House School in Britain and Tim Peake on the International Space Station. So I decided to put the finished antenna rotor to good use since one of the triggers for building a rotor was getting my arms real tired on earlier ISS passes.

And indeed, I had no problem with holding the antenna. But it still took a while before I heard anything and the signal was not very good.

With lots of my fellow amateurs making contacts all over north and south america this should not be hard but while I have heard amateurs from south america I haven't been able to make any contacts south of Puerto Rico up until today. I saw PT7DX active on 20meter PSK31 and tried to answer him a few times. On the third try it worked and we had a short contact in which I thanked him for the new country.

The fun part is that I saw KB6NU in the US complain about HF propagation around the same time.

ISS SSTV April 2016 MAI-75 image received by PE4KH at JO22NC 20160415 1627Z

And a chance to receive an image from the Russian 'MAI-75' project. Originally I had a lot of trouble decoding the image with qsstv and the author of qsstv helped me find the ideal workflow. Upgrading qsstv and using a 48000 samples/second .wav file helped.

Earlier I played the audio in audacity and decoded in qsstv with pavucontrol setting the 'Monitor of builtin audio' as input for qsstv.

And while I had the amateur satellite gear out I checked for upcoming interesting passes and saw that SO-50 would pass right after the ISS pass between SSTV experiments.

I tracked the pass and heard activity, mostly from IZ5TEP with F0DTV. I tried answering a few times, to IZ5TEP and in general but no contacts. The amount of interference was not as bad as I heard a few times last year but it was not perfect amateur satellite behaviour either.

I saw people post more images which seemed to be from the MAI-75 SSTV program. I tried a pass at 18:27 UTC but heard nothing. Checking the article ISS Slow Scan TV in April - Amsat-UK shows that the ARISS commemorative SSTV event ended at 14 April 11:35 UTC and the first MAI-75 activity was 14:45 until 18:00 UTC. The next MAI-75 activity is Friday 15 April 14:10 until 19:00 UTC.

ISS SSTV April 2016 image 06/12 received by PE4KH at JO22NC 20160412 1920Z

In a later pass I received two partial images.

ISS SSTV April 2016 imagereceived by PE4KH at JO22NC 20160412 1920Z

The good news is that standing outside holding my Arrow antenna I did some serious thinking how the Arrow is going to fit on the antenna rotor. And I tested how reception is when I fix the elevation at around 20-25 degrees: fine.

ISS SSTV April 2016 image 12/12 received by PE4KH at JO22NC 20160412 1606Z

Today a nice pass which fit between two stages of cooking our dinner so I recorded the audio. Again I heard no signal but then I heard the starting tones of a slowscan TV image and saw the signal meter pegged to S9++ (the maximum).

One image was received in full.

In one of the articles about the current ISS SSTV event was a starting time of 19:25 18:25 UTC, and the pass over my QTH JO22NC started at 19:28 UTC. So I was out with the whole setup and a strong arm to aim the antenna at the ISS in the hope of receiving something.

But nothing was received. The fun part is that an ISS pass shortly after sundown gives a visual aid to aim the antenna at, but no signal received.

Also noticed by Mike Rupprecht DK3WN: ISS – no SSTV active - DK3WN Satblog with a very nice image.

Update: Corrected starting time after rereading ARISS commemorative event (April 11-14) - ARISS SSTV Images which has been updated with:

*** Update (April 11, 2016)
Looks like the start will be delayed. Seems the hardware is having issues and not transmitting. Troubleshooting is in work.

Update 2016-04-12: First images received now in Asia and available from the ARISS SSTV Gallery

The antenna rotor made its first turns. I mounted it to a very old stepladder which has an almost vertical part at the top.

The fun part is that with the upcoming ARISS SSTV event from ISS I could use a good rotor in the upcoming week.

New country today in amateur radio contacts: Japan. Another one of those lucky contacts without any planning, I just had the longwire antenna out to try if I could get a signal in the 6 meter band.

I saw a call from Japan, answered it, answered it again after raising the power level and the contact was made.

Naast mijn bijdrage Mills on the Air 2016 PE4KH hebben ook andere leden van de Veron afdeling A08 Centrum besloten mee te doen aan 'Mills on the Air' en wel bij een molen een stuk dichter bij: PI4UTR doet mee met Mills On The Air 2016!.

Ik hoop in ieder geval tijdens dat evenement zelf een verbinding te kunnen maken met PI4UTR/P.

This weekend I had a few hours to participate in the EA RTTY contest 2016. Propagation was mostly bad and I had a hard time decoding signals. There were some good moments, for example I did work YB6HAI from Indonesia again. His antenna park looks quite impressive too which helps. I switched a few times between the 20 and 40 meter band trying to find propagation and new callsigns to contact.

The end result was 76 QSO's (contacts) and the last one was in the last minute of the contest, logged at 15:59 UTC.

I already recieved the raw results from the EA PSK63 contest I participated in a few weeks ago which are presented in a very nice format on the contest website showing the buildup of the score.

The wireless card of the weather station computer in the shed is dual-band but with only a 2.4 GHz capable antenna. Since the house access-point is configured to support both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz channels the system sometimes selects the 5 GHz access and keeps having serious packet loss. I looked at ways to convince the driver to select 2.4 GHz channels only but found none, but then I found out wpa_supplicant can do this. But I configure wpa_supplicant through wpa-* options in /etc/network/interfaces so I had to find out how to configure it using those. The manpages for the interfaces file is very limited on the wpa-* options, but I found an explanation that a lot of wpa_supplicant options are supported, including the one to select frequencies. The sneaky part is that the option in wpa_supplicant.conf is freq_list and the option in /etc/network/interfaces is wpa-freq-list. A rather complete list can be found at Where can I find a full list of wpa-* options for the interfaces file? - superuser.com. So now I have in /etc/network/interfaces:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
        wpa-ssid default
        wpa-psk VerySecret
        wpa-freq-list 2412 2417 2422 2427 2432 2437 2442 2452 2457 2462 2467 2472

The ideal solution is to order a dual-band (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) antenna.

Update: Noticeable absent are channels 12 and 13 which are available for regulatory domain NL but are not listed when I ask the driver for available channels:

koos@ritchie:~$ /sbin/iwlist wlan0 chann
wlan0     19 channels in total; available frequencies :
          Channel 01 : 2.412 GHz
          Channel 02 : 2.417 GHz
          Channel 03 : 2.422 GHz
          Channel 04 : 2.427 GHz
          Channel 05 : 2.432 GHz
          Channel 06 : 2.437 GHz
          Channel 07 : 2.442 GHz
          Channel 08 : 2.447 GHz
          Channel 09 : 2.452 GHz
          Channel 10 : 2.457 GHz
          Channel 11 : 2.462 GHz
          Channel 36 : 5.18 GHz
          Channel 40 : 5.2 GHz
          Channel 44 : 5.22 GHz
          Channel 48 : 5.24 GHz
          Channel 52 : 5.26 GHz
          Channel 56 : 5.28 GHz
          Channel 60 : 5.3 GHz
          Channel 64 : 5.32 GHz
          Current Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)

And now I wonder why those are missing.