News archive 2017 - Koos van den Hout

Since the powerfailure that caused problems for the weatherstation computer ritchie and the conclusion that even after the bios upgrade the serial ports kept failing there was no 'inside the shed' temperature.

But this week I needed a better view of the temperature inside the shed as we're using it to keep some meat cool. So I heated up the soldering iron and the heatshrink gun and made a cable with two DS18B20 sensors in it. I decided that if I started on measuring temperatures inside the shed I also wanted the temperature near the roof.

The interesting bit was adding the two sensors to the w1retap configuration. It seems the whole 1820 family of temperature sensors needs to be set up as a 'DS1820' and w1retap will find out how to read it. Resulting configuration:

28F24C5602000054:DS1820:Tempinside:TEMP0:⁰C::
286B545602000031:DS1820:Temproof:TEMP0:⁰C::

and now I have logging of the temperatures:

2017-12-29T16:28:00+0100 Tempinside 2.812500 ⁰C
2017-12-29T16:28:00+0100 Temproof 2.687500 ⁰C

And it helps us to determine when we need to make space in our fridge and move some other things to the shed to keep them somewhat cool.

Before I expose anything to the outside world I want the access controls to work as I expect, but things have changed a lot in Apache 2.4.

Standard for a site that's normally available is now in 2.4:

        <Directory "/home/httpd/idefix/html">
                Require all granted
        </Directory>

(and any other needed options). But for development systems I want a username/password request to access them. This part took a bit of work to get right. First I found Upgrading to 2.4 from 2.2 - Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4 has a repeating typo in the authorization samples:

AuthBasicProvider File

isn't going to work, giving

Unknown Authn provider: File

error messages. The right bit is:

AuthBasicProvider file

The difference one letter makes.

That also did not give me a working configuration, leading to interesting errors in the log of type:

AH00027: No authentication done but request not allowed without authentication for /. Authentication not configured?

Which turned out to be a missing bit in the samples in the same document: the AuthType is needed too.

The full now working access rule is:

    <Location "/">
        AuthType Basic
        AuthBasicProvider file
        AuthUserFile /home/httpd/data/sitemanagers
        AuthName "Koos z'n Doos beheer"
        <RequireAny>
            Require valid-user
        </RequireAny>
    </Location>

The use of RequireAny allows me to add trusted IP ranges so that the site is reachable from a trusted IP address or after using http basic authentication.

The good news is that the samples in Authentication and Authorization - Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4 are correct.

In the new homeserver I want an haproxy running on the "router" so it can route http requests to the right backend. At the moment I am testing this and after the 'http' config I'm now testing the 'https' part. To keep things consistent things that come in via https also get requested via https from the backends.

For testing I have some ports on the main server forwarded to haproxy so I can test with all aspects of host-header based routing. After some searching I found out that when I visit http://developer.urlurl.org:8080/ the header is set to

Host: developer.urlurl.org:8080

And this wasn't routed to the 'development' server. The production server is the 'default' so I searched for the right incantation to test the domain name part and found:

acl devsite hdr_dom(host) -i developer.urlurl.org

And now it's a config that will test on developer.urlurl.org port 8080 and will run on port 80 too. I like configurations that I can test before bringing them into production.

While doing some upgrades on new homeserver I ran into a problem with the tun/tap network driver which is needed for virtual machines, giving the error message

Dec 27 21:41:51 conway kernel: [  266.832675] tun: Unknown symbol dev_get_valid_name (err 0)

Since virtual machines are the main thing to run in this machine I needed this driver to work. Searching for solutions found the suggestion to reinstall the linux kernel image, which I did:

# apt-get install --reinstall linux-image-$(uname -r)
# apt-mark auto linux-image-$(uname -r)

After which the system came up fine but without a network connection it seemed. This is irritating as the homeserver is in the attic and I found out the VGA screen up there does not cooperate with the new server. So another VGA screen got dragged up there to fix it.

Some searching later I found the eth2 and eth3 interfaces got swapped from what I expected. These are the two mainboard interfaces, both Intel interfaces but with different chipsets. There is a /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules which sets this up but it isn't working at the moment:

In the system logs:

[    2.833442] udevd[542]: Error changing net interface name eth2 to eth3: File exists
[    2.834309] udevd[542]: could not rename interface '4' from 'eth2' to 'eth3': File exists
[    2.866356] udevd[538]: Error changing net interface name eth3 to eth2: File exists
[    2.868197] udevd[538]: could not rename interface '5' from 'eth3' to 'eth2': File exists

Maybe different names that don't start with eth will work better to get truely persistant names as the current situation isn't very stable and reliable.

After all the work the tun/tap driver works again so the virtual machines now start fine.

Yesterday on the 26th of December I saw FT8 activity on the 10 meter amateur radio band (28.0 MHz-29.7 MHz) and made a few contacts. Propagation dropped around 12:35 UTC after which I made one contact with a nearby amateur.

Today I spun the big dial on the radio to the 10 meter band after dark and made contacts (around 17:20 UTC). This is extra special as the maximum frequency at which propagation across the ionosphere occurs drops after the sun stops illuminating it and therefore the 10 meter band is the first band to drop after sunset.

All this was predicted: the most recent 'space weather news' had some good news for radio amateurs. Today I found an article The sun will probably knock out the grid someday | Popular Science which mentions the 'Space Weather Woman' Tamitha Skov and her youtube channel TamithaSkov. I have watched a few episodes and I read articles here and there with the predictions of solar flares and solar wind.

This morning I noticed some to me new amounts of sshd noise in the log:

Dec 26 01:55:43 server sshd[31415]: Bad protocol version identification '\200F\001\003\001' from 185.110.132.140
Dec 26 01:56:24 server sshd[31466]: Bad protocol version identification '\200F\001\003\001' from 185.110.132.140
Dec 26 01:56:53 server sshd[31475]: Bad protocol version identification '\200F\001\003\001' from 185.110.132.140
Dec 26 01:57:33 server sshd[31499]: Bad protocol version identification '\200F\001\003\001' from 185.110.132.140
Dec 26 01:58:17 server sshd[31691]: Bad protocol version identification '\200F\001\003\001' from 185.110.132.140
Dec 26 01:58:51 server sshd[31749]: Bad protocol version identification '\200F\001\003\001' from 185.110.132.140
Dec 26 01:59:32 server sshd[31773]: Bad protocol version identification '\200F\001\003\001' from 185.110.132.140

Dec 26 12:07:58 server sshd[16434]: Bad protocol version identification '\200F\001\003\001' from 185.110.132.140
Dec 26 12:08:55 server sshd[16687]: Bad protocol version identification '\200F\001\003\001' from 185.110.132.140
Dec 26 12:09:52 server sshd[16743]: Bad protocol version identification '\200F\001\003\001' from 185.110.132.140

Going on and on and on and..

So I looked it up and found How to block Bad protocol version? · Issue #1284 · fail2ban/fail2ban · GitHub which has a simple rule to block this with fail2ban. As soon as the sshd.local was loaded a block was set for 185.110.132.140.

As if one new country today wasn't enough, I also managed to get Armenia in the log with station EK1KE also in FT8 mode.

A special first for me: an amateur radio contact with Australia, with VK3EW who seems to be a serious DX chaser. For me, this is almost the other side of the world.

This was an FT8 contact, which is a digital mode specific for making contacts with very weak signals using the minimal exchange of information to have a valid contact. I think the neighbours have heard my happy shout after I saw the first response come back to me. The exciting part was making it a full contact complete with signal reports exchanged.

The distance of this contact is 16581 kilometers! The scaling of the generated maps at PE4KH amateur radio has been adjusted to make this contact visible.

Vijf jaar geleden deed ik mee aan de hackcontest ter ere van 20 jaar SURFcert. Vijf jaar verder ben ik zelf lid van het SURFcert team en heb ik mee georganiseerd aan de hackcontest / capture the flag op 8 december. Dit keer was het een 'capture the flag' stijl wedstrijd waarbij teams van maximaal 4 personen streden om de eer. Bij een 'capture the flag' moet je uit diverse puzzels herkenbare 'flags' (vlaggen) vinden, zeer herkenbare speciale strings in bestanden. Ik had me vooral beziggehouden met flags in bestanden in allerlei vormen zoals commentaar in een plaatje (als morse) of een flag in een bestand in een textfile in een zip file achter een jpg file geplakt.

Vrijdag hebben er 4 teams gespeeld. Ze hebben de hele dag nodig gehad en een groot deel van de uitdagingen opgelost. Er was ook een team van de UU bij, die zijn zeer eervol derde geworden.

Dit keer zat ik dus aan de andere kant en zat mijn creativiteit niet in het oplossen van de challenges maar in het maken er van. Wat ik gemaakt had werd gewaardeerd en sommigen lieten zich op het verkeerde been zetten waar anderen juist dwars door mijn misleiding heen keken. Het ernstigste geval 'verstoppen in het volle zicht' (hiding in plain sight) was een flag die in een titel van de standaard webpagina zat. Niet iedereen had die gezien.

Although reports are showing up that AO-91 has the usual 'zoo' when it's over southern Europe I still want to prepare for making contacts on interesting passes. So I dove into adding satellite transponder details to Gpredict again. According to [amsat-bb] AMSAT-OSCAR 91 identified it is Norad object 43017. And when Nico Janssen finds a satellite using his methods of doppler-curve fitting it's a very good indication it's the right one.

So time to create a .config/Gpredict/trsp/43017.trsp with the right frequencies and details:

[Fox-1B trsp 67 Hz PL]
UP_LOW=435250000
DOWN_LOW=145960000
MODE=FM

Now to find a pass at a for me usable time.

Today I had some time left and the choice was between staying at home and throwing out the endfed and making a lot of contacts in digital modes or going out and trying a nearby park and making a lot less contacts but learning about my options there.

I chose the latter one: I loaded my gear in the bicycle trailer and cycled to a nearby park, just outside the city limits of Utrecht. I took the fiber mast and used two elastic straps to tie it to a parkbench. The effect was that the mast was slanted but using it with the wire of the endfed twisted around it the fiber mast stayed up fine without needing its guy wires. And I forgot to bring the tent pegs anyway so I was unable to guy the mast.

I tried the endfed as a vertical with some slack at the bottom and the transformer at the bottom. This gave me a horrible standing wave ratio on 40 and 20 meters. I guess the endfed is only balanced when it is stretched. The quick fix was to add a common-mode choke in the coax to the radio. I also added a counterpoise wire to the earth of the endfed to be somewhat balanced again.

On the 40 meter band reception was ok but I could not understand a lot of stations. On the 20 meter band there was local interference.

In the end I logged one whole contact on the 40 meter band with an Italian special event station. He gave me a 4-4 report and I gave him a 5-9+. After a few tries I gave up making him log me as /portable so I logged it in my PE4KH log. The location is still within JO22NC so I logged in my home log.

As soon as the sun set it started cooling down and the grass got wet and I went home.

It's a nice location and quite reachable from home. It's 10 minutes cycling and in 10 minutes I had the mast and the radio set up.

I am noticing lots and lots of distributed SSH scanning, not doing enough attempts from one IP address to trigger fail2ban. Timing and choice of login names used suggest a strong link between the ssh attempts even when source IPs are very different. Login names also refer to websites hosted on the same address.

At a given moment I started wondering if this was just me, but others reported the same and exchanging IP address lists showed a lot of matches between attacks on totally unrelated systems.

Note: even with full name mapping enabled you will still have problems. To get this mapping fully working you will need to establish trust relations via kerberos.

When I shared my article on NFSv4 on the synology I noticed I left out the fundamentals about Linux and NFSv4 with name mapping. All kernels I nowadays run into have the same preference to disable using names over NFSv4 because somewhere the decision was made to assume most Linux systems will be in an environment with centralized UID/GID management.

In any environment with devices with their own UID/GID management (such as synology devices without central LDAP) this will not be true. So the defaults need an override.

The runtime way to change this is, for the nfs client kernel process:

# echo N > /sys/module/nfs/parameters/nfs4_disable_idmapping

And for the nfsd server kernel process:

# echo N > /sys/module/nfsd/parameters/nfs4_disable_idmapping

Notice the one letter difference.

To make this change more permanent, set up a file with a name like /etc/modprobe.d/local-config.conf with

options nfs nfs4_disable_idmapping=0
options nfsd nfs4_disable_idmapping=0

And you still need to set /etc/idmapd.conf on all systems involved (both clients and servers) with the same value for the 'Domain'. I obviously have:

[General]

Verbosity = 0
Pipefs-Directory = /run/rpc_pipefs
# set your own domain here, if id differs from FQDN minus hostname
Domain = idefix.net

[Mapping]

Nobody-User = nobody
Nobody-Group = nogroup

And enable idmapd. How you enable this depends on your Linux distribution. In ubuntu server it's in /etc/default/nfs-common with

# Do you want to start the idmapd daemon? It is only needed for NFSv4.
NEED_IDMAPD=yes

I read the Dutch version of "The Cuckoo's Egg" when it came out in 1989. Later I bought the English version.

Via a complete diversion I found out this weekend the book was made into a TV documentary: The KGB, the Computer and Me which has a lot less personal diversions than the book. It is played by Clifford Stoll himself and others involved in the original story. Although the CIA guys look a bit more stereotypical than they come out in the book.

A very interesting part is there is a closing remark in the documentary by Markus Hess. Now I want to get a view of the movie of the other side, '23'.

The funny part is that I found this documentary from following news related to amateur radio: Cliff Stoll -- K7TA -- Has THE KNACK. And a GREAT NOVA Video. Clifford Stoll does have a callsign: K7TA

Framebuffer is nice but I want it really disabled on my new homeserver 2017 because that will end up in the attic where I don't want a repeat of the earlier Linux-related radio interference problem. And for virtual machines it's a bit of overkill too.

To disable framebuffer in both grub and the running Linux it has to be disabled twice. Both in /etc/default/grub which now has these two lines:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset"

GRUB_TERMINAL=console

This solution fails at the moment I start using rsync to sync directories to the Synology. Update when I find out where that goes wrong.

I am now using a synology for storage in the home network. Linux clients use NFS to access the Synology, and nowadays the default NFS version is version 4, which does things quite differently from version 3. NFS version 4 is supposed to use user names with NFS domain names and rpc.idmapd instead of numeric user and group IDs.

After serious debugging I found out NFSv4 with the synology doesn't use names as I expected. I kept looking at nfs client settings but eventually I used tcpdump, wireshark and tshark to find out owner names aren't used at all. Numerical UIDs are used as text in the NFSv4 answers, even for files that have an owner that is known in the synology. As if the nfs4_disable_idmapping=0 is never set for the NFS server.

I confirmed this with capturing the NFS traffic with tcpdump and analyzing the pcap files with wireshark and tshark. I indeed see:

                        reco_attr: Owner (36)
                            fattr4_owner: 1026
                                length: 4
                                contents: 1026

A lot of google searching confirms this, including anyone have nfsv4 actually working? - Synology Forum. The next step is to adjust the idmapping in the running kernel on the synology, using:

# echo N > /sys/module/nfsd/parameters/nfs4_disable_idmapping

Now I indeed see the right strings in the NFSv4 traffic, but the idmapd on the client doesn't translate for some reason. Fixing the /etc/idmapd.conf file helped.

The next step is to make this change permanent on the synology. Adding a file /etc/modules.local.conf with

module_nfsd_args="nfs4_disable_idmapping=0"

does the trick. This I learned from reading the startup file /etc/rc.subr which loads the kernel modules.

And now I see the right data in the NFS traffic:

                        reco_attr: Owner (36)
                            fattr4_owner: koos.at.idefix.net
                                length: 15
                                contents: koos.at.@idefix.net

And the user mapping works. On an older system I have UID 501, on the synology I have UID 1026 and on a new system I have UID 1000, and I'm owner of the files everywhere.

I decided to try to receive telemetry data from the Fox-1A (AO85) satellite to prepare for receiving telemetry from the new RadFxSat right after launch. The FoxTelem program is ready to receive data from all the Fox series satellites so this was a good way to test my receiving setup.

This afternoon there was a reasonable pass so I decided to give it a try. With the FT-857D radio tuned to the downlink frequency 145.978 MHz in FM packet mode. While I did hear the conversations on the satellite in the noise the program did not seem to receive anything. And then I noticed the sound display in the program reacted strongly when I tapped the microphone connected to the mixing board. I chose the wrong audio device. I have two USB audio devices connected to the computer, one feeds audio from a mixing desk and one feeds audio from the radio. Normally I can keep them apart but FoxTelem was only showing one of them.

The solution was to set FoxTelem to the audio device 'default' and use pavucontrol to switch the input of the application to the right USB audio device. But by the time I figured that out the satellite was already too far to receive any useful telemetry data.

Time to find another nice pass with useful elevation (above 10 degrees) to try this again. And it's a good preparation for the launch of Fox-1B.

The subset of radio amateurs that is interested in amateur satellites is waiting for the launch of RadFxSat / Fox 1B. The name 'RadFxSat' stands for 'Radiation Effects Satellite'. The primary mission is in cooperation with Vanderbilt University ISDE studying radiation effects on commercial off the shelf components.

The amateur radio mission is a FM U/v repeater with CTCSS, which means it can be used by radio amateurs to make long distance contacts.

As any new satellite, the first phase after launch is a lot of testing before any experiments or radio services are started. During the testing phase the satellite will transmit short radio messages (audio with data mixed in as low frequency tones) with telemetry data. By receiving the telemetry data and forwarding it to the operators radio amateurs can help the testing. This telemetry includes voltages and temperatures which allow the operator to find out if the satellite operates as designed and whether the power budget (generated power from solar panels minus used power) is good.

To receive telemetry from the Fox series satellites and forward it a program has been developed named FoxTelem and I am glad to see a linux version is available. This allows me to receive the satellite unattended and forward the data. I will at least try to participate in the 'Launch and Early Orbit program' during the first few days.

Current launch date is planned at November 14th.

More information:

• RadFxSat (Fox 1B) - Gunter's Space Page
• Getting Ready for RadFxSat (Fox-1B) - AMSAT-NA
• RadFxSat (Fox-1B) Launch Delayed; AMSAT Asks for Patience During Commissioning - ARRL

I'm easily amused by the rejects in the maillog clearly caused by spammers using ancient lists.

For example, I'm still seeing attempts to mail the address that I used for signing up to linkedin. When the first spam came after the linkedin breach in 2012, I changed the address and disabled the original address. But spam for that address still came in this week.

Tijd om weer eens een DAB services scan te doen. Een extra reden was omdat bij de scan op de Pure DAB+ radio zelfs de Vlaamse multiplex binnenkwam.

Bij de scan met de Noxon USB stick kwamen die niet meer binnen (en waren tegelijkertijd aan het wegvallen op de Pure radio), maar die heeft weer even de Duitse landelijke multiplex gezien. Maar de regio's Noord/Oost en Zuid kwamen dit keer niet in de scan. De typische volgorde van kanalen komt trouwens omdat de Noxon software de scanvolgorde nog altijd geoptimaliseerd heeft voor de Duitse situatie en dus de scan begint bij 5C.

Met alle testen met lokale radio via DAB+ is dat nog steeds niet in de buurt actief geworden.

Opvallend is dat MTVNL op 5B opduikt. Op 12B had ik wel MTVNL maar volgens Muxxi zonder services (0 CU in gebruik).

Dear Professor Epocafe,

Yes, there is an e-mail address that looks like repocafe@ but it's not a person.

I needed to look up some gpg commands and found GPG Cheat Sheet and it had what I was looking for.

Looking at this page I found this gem:

Ok, so what if you're a paranoid bastard and want to encrypt some of your own files, so nobody can break into your computer and get them? Simply encrypt them using yourself as the recipient.

That makes me a paranoid bastard since I use this to store passwords and other secrets.

This weekend was the CQ World Wide DX Contest. This is indeed another phone (voice) contest, so I connected headset, footswitch and the remote head of my radio. I had some time to participate on Sunday early afternoon and Sunday evening. On Sunday afternoon the logical band to try was 20 meters, on Sunday evening 40 meters. In the end I made 51 contacts.

All I did was 'search and pounce', checking for stations calling CQ that I could understand good enough and transmit my call back to them in the hope they would hear me. Some stations had me on the first try, some took several tries and some never heard me. The DX that got away was a Kazakhstan station who could not decode my call even after several tries.

I used the yfktest contest software for Linux again. This wasn't very hard as yfktest has a standard definition for the CQWW DX contest.

I heard both serious contest stations and single operators just calling CQ on the air. Interesting was to work OH1LWZ/M who according to his qrz page is really contesting mobile from his car or bicycle.

For next time I have to check the compression and gain settings for SSB on my Yaesu FT-857D radio when using the headset.

Claimed results:

Band    QSO    Qpts   Dupes Countries Zones
-------------------------------------------
  20     40      48       0      15       5
  40     11      19       0       9       6
-------------------------------------------
 ALL     51      67       0      24      11
===========================================
 Total Score: 2,345

A few times I heard the contest call PA0AA of my radio club who worked very hard to get the antenna at the club ready for contesting, but only in the background when I was trying other calls. It would have been nice to get them in the log.

Ondertussen leven we op ruim 5 jaar sinds de eerste spam die te herleiden was tot een belgische lijst maar er kwam er vandaag weer een binnen van een belgisch bedrijf met kenmerken die lijken op de eerste spam die binnenkwam. Dus ook Kleurstempel.be gebruikt spamlijsten. Die ondertussen oud zijn.

En ook Aqua service gebruikt oude spamlijsten. En bijvoorbeeld ook ART-company.

Eerder, eerder, eerder, eerder.

I had time this week to test the fibermast I ordered and I wanted to do this at a location away from houses. Someone suggested the location 'Trintelhaven' which is a small harbour in the dike between Enkhuizen and Lelystad. This is a harbour of refuge in which ships on the Ijsselmeer can find a safe location to spend the night or wait out a storm.

Usually I do my outdoor radio activities at cycling distance, but this was an interesting location, I had the day available and I felt like going a bit further.

The Trintelhaven is originally an island created for the construction of the dike between Enkhuizen and Lelystad, which was going to form the 'Markerwaard'. But that plan was cancelled and now it is the 'Markermeer' (lake) with a new project to bring more life into it.

In the end I learned things about the new fiber mast, played radio, enjoyed the outdoors and had fun.

Someone has been looking at websites I run to think of ssh login names to try:

Oct 16 16:21:53 greenblatt sshd[19367]: Invalid user weather from 223.194.227.104
Oct 16 16:22:11 greenblatt sshd[19387]: Invalid user weatherstation from 223.194.227.104
Oct 16 16:55:07 greenblatt sshd[22596]: Invalid user weerstation from 223.194.227.104

All valid and published websites on this system: http://weather.idefix.net/, http://weatherstation.idefix.net/, http://weerstation.idefix.net/.

Ages ago my first homecomputer was a Commodore VIC-20. I did basic programming on it and played some games. I remember the game Centipede and loading games from audio cassette.

These days games seem to be enormously complex and expensive or filled with advertisments. I don't like these, the last time I seriously invested time in a game was Pinball Dreams.

I found out about the VIC-20 emulator xvic, part of the vice package. I even bought a cheap USB joystick to use. I never had a joystick with my VIC-20 so it was about time to get one. This joystick is a DragonRise Inc. Generic USB Joystick (yes, including the spaces) and I noticed today it wasn't working right: up and down on the joystick did not work. I found out eventually the left and right on the second stick mapped to up and down, thanks to a simple joystick tester from Joystick - Denialwiki in 7 lines of Basic.

Some searching found DragonRise USB Driver Issue - RetroPie which mentions this issue in hid-dr.ko happened in Linux 4.4 - 4.9.

I did not feel like going back to compiling my own kernels for this laptop, but there is a simple solution in Ubuntu 16.04: use hwe (hardware enablement) kernels. These seem to be aimed at the long term support server versions, but they fix my joystick problem and I can play centipede.

I got around again to working on the new homeserver 2017 and I worked on the installation of a 'testing' virtual machine with virt-install. This test machine also runs devuan linux. The first application I was testing on there is haproxy.

I noticed some defaults I did not expect (such as preferring IPv4 over IPv6). It seems the 'stable' devuan has the same age issues as 'stable' debian. Otherwise haproxy does what it is supposed to and I may standardize on it.

Upgrading was easy, I looked at Upgrading Devuan Jessie to Ascii and just changed jessie to ascii in /etc/apt/sources.list and did an apt-get dist-upgrade. The only minor issue afterwards is that the system now insists on using framebuffer video, which I find overkill for a virtual machine. VGA 80x25 is fine.

After working through the results of my participation in the Russian worldwide digimode contest 2017 I decided to run a graph again of contacts per month as I did in Februari 2017. And remember how I made those graphs this time and save it in a plot script.

And the plotscript:

set output "qslcount.png"
set terminal png size 440,300 fontscale 0.7
set timefmt "%Y-%m"
set xlabel "Month"
set ylabel "Number of contacts"
set xdata time
set style data lines
set xtics format "%b %Y" 
set xtics rotate
plot "dataset-qsocount" using 1:2 title "Contacts/Month"

The interesting peak in January 2017 is still visible, it was caused by two contests I participated in: the ARRL RTTY roundup 2017 and the UBA PSK63 prefix contest 2017.

Past weekend was the Russian worldwide digimode contest edition 2017. I mounted the endfed antenna outside and participated when time was available.

Thinks went good in search and pounce mode, there were multiple instances of making more than one contact in the same minute according to the log. Calling cq gave less response but I also got some contacts logged that way.

Band  QSOs Dupes Points Mults
160      0     0      0     0
80       0     0      0     0
40      46     0    280    32
20      41     0    129    35
15       0     0      0     0
10       0     0      0     0
======================================
Total   87     0    409    67
Claimed score is 27403 points

Since I operated in more than one band and with power above QRP levels I entered in the SINGLE-OP ALL HIGH category.

I am used to being unable to unmount filesystems as long as they are NFS exported. It took me a while to find out how to correctly unexport filesystems before trying to unmount them. The easy solution would be to unexport everything and just export the other filesystems, but I'd rather not interrupt NFS availability of other filesystems.

So it was time to check some large filesystems again and I'd rather not do that during boot as it can delay booting for up to an hour. Currently those filesystems are exported via IPv4 and IPv6. Removing the export for IPv4 is easy:

# exportfs -u 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0:/export

But for IPv6 it gets harder:

# exportfs -u 2001:db8:a::/64:/export
exportfs: Invalid unexporting option: 2001

So it is still exported via IPv6. And next thing I try to unmount it and notice it's ok to unmount a filesystem that is only exported via IPv6. I guess this shows some interesting bug.

In today's mail problems:

   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to ecp-nl.mail.protection.outlook.com.:
>>> DATA
<<< 450 4.7.26 Service does not accept messages sent over IPv6 [2001:980:14ca:61::13] unless they pass either SPF or DKIM validation (message not signed) [VE1EUR01FT036.eop-EUR01.prod.protection.outlook.com]
<info@ecp.nl>... Deferred: 450 4.7.26 Service does not accept messages sent over IPv6 [2001:980:14ca:61::13] unless they pass either SPF or DKIM validation (message not signed) [VE1EUR01FT036.eop-EUR01.prod.protection.outlook.com]
Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours
Will keep trying until message is 5 days old

Rerouting mail for ecp.nl via xs4all servers in the hopes of getting it delivered.

Some research shows me that the xs4all outgoing mailservers (smtp.xs4all.nl) do offer incoming connectivity via IPv6 but don't connect to the IPv6 addresses of mailservers they are trying to reach.

The imap server where I fetch my work mail changed and suddenly the enigmail plugin on one system could not decrypt gpg-encrypted messages anymore with a 'partial decrypt' error. I remember seeing this before but had to look up the details.

Found again, it's a setting in enigmail (not in the general thunderbird preferences!), Enigmail → Preferences → select Advanced → Only download attachments when opened (IMAP only) has to be unchecked.

Answer found via Resolving Thunderbird/Enigmail decryption errors for encrypted emails with large attachments

This weekend was the CQ WW RTTY Contest 2017. I participated when possible in an otherwise very filled weekend.

In the end I made 81 contacts, 32 on the 20 meter band and 49 on the 40 meter band. One station in the US, KI1G in the state of Rhode Island (a new state). And the counter of worked DXCC's went up one, so I was browsing the log trying to find out which was the new country and it turned out that I made the first contact with Luxembourgh, LX7X. I will put that call on the list for a QSL card.

Finishing the log took a while. I set fldigi to contest style "CQWW RTTY" and used that template to export the log. But the logged CQ zone and state did not show in the Cabrillo export. I had to do that all by hand. Next time prepare the macros to log this correctly!

As noted the last time I operated portable from an outdoor location it would be easier to deploy outside with a portable fiber mast. I borrowed a fiber mast for supporting an antenna earlier and it was really nice to have this option. It takes a bit of work to set it up, but it makes HF antenna work easy.

So I wanted one myself. The advice from fellow club members was to look at the offerings at DX-Wire which includes fiberglass telescopic poles and accessories to set them up. I ordered the 11,5m GRP pole "MIDI" complete with a spool of guying wire, a guying ring and other material to be able to set it up.

After the problems with the laptop controlling the radio when I participated in the SCC RTTY contest 2017 I decided to build a common mode choke. This is a filter that should keep the radio frequency signals at the side of the antenna.

Based on the simple design with a piece of PVC pipe with 8 windings of Aircell-7 coax I still had lying around. The PVC pipe was donated by a fellow radio amateur who had it in his junkbox.

I drew a pencil line on the pipe, decided where to drill holes for the coax cable (using a 16 millimeter drill) and where to drill holes for tiewraps to hold the coax. After drilling the holes it was a matter of winding the coax correctly, mounting the cable with tiewraps and soldering the connectors to the cable.

In the first testing the filter worked fine, completely stopping the interference to the keyboard of my "shack computer" and even reducing incoming noise on the 10 meter band.

Common mode choke: materials

Common mode choke: finding where to drill holes

Common mode choke: holes drilled

Common mode choke: cable mounted

Common mode choke: connectors done

I realized today I never wrote an article about finishing the linked dipole kit I bought a year ago and started making my own dipole from Linked dipole portable HF antenna kit.

I used the SARK100 antenna analyzer to test it on each band: first 15 meter, after that 20 meter and I finished with 40 meter. I did 15 and 20 meter on two separate meetings at my radio club and 40 meter in a park near our home. As mentioned by others you need to take the time to tune this antenna to the right length. Each band took me about 2 hours which turned out to be what I could do in one evening at the radio club.

The proof is always the first contact and that happened when I brought it on our holiday to Germany and Austria. The tree behind our tent at the campsite in Austria was not high enough to support the 40 meter length of the antenna but I just set it up for 20 meters and that worked fine. It's remarkable how forgiving this antenna is after tuning. I just set up something resembling an inverted V and my radio found it near perfect, very little reading on the SWR meter.

First completed contact was with a radio amateur at the same campsite so that wasn't very hard. I did hear a Dutch radio amateur using a serious amplifier to try to reach me but lacking output power he did not hear my answer.

Anyway, project officially finished.

Ik had een hik vandaag met de DSL verbinding en toen was ineens de snelheid 15 mbit downstream en 1.2 mbit upstream in plaats van 103 mbit downstream en 27 mbit upstream wat ik meestal gewend ben. Het leken wel ADSL2 snelheden. Ook met maar 512 carriers van de 4096 in gebruik. Toch was het DSL profiel nog wel 17a, wat een VDSL profiel is.

Na een tweede hik was de snelheid weer gewoon wat ik gewend was met vectored VDSL.

Update 2017-09-11: De snelheid blijft toch inzakken. De verbinding is nog stabiel maar ik verwacht eigenlijk problemen in de komende tijd. Het regent veel de laatste dagen dus het kan zijn dat er ergens water in de telefoonkabels terecht komt.

Update 2017-09-12: En na een nieuwe hik is de snelheid weer terug. Het blijft magie, maar omdat het radiofrequenties zijn verwacht ik dit soort magie.

I was reading about a solar flare maybe coming in the direction of earth on several places related to amateur radio. Propagation via the ionosphere is affected by solar flares: a solar flare will change the ionization of the ionosphere seriously.

By chance I had wsjt-x running decoding FT8 signals this morning but I was busy with other stuff. When I returned to the radio shack the last decode was at 11:55:30 UTC and not a single decode after that, and just the local noise on the radio.

For ages the whole 'right to be forgotten' issue was something happening to other people for me. The worst I do on my website is name spammers that keep sending me unsollicited e-mail.

This changed when I started playing with old files from BBS Koos z'n Doos including old BBS lists.

A few years after I started putting these on-line I received a request to remove a name from the lists. This person advertised running a 'hardcore sex' BBS in the 1990s. But in 2013 the rather unique name of this person showed up with a decent company and in this BBS list.

I could imagine that this person had no idea in the 1990s what someone might do years later with that information. At the same time it felt bad to 'change history'. Those were original files, it felt bad to change them. But after consideration I changed the name to spaces.

I also received notice from the google webmaster program that some search results are hidden on bbs.idefix.net. I have no idea which ones or what names I should mask.

The whole 'right to be forgotten' is a typical 'shades of gray' subject.

Again this year had the SCC RTTY contest in the same weekend as the barbeque of the radio club so the solution was to work in the contest from the location of the radio club. I set up with the endfed antenna in the available field.

That field is close to some houses so I had some interference. And the main problem was that the computer control between the laptop running fldigi (the contest logging software) and the radio regularly gave problems, usually leaving the radio in transmit mode. The laptop and the computer interface aren't shielded very well which is probably a reason, combined with the use of the endfed antenna which is known for causing interference since it's an asymmetric antenna.

In the end I made 53 contacts. Less than the number of contacts in previous SCC RTTY contest but I had limited time and local noise was higher than I expected. For a next time I am working on a common mode choke to limit interference to the computer and maybe some noise. And probably next time I contest at the radio club I will try to use a different antenna location.

This morning I had some time and a good reason to leave the house. So I packed the radio, batteries and headphones and loaded all of it in the trailer of the recumbent and cycled to the bend in the road with a table and some trees where I operated portable before.

The local noise was very low again, about S1 on the 20 meter amateur band and about S4 on the 40 meter band. But conditions made the 20 meter band very quiet so I tried answering some calls on the 40 meter band first. In total I had 5 contacts, three of which were activations in the world wide flora and fauna program. Some of the contacts later in the morning were on the 20 meter band after it opened up.

All in all a nice way to spend the morning. Things noticed:

• My newest lead-acid battery is failing already. It has trouble charging and when the charger thinks it is full it will drop output voltage way too fast. Time for a new battery with more capacity. 20 to 25 amp-hours would be a good value.
• Getting a rope up in a tree is still annoying, I had to try way too many times. I am looking at fiber poles for portable operations. That would also mean there are possible locations for operating outdoor portable a lot closer to our home. Just a parkbench and some way to tie the fiber mast to something vertical is enough.

Other people from my radioclub were reporting they uploaded FT8 contacts to LoTW so I wanted to try this too. I uploaded earlier contacts as 'DATA' (and got some confirmations) but FT8 is the correct mode so I wanted to re-upload them.

After my earlier experiences uploading FT8 contacts to eQSL I expected some database work to be able to upload those contacts again. Finding the right field to set to the right value was a bit of work since I expected the approach to be similar but it wasn't. In the end:

$ mysql -S /home/koos/.config/cqrlog/database/sock cqrlog002
mysql> update cqrlog_main set lotw_qsls = '' where mode='FT8';
Query OK, 77 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Rows matched: 78  Changed: 77  Warnings: 0

That's after trying most lotw related fields and values.

Almost two years after I ordered QSL cards for PD4KH they ran out. I had to print stickers with the PE4KH call sign for a while to update the cards.

Now I had time to make new cards and see what the options where. I promised myself nicer cards with not just the standard data but nice colour pictures on the front side so I looked at ideas, drew some things on paper and worked a few evenings in the Gimp to get the ideas into something that would survive being printed. I created files for printing at 600 dots per inch so there should be no strange printing artefacts.

Image credits:

• License plate generated with Kenteken generator
• Dom tower Utrecht from Utrecht Center Central Houses Dom Dom Tower
• Shelf with radio, power supply: own picture, also available at Alan K205 power supply, tuner and radio | KvdHout on flickr
• Recumbent bicycle with radio on wooden table: own picture

We zijn terug van bijna 3 weken vakantie. De planning was om dit keer naar zuid-Duitsland te gaan. We zijn terecht gekomen op Schwarzwald camping Altensteig en na een week doorgegaan naar Kaprun in Oostenrijk naar Camping "Mühle".

Veel leuke dingen gedaan, onder andere ook bergwandelingen op de Kitzsteinhorn gletscher waar we met de lift snel naar hoogte konden om dan daar te wandelen. Hoogste punt bereikt was 3029 meter boven zeeniveau. Daar konden we in de sneeuw een stukje slee rijden.

Bij Kaprun dacht ik toch direct aan de Kabeltreinramp in Kaprun op 11 November 2000. Ter plekke kon ik weinig sporen meer zien van de aanwezigheid van die kabeltrein maar volgens de wikipedia pagina had ik iets verderop langs de parkeerplaats nog wel het herdenkingscentrum bezoeken. Het enige wat ik aan de onderkant kon zien was een stukje ontbrekend bos onder een afdichting in de bergwand. Bovenaan in het Alpine center zat een schuine uitbouw aan het gebouw.

We hebben een keer lunch gegeten in de Krefelder Hütte (een berghut in Oostenrijk gebouwd door de afdeling Krefeld van de Duitse alpensport vereniging) en volgens de kaart van openstreetmap loopt de tunnel van de kabeltrein recht onder die hut door.

Bergwandelen is ons goed bevallen, misschien volgend jaar weer!

I received a notification from the google webmaster program that chrome browser would start showing security warnings on http://www.virtualbookcase.com/ due to the search box there.

The simple solution: make the site correctly available via https and redirect to the https version. I found out I already started doing the first bit and therefore the conversion was easy. Now with encrypted connections: The Virtual Bookcase.

The new homeserver 2017 has arrived and I'm working on installing it. But first I had to do my first 'casemod' which was just rerouting a few cables. The case comes with a fan control, but I want all fan control to come from the mainboard and monitor the fans from the operating system. So I disconnected the fans from the case fan control and reconnected them to fan connectors on the mainboard that allow for voltage based fan control and monitoring.

The case is a bit overkill, but looks really good and offers lots of routes for airflow. New to me was that the case has cableguides which allow it to look really nice internally and have really good airflow. So I used those cableguides when I rerouted the fan cables and even tie-wrapped the cables to keep them looking nice.

I saw someone post somewhere about problems with sending mail, with the complete session log. E-mail addresses were obfuscated, but there was a part of the session not obfuscated, which had far more interesting secrets than just e-mail addresses. It looked a bit like this:

250-HELP
250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN
250-SIZE 157286400
250-8BITMIME
250 OK
AUTH LOGIN
334 VXNlcm5hbWU6
dXNlcm5hbWU=
334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6
cGFzc3dvcmQ=
235 ... authentication succeeded
RSET
250 OK

Those "random" letters and digits look a lot like base64, so to decode them:

$ echo "VXNlcm5hbWU6" | base64 -d ; echo
Username:
$ echo "dXNlcm5hbWU=" | base64 -d ; echo
username
$ echo "UGFzc3dvcmQ6" | base64 -d ; echo
Password:
$ echo "cGFzc3dvcmQ=" | base64 -d ; echo
password

So the random letters and digits are actually username and password, very interesting information. Searching for VXNlcm5hbWU6 gives me examples of usernames and passwords.

And a third night. I used the timed recording option of audacity, which in the current linux version does not offer the option to set in advance how to save the project. This time I 'only' recorded for 7 hours, and was able to save the project afterwards without needing a recover. But on reloading the saved project audacity complained about some internal error in it, and it still had the problem of assuming 44.1 kHz sampling while showing the project sample rate as 48 kHz. Anyway, images decoded from the audio and I even recieved a few new ones.

On doing some research on randomness in Linux I found out about the rng-tools package which includes rngd which can get randomness from hardware random generators to linux /dev/random.

On the main homeserver greenblatt there was no hardware randomness source available, I already use randomsound to generate randomness from audio noise. I found out the Raspberry Pi has a hardware randomness source so I installed rng-tools and rngd was able to use it. The impact on the measured available entropy is quite visible.

On the night from Friday to Saturday I had the whole setup ready to receive more ISS SSTV images. And nothing was received since I had the antenna unplugged during Friday because of thunderstorms and forgot to plug it back in.

So when I found that out I put a note on my desk with 'Antenna unplugged?' which can be a reminder to unplug it when I'm done or plug it in when I want to receive something.

On the night from Saturday to Sunday I plugged the antenna in and let the whole setup run again like on the earlier run on Friday Received slow scan TV images from ISS while I was sleeping. To make sure I had the antenna plugged in I tuned to 145.750 MHz where I can hear a distant repeater faintly.

Again audacity hung after the recording, and this time on recovery it had some issues with the saved project. At first I could see and hear audio of SSTV passes but qsstv could not decode anything. In the waterfall display of qsstv it looked like the frequencies were too low. I had a thought that maybe something decided the samplerate was back to 44.1 kHz so I simply speeded the audio of an image pass up by 8.8435% and suddenly it decoded fine.

In the end I decoded 11 images from the ISS SSTV project. Numbers seen 8, 10, 9, 6, 7, 8, 6, 4, 5, 6.

And 2 images from nearby radio amateurs who weren't operating according to the bandplan... but at least did not interfere with the ISS SSTV transmissions.

I read about the current ARISS Celebrates it’s 20th Anniversary through SSTV Event and noticed the planned times weren't really compatible with my day/night cyclus. I know, as a hardcore radio amateur I should be up at the weirdest hours for rare events but I also like my sleep a lot and my wife really dislikes alarms at weird hours.

Automation to the rescue: I decided to record all of a night of ISS signals on the computer with audacity and decode images from it later. The computer adjusted the radio for doppler using gpredict. Since I don't have an automatic rotor for satellite antennas I used the VHF/UHF vertical. This may seem strange but the weakest signals from ISS are when it is right above the horizon (which is when the vertical has the best reception). And as noticed on earlier SSTV events that compared to other amateur satellites the ISS has a strong signal.

So I left it running for a night and checked the results afterwards. The result was a 9 hour recording and audacity decided to hang after stopping the recording. I made a backup copy of the audio data just to be safe and restarted audacity. Luckily it recovered the project fine after restarting.

With a recent version of qsstv I decoded the recorded audio and searched for ISS passes in the recording.

The result is 13 decodes in one night. It turns out it received audio from a number of low passes that I did not see in gpredict because I have gpredict set up to skip low passes (those that don't come above a 20 degree angle above the horizon). But the strong signals from ISS make those show up in my radio anyway.

Decoded and seen the numbers sofar: 11 (partially), 12, 9, 10, 9, 10, 9 (partially), 9, 7, 8.

E-mail with subject starting with "Please find attached our purchase order number" and a zip, with a zip in it with in that zip an .exe file.

Archive:  PO185 - 188207 X.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
   341805  2017-07-19 04:55   PO362 - 867977 X.zip
---------                     -------
   341805                     1 file

Archive:  PO362 - 867977 X.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
   431458  2017-07-19 15:32   PO362 - 867977 X.exe
---------                     -------
   431458                     1 file

I guess the .exe will cause some serious damage in Windows operating systems. The size is huge, where is the time virus writes tried to stay below 1024 bytes!

Recently the wireless access-point decided that I should not have access to the management interface. I even tried both the IPv4 address I assigned and the default IPv4 address it gets. And the last days I noticed strange delays, which may have been caused by channel overlaps. So I wanted access to the management interface to check the channel settings. I noticed the management interface decided to respond again on the IPv4 address I assigned, and I saw new firmware available which should also help with some stability issues.

Firmware upgraded, and after the upgrade and automatic reboot my access was gone again. Time for the suggested factory reset to get everything back to normal. Done, and I was able to set it up again from scratch with the right configuration.

Maybe I should start running some kind of wiki or something to keep internal documentation of my home network. I had a hard time remembering several details of my own setup recently.

I removed rdnssd and resolvconf and fixed the symlink linking /var/run/NetworkManager/resolv.conf and /etc/resolv.conf by hand. The file /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf now says:

dns=none
rc-manager=file

But now I run into the 'NetworkManager prefers IPv4 resolvers' again, leaving me with the resolvers from the DHCP answer before those from the IPv6 route advertisment. The search domains are fine now.

This evening I noticed incoming FT8 QSO's in eQSL, so the mode is now recognized there. But I needed to retry uploading all FT8 contacts to get them to upload. It took a bit of experimenting, but finally the right SQL command to mark the contacts as not uploaded was:

$ mysql -S /home/koos/.config/cqrlog/database/sock cqrlog002
mysql> update cqrlog_main set eqsl_qslsdate = NULL where mode='FT8';
Query OK, 24 rows affected (0.02 sec)
Rows matched: 26  Changed: 24  Warnings: 0

And now they are all uploaded.

That is about a week between first seeing mentions of FT8 in radio amateur news and the first confirmed contacts.

Or maybe I should use the word 'played' again: 6 contacts. It was a weekend with not much time for radio and when that time did happen propagation wasn't cooperating very well. The advantage of contests is that there are a lot of stations who want to hear every other station, so I used the last 20 minutes of this contest just to answer a few calls and get in the log.

Jul 16 04:17:01 greenblatt sshd[9365]: reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo for 121-124-124-73.youiwe.co.kr [121.124.124.73] failed - POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!
Jul 16 04:17:01 greenblatt sshd[9365]: Invalid user 1234 from 121.124.124.73
Jul 16 04:17:01 greenblatt sshd[9365]: input_userauth_request: invalid user 1234 [preauth]
Jul 16 04:17:01 greenblatt sshd[9365]: Received disconnect from 121.124.124.73: 3: com.jcraft.jsch.JSchException: Auth fail [preauth]

That last bit is not from my sshd but an error message related to a java library for ssh, as noted in Reasons for com.jcraft.jsch.JSchException: Auth fail | Maximilian Böhm which correctly notes that attacks are a reason.

I was reading Debian Stretch - Het Lab Henk van de Kamer (in Dutch) which mentions removing package rdnssd to avoid a dependency problem. But I like rdnssd as it helps use the nameservers available via IPv6 in a network with only SLAAC and no DHCPv6.

Right away I had to check on my own laptop with Ubuntu 16.04 and noticed all traffic was going to the IPv4 address of the local resolver. Which is not what I want, I want to prefer IPv6 when possible. Searching found Bug #936712 “NetworkManager should put IPv6 DNS servers before I...” : Bugs : network-manager package : Ubuntu which is indeed what I saw, and it's still showing in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial.

My solution was to stop using dnsmasq, and switch to a generated resolv.conf from NetworkManager. To do that I had to update /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf to have:

#dns=dnsmasq
dns=none
rc-manager=file

And now I have a resolv.conf with only 3 IPv6 nameservers and no search domains. Not exactly what I want, but at least IPv6 is preferred. I considered something using only the first three resolvers because that is a maximum somewhere but just advertising two resolvers via radvd also makes two show up in the generated resolv.conf. This is not perfect. The generated resolv.conf has comments that it is generated by resolvconf so maybe this is a conflict between resolvconf and NetworkManager not in 'use resolvconf' mode.

Haven't seen this before:

Jul 13 09:29:45 greenblatt sshd[24232]: Invalid user  from 193.105.134.187
Jul 13 09:29:45 greenblatt sshd[24232]: input_userauth_request: invalid user  [preauth]
Jul 13 09:29:59 greenblatt sshd[24232]: Disconnecting: Change of username or service not allowed: (,ssh-connection) -> (admin,ssh-connection) [preauth]

I have seen user '' (empty) before, but a change of username is new to me. Searching finds very little information, only one mention: Which ssh exploit works by changing the user name in the middle of the process? - Information Security stack exchange where the assumption was that this was some kind of attack.

This week there was a sudden 'buzz' about a new digital mode for amateur radio from Joe Taylor, K1JT. It's like JT65, with a very minimal exchange (callsign, locator, signal report) but with a lot faster timing: each turn is 15 seconds and from what I can see somewhat more than 13 seconds transmitting. I made the first few contacts today after downloading wsjtx from WSJTX-Development : Greg Beam as Ubuntu package.

They are now in my log, but uploading to eQSL / Logbook of The World is not possible yet as 'FT8' is not seen as a valid mode yet. The solution for LoTW seems to be to change to 'DATA' but this solution does not work for eQSL. I'll have to upload those contacts later when the mode is recognized.

First contact was with IZ8GNR and I also had contacts with club members PA2RG and PD3RFR.

With JT65/JT9 I sometimes get distracted waiting 50 seconds before it's my turn to react again, with FT8 it's more high-speed work (somewhat less than 2 seconds to react to a CQ or an answer). WSJT-X now has an auto-sequence feature which will step through the exchange automatically.

Just happening:

Err http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ jessie/main libgcrypt20 armhf 1.6.3-2+deb8u4
  Cannot initiate the connection to raspbian.42.fr:80 (163.172.250.246). - connect (101: Network is unreachable) [IP: 163.172.250.246 80]

It seems mirrordirector.raspbian.org redirects to IPv4-only sites even when the client connects via IPv6. My Raspberry Pi systems have IPv4 disabled. It's a known problem in Bug #1595563 “Native IPv6 client redirected to IPv4-only mirror” : Bugs : Raspbian where people seem to rather ignore the problem. I could reverse the statement there to "a service that can only be accessed by v4 nodes cannot be reasonablly considered to be available on the internet." but I guess that's "different".

My activity in radio contesting has been in digital mode contests, with one exception in a mixed-mode contest where I also made some voice contacts: the ARI International DX Contest in 2016.

But this weekend I seriously entered the IARU HF Championship in 'phone' (speech) mode. I made 59 contacts, 50 on the 20 meter band and 9 on the 40 meter band. I managed to work a lot of the HQ stations I heard active for the various national radio clubs. I heard no serious DX, but the local noise at home is prohibitive for voice contacts anyway. My personal reason for entering this contest was reading about its role in the world radio team championship in the book Contact Sport: A Story of Champions, Airwaves, and a One-Day Race around the World by J.K. George.

I used yfktest for the contest logging and found the biggest fixed font I can use which makes the 80x24 xterm almost fill the entire screen. See the screenshot.

Claimed results according to yfktest:

Band    QSO    Qpts   Dupes   Mult1   Mult2
-------------------------------------------
  20     50     112       0      23       0
  40      9      13       0       8       0
-------------------------------------------
 ALL     58     124       1      31       0
===========================================
 Total Score: 3,875

The last week I had a problem with the FT-857 radio rebooting when I started transmitting in digital radio modes (PSK31 or JT65). The reboot showed as the radio giving the standard beep and the display and backlight switching off and on. Searching for clues suggested that some form of radio frequency interference would probably be the source.

So I wondered what I changed recently around the radio and remembered I changed something in the power distribution to have connectors available for powering my SARK100 antenna analyzer with a 12 volt battery.

Reseating all those power connectors and fixing some wires seems to have stopped the problem.

I participated in the Ukranian DX Classic RTTY Contest 2017 this weekend. I prepared the antenna and the contestmacros Friday evening, but I knew most of Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning would be unavailable.

Local noise was bad, it seems interference from solar panels is on the rise and it was a quite sunny day.

On the other hand, there was a 10 meter band opening Sunday afternoon, giving me some new multipliers with 8 contacts on that band. But no serious DX in the whole contest, I just saw Eastern Europe and Asiatic Russia active, unlike when I participated in the Ukranian DX Classic RTTY contest 2016.

The end result is that I made 70 contacts in somewhat less than 6 hours of operating time. So I participated in the SINGLE-OP ALL 6-HOUR RTTY category.

A good sunny day and the effect it has on the HF spectrum: extra interference from solar panels. I'm not sure whether to complain about all solar panels not regularly identifying with their callsign or complain about interference or just give up and find another location for amateur radio.

The SARK100 antenna analyzer I bought also has the option to be controlled over an USB interface (other versions even have bluetooth support). Over USB it is possible to automate the measurements and have the results returned to the controlling computer.

For Linux software is available: SARK100 Antenna Analyzer Linux Software also via github with updates coddingtonbear/sark-100-antenna-analyzer.

I cloned the git repository and guessed that the command to build a 32-bit version would be:

koos@thompson:~/radiowork/sark-100-antenna-analyzer$ mkdir build
koos@thompson:~/radiowork/sark-100-antenna-analyzer$ cd build
koos@thompson:~/radiowork/sark-100-antenna-analyzer/build$ qmake -spec linux-g++ -o Makefile ../analyzer/analyzer.pro

This indeed compiled into a working 32-bit binary. Needed because the 'main radio desktop' can't run a 64-bit linux. The laptop does not have this problem.

The attic dipole on 10m analyzed with the Sark100 analyzer and linux software

The attic dipole on 20m analyzed with the Sark100 analyzer and linux software

And after compiling the software comes using the software. It works nicely and does what it says on the packaging.

Almost three years ago I started making PSK31 contacts on the 10 meter band which was my first experience with HF and propagation through the ionosphere as a novice amateur with callsign PD4KH. The 10 meter band is the amateur band from 28.0 MHz to 29.7 MHz.

But the propagation through the ionosphere depends on the solar cycle. Currently the cycle is going towards a solar minimum meaning the number of sunspots is very low. Due to the low number of sunspots the propagation of radio signals through the ionosphere back to earth is also very low. After I upgraded to a full license opportunities to use the 10 meter bands were very rare. Up until yesterday I had 5 contacts in the log for PE4KH on the 10 meter band.

And yesterday that changed. I was testing with a borrowed fiberglass pole since I want to use that to help me tune the linked dipole kit I bought. I set up the fiberglass pole in the back of our garden using the fence for support and raised it to the full 10 meters with the endfed spiralled around it. At the end I had some wire left to the transformer so I just hung the transformer in the back garden. It took a lot of cable to get from my radio to the antenna far away, but I really wanted to do that experiment, especially to get an idea of the influence on the local interference. On the 20 meter band the interference was about the same, on 40 meters it was a bit less but on 10 meters it was almost gone.

And at the same time there was interesting propagation on the 10 meter band. I made several contacts with stations in Poland, Austria, Italy, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Most of those contacts would not have been possible with the noise levels I am used to.

An interesting experiment in radio. My first thought was that this antenna setup might be interesting for contesting, but I realised that I really need to keep an eye on the power levels since there is a small footpath right behind our garden for our neighbours. I can't ask them not to use that footpath for an entire contest weekend.

I finally had some time to upgrade the BIOS on the Alix 1.c box (ritchie). It was a lot easier to do this with the flashrom utility than to do this with DOS boot floppies!

I just made sure again I checked the old bios version, which turned out to be alixbio3, and upgraded to alixbio8 from the PC Engines Alix 1.c page.

Now the machine boots without a screen attached. I also swapped the mainboard battery as it kept forgetting the current time.

Writing a bios file with flashrom is just changing the -r to a -w from the reading the flashrom command.

But this does not help the serial ports: those seem to be dead for good.

Je ontvangt deze e-mail omdat je meedoet aan MrKortingscode.

Regel 1 over spammers: spammers liegen. Ik heb nergens een e-mail adres opgegeven. Maar blijkbaar kon een ander wel mijn adres verzinnen en kreeg ik deze mail.

Die pas na twee keer goed lezen een verificatiemail bleek te zijn en niet een 'we gaan je maar spammen' mail. Tijd om je tekst aan te passen naar iets wat meer rekening houdt met de optie dat het verkeerde e-mail adres opgegeven wordt.

Radio Caroline will be awarded a license to transmit on 648 kHz AM. From the Radio Caroline website where I can't deeplink to the right article (Home - Am Licence):

AM LICENCE ‐ A KILOWATT ON 648

We are pleased to announce that Ofcom have informed us that our application for an AM licence has been approved and that a licence will be awarded.

The basis of our application was that our traditional heartland was Essex and Suffolk, where the signal from our ships made first landfall and that we wished to entertain on AM, an audience that we have not been able to serve in this way since 1990.

We said that this audience may hear music radio of a style they remember and in some cases presented by the same people they remember.

That in essence is what we intend to do.

We can now announce that our AM frequency will be 648 kHz with a power of 1000 watts. This is ERP or simply the power radiated by the aerial.

A transmitter was imported from the Continent a few days ago and is now being modified to suit the frequency. There are further hurdles, but as you can see progress is being made.

The frequency (648 kHz, once BBC 648 / BBC Europe / BBC world service) isn't very good for local community radio (needs big antennas) so one 'big' station is a better idea. I think reception in the Netherlands will be possible when local interference is minimal.

My sark100 antenna analyzer

In september 2016 I ordered a balun and a linked dipole kit from sotabeams with the idea to make a lightweight dipole antenna for outdoor use. But there is one very important ingredient to making a dipole: you need an antenna analyzer to get the dimensions right to have optimal reception and transmission into a resonant antenna.

I could borrow the antenna analyzer from the club just like I did for measuring my 2m/70cm portable coax antenna but after reading about the (cheap) SARK100 antenna analyzer I decided to buy one myself. One good review I found is It finally arrived! My SARK100 from China. This analyzer seems to be a serious case of an 'open source' design being picked up by the Chinese electronics manufacturers and sold in high numbers. I bought one for a reasonable price at an aliexpress seller that had good reviews and orders before.

It arrived today and the first tests look really good. First I measured my dummy load (to get an idea of how it was doing as an analyzer) and after that the 10m/20m/40m endfed antenna that was hanging outside anyway for the EU PSK DX Contest 2017 that I participated in. This antenna isn't perfect (as visible in the picture) but it does the job.

So now I have to find the time to design a linked dipole as I want it, build it and measure / adjust it until it does what I want.

It's a good thing I can easily calculate linked dipoles at Various tools for SOTA purposes. My plan is to build a 15-20-40 meter band dipole. The selection of bands is because outdoors I will use less digital modes and 40 meters is the longest size for a dipole that is usable to set up. The angle of the dipole and therefore the height of the centerpoint also has an influence on the antenna. But I don't know how high the tree will be, so I will have to make a guess.

I noted the EU PSK DX Contest in the contestcalendar and decided to participate. Conditions did not cooperate very well and I found some issues with my setup during the contest. But in the end I made 57 contacts. Not very good given my scores earlier this year but I think the big issues with local HF noise started after the previous contest.

Total number of QSO in your log is 57, Including 0 QSO with errors, Valid QSO - 57
Band  QSOs Dupes Points Mults
160      0     0      0     0
80       0     0      0     0
40       0     0      0     0
20      57     0    117    64
15       0     0      0     0
10       0     0      0     0
======================================
Total   57     0    117    64
Claimed score is 7488 points

I was looking at on-line offers of shielded/foiled network cable and found out it's not that expensive anymore. And with the 'keystone' connectors it looks like it's not that complicated to make neat and very well shielded connections.

But it's always a good plan to check the local electronics hobby shop. We still have one in the center of Utrecht: radio centrum where they had 1 meter and 2 meter patchcables for a very nice price (competitive with on-line shops) right up for grabs. So the first set of short cables that are always in use for gigabit are now s/ftp category 6 cables. I hope this improves radio reception.

I still think I will order longer cable and keystone connectors and holders for the longer cables.

Usernames seen in ssh attempts: 0 1 a a0 adm admin admln agnes ajay apache ask bin byte cactiuser CarpeDiem cisco cs daniel data db2inst1 debian D-Link erp ezrena faxadmin ftp ftpuser glassfish gpadmin guest help jesus lancer maile mailers marifer maronique media mis mysql nodeclient ooooooooo opuser oracle perl personnel pi pig PlcmSpIp postmaster postpone remote root roote rppt sales shop student support test testing ts ts3 turbo ubnt ubuntu user vnc wildfly willy xbmc And the '' username (empty string). By numbers root has the highest number of attempts.

Today I had planned to dig deep into the sources of the HF interference by switching off the electricity in the whole house and seeing what difference that would make and if it did, search for sources.

I used the 10-20-40 meter band endfed outside, and the 10-20 meter dipole inside. The conclusions are mixed:

• The 40 meter band (that I can only use on the endfed) is not influenced at all by switching off the power.
• The 20 meter band on the dipole gets somewhat less noise when the power is down.
• The 20 meter band on the endfed gets the same amount of noise when the power is down.
• The 10 meter band on the dipole gets no noise at all when the power is down. Change from S8 noise to S0 noise.
• The 10 meter band on the endfed gets 2-3 points less noise when the power is down.

So for the 10 meter band and less for the 20 meter band it was good to search in the house for sources of the noise. Found:

• The lights in the attic
• The UPS for the server
• The netgear switch downstairs when ports become active. The switch upstairs probably too, but it's behind the UPS, so interference from the UPS showed up first
• The wireless accesspoint downstairs

So the problem sources that I can't switch off easily are all part of the home network. My current theory is that 10 meter seems to be affected by gigabit network. My experience is that transmitting on 10 meter indoors causes a network outage.

The home network is all Cat-5E at the moment, unshielded twisted pair. It seems an upgrade to s/ftp is in order (with foil and braided wire, the same I do for antenna cable).

The thing is that with the current solar cycle 10 meter use is very rare. I haven't made a contact yet in that band in 2017.

Interesting error message today:

Jan  1 01:01:02 ritchie CRON[1834]: pam_unix(cron:account): account koos has password changed in future

But it is caused by the system realtimeclock being completely wrong and assuming the date is 1 January 1990 or something. It probably needs a new battery. Or maybe a whole new system, this is from the system ritchie that started life as the wardriving box which was bought in 2008.

This evening the only amateur satellite pass at a reasonable time was by the XW-2A satellite, part of CAMSAT XW-2 Satellites - amsat UK and I only heard weak signals which sounded like other radio amateurs tuning their transmitters/receivers but I never heard something like a voice. Or my own signal when I tried transmitting.

Passes of amateur satellites aren't always at times that are compatible with other things happening. But the discussion about AO-85 on the amsat-bb mailing list also had some details about the satellite and I also found AO-85 Twist Trick and Other Hints - Spacecomms which explains:

Apparently the epoxy caused a change in impedance which essentially “detuned” the antenna. It makes the bird appear deaf. A workaround is to twist the Arrow antenna 90 degrees when you transmit. That is, rotate the antenna until the receive signal is “peaked” and then rotate it 90 degrees when you transmit and back again to receive.

The downside to this is if you’re working full duplex when you rotate the antenna 90 degrees to transmit you will often lose the downlink signal and not be able to hear yourself. In my experience I only have to do the twist trick in the beginning and end of the pass when the bird is farthest away.

Another fix is to just use more power, but if you only have an HT that’s usually not an option.

This, combined with the frequencies up and down being slightly different from the planned frequencies explains the weak signals I hear upon receiving and the difficulty I had getting into the satellite.

This evening had a pass of AO-85 which did not leave me time to drag out the whole setup, but I was able to bring the arrow antenna and a handheld radio to check reception to see if the frequency was correct, including doppler correction. It was correct, but reception is indeed quite sensitive to the orientation of the arrow antenna.

We zijn verzekerd bij Unive, en daarover ontvang ik een mailtje:

Subject: Document(en) bij uw pakket xxxxxxxx

Geachte heer ..

Hierbij ontvangt u het overzicht van uw verzekeringspakket. Wilt u
controleren of de gegevens juist zijn?

Mijn eerste gedachte was om het attachment direct naar een analysestraat voor malware te sturen, maar we zijn inderdaad bij hun verzekerd en het mailtje was gericht aan het adres wat ik gebruik om met Unive te communiceren. Alleen lijkt het subject wel erg op de mailtjes die ik zie met de nieuwste ransomware.

Dus toch maar eens de pdf geopend en daar bleek ook een 'acceptgiro' in te zitten. Dus het was nogal vitaal om dat bestand te openen en door te lezen.

Ik wilde dus Unive op de hoogte stellen van het feit dat ze nogal onhandig communiceren. In het e-mail bericht staat:

Heeft u nog vragen of opmerkingen, neem dan gerust [2]contact met ons op.

Met een verwijzing naar https://www.unive.nl/klantenservice. Alleen als ik daar mijn verbetersuggestie probeer in te voeren moet ik om het bericht te mogen versturen ook perse een adres en een geboortedatum geven, en is het optioneel om zelfs mijn burgerservicenummer te geven.

Voor het verwerken van mijn suggestie zijn die gegevens niet nodig en het zou dus heel handig zijn als er een contactoptie was waarbij die gegevens niet gevraagd worden. Dit is geen privacy by design.

Vandaag in de spambox:

Weet je nog dat ik je een tijdje geleden vertelde dat ik op zoek was naar een date via internet? Jeetje, wat was dat moeilijk, ofwel kwam ik uit op een of andere vrouw die zichzelf voor iemand anders uitgaf, ofwel stond ik daar op een date voor niks! Vorige week dan uiteindelijk via via nog een laatste keer geprobeerd en me aangemeld op deze http://track.trqq.us/index.php/campaigns/wl1097ca0152e/track-url/zo129aq31z3j1/12ba15d9a417e1723e8f4327c6cd1e9a3ea34c18 gratis datingsite

Leuke poging tot aan de tracking-url...

I decided to share my woes of the receive side going deaf (receiving nothing) when I transmit with the amsat-bb mailing list, together with a description of the whole setup. The suggestion came from Eduardo PY2RN to not use a preamp and have filtering so the transmitted signal cannot get into the receiving side.

I pondered this for a while and realised I already have a filter: the diplexer on the arrow antenna. So to receive on 2 meter and transmit on 70cm I connect the transmitting radio to the 70cm antenna and connect the receiving radio (the rtl-sdr) to the 2 meter antenna via the diplexer, and put a 50 ohms terminating resistor on the 70cm connector of the diplexer to make sure it still shows the right impedance.

In a simple test this works, transmitting now has a lot less influence on the rtl-sdr (it's not completely gone yet). I haven't had a good satellite pass yet to try this out.

In my project to receive amateur satellites with the rtl-sdr I noticed the sdr itself has a considerable frequency error as noted in Going full duplex with amateur satellites, part 5 : first test of the amplifier with RTL-SDR.

Using the PI2NOS output frequency I ended up at an error of 54 ppm so I entered that in gqrx. But to be really sure there is a program named kalibrate-rtl available via GitHub - steve-m/kalibrate-rtl: fork of http://thre.at/kalibrate/ for use with rtl-sdr devices.

I had some trouble finding the right way to use this program so I am sharing my steps here. First try to guess the error by using a known frequency such as a local repeater (especially when they mention using GPS to maintain frequency) or a broadcast FM station.

First step with kalibrate-sdr is to scan for GSM channels which are strong enough. I noticed in later runs that I really need to add the first guessed frequency error, otherwise it will not find the GSM channels at all.

koos@kernighan:~/radiowork/kalibrate-rtl/src$ ./kal -s GSM900 -e 54
Found 1 device(s):
  0:  Generic RTL2832U OEM

Using device 0: Generic RTL2832U OEM
Found Rafael Micro R820T tuner
Exact sample rate is: 270833.002142 Hz
[R82XX] PLL not locked!
kal: Scanning for GSM-900 base stations.
GSM-900:
        chan: 8 (936.6MHz + 724Hz)      power: 67277.85
        chan: 17 (938.4MHz + 606Hz)     power: 36428.54

Second step with kalibrate-sdr is to select a GSM channel to use for the calibration run. I selected channel 8 which looks quite active.

koos@kernighan:~/radiowork/kalibrate-rtl/src$ ./kal -e 54 -c 8
Found 1 device(s):
  0:  Generic RTL2832U OEM

Using device 0: Generic RTL2832U OEM
Found Rafael Micro R820T tuner
Exact sample rate is: 270833.002142 Hz
[R82XX] PLL not locked!
kal: Calculating clock frequency offset.
Using GSM-900 channel 8 (936.6MHz)
average         [min, max]      (range, stddev)
+ 169Hz         [85, 251]       (166, 49.119198)
overruns: 0
not found: 0
average absolute error: 53.820 ppm

And only in that step you get the output with the calculated frequency error.

Update: Doing this calibration is also a good idea for the stick running the ads-b receiver. That came out to -30 ppm and using that factor makes dump1090 receive signals from greater distances.

This evening had a Fox-1A (AO-85) pass at a reasonable time so I decided to drag the entire setup outside and try my luck at a qso. Reception of Fox-1A was bad (maybe I'm somewhat off-frequency) and the major dissapointment was that the receiving side on 2 meter via sdr got deaf when I was transmitting on 70 centimeter. That's not supposed to happen, the whole reason for the full-duplex setup was to be able to hear myself on the downlink.

Anyway, the recording of downlink audio went fine this time so there is a full recording of what I heard. It was a Northwest-Southeast pass which means it took a while before I heard anything because northwest is over the houses. Callsigns heard in this pass: DO3EXE, IZ5ILX, 9A2EY, IZ3KLF, Something with F2D I completely can't decode and "Mr Olla".

My best guess would be a retry on SO-50, FO-29 or AO-73.

It has been a while since I wrote about pump-and-dump spam (scam) but it's never been completely dead. It does seem there has been some action against it and spamfilters got better at recognizing it.

Today's winner I see is Q like in Quality, S like in Straight, M like Mary and G like Gold. The spammer is sure to never use QSMG directly to avoid spam filters.

The funny part is that a google search for QSMG directly brings me to Pump and dump spam: Quest Management Inc (QSMG) stock - Dynamoo's blog with a complete write-up of the multiple spamruns the last week trying to make some money from this type of fraud.

I was testing with noise on all radio bands with the LW-10 longwire antenna with tuner. I recently made the rope that hangs it out from the window a bit longer and I noticed the noise on the 10 meter amateur radio band had dropped a lot compared to the noise I experienced before and the noise on the antenna under our roof. In S-points: under the roof S8, with the 10/20/40m endfed S8, and with the longwire antenna S0.

On bands with lower frequencies (higher wavelengths) noiselevels were high, up to S9+ on 80m with a rattling noise in it. But this sudden change on the 10 meter band made me think there could be a pattern so I measured how much more distance I could move the antenna away from the house and maybe get lower noise levels on the 20m band too. After adding 1.60 meter of rope and rehanging the antenna the noise level on the 20 meter band also dropped from S8 to S7. Not the biggest improvement but it's something.

I'm now making some PSK qso's on the 20 meter band. At the S8 noise level this was getting impossible.

This evening I thought there would be a nice Fox-1A (AO-85) pass but gpredict on another computer showed totally different predictions. Pondering that difference made me suddenly remember AO-85 is still not part of the 'standard' set of Kepler data because it's close to some militairy satellite. The data is available through other sources, I use TLE | Amateur radio PE0SAT and updated from that location. The 'nice' AO-85 pass near 22:30 localtime shifted to 'way too late', so I looked for other satellites to at least try recording downlink audio. I saw passes of HO-68 and UO-11. So I created the whole setup with audacity recording audio. Using pavucontrol I adjusted the recording flow of audacity to record 'Monitor of Built-in Audio Analog Stereo' and indeed audacity was recording the same as I heard on my headphones.

But no signal from the satellites was received. Checking the Amsat Oscar status page shows both haven't been heard by others either. So I recorded noise, but I recorded the right noise.

Today I was scanning the bands to build an overview of noise / interference levels on each band and I came across the 60 meter band (5 MHz) which I can get tuned on my LW-10 longwire antenna. No idea how much power is eaten by the tuner and how much gets out but it works. I noticed some RTTY signals and those were within the part of the band I can access with my license.

So I answered the CQ from DK7UY and we had a good contact.

The 60 meter band is a recent addition for Dutch and other amateurs, only allowed since 3 december 2015. Around that date the WRC-15 conference happened where world-wide agreements were made about secondary amateur access to this band. And on 1 april 2017 the access for Dutch amateurs was limited to the agreed allocation.

Today I had time for a reception test and when I started collecting the amateur satellite reception gear I saw two upcoming passes, one of the AO-73 Funcube and one of the AO-85 Fox-1a satellite.

The AO-73 Funcube is an 'inverting transponder' which converts an LSB uplink to an USB downlink with space for multiple contacts at the same time. By default gpredict selects the center frequency where I heard PA3HDG calling CQ but hearing no answer. Sorry, I did not have the rest of the setup to transmit that answer.

The AO-85 Fox-1a is like an FM repeater in space so it should be easier to receive it. But I heard nothing, which was most likely due to the satellite being in a part of the sky where the hedge is in the way. due to the fact my data about that satellite wasn't updated: it's not in the default sets. Updating from a trusted source of extra kepler data TLE | Amateur radio PE0SAT showed a shift in pass times of more than 60 minutes.

Anyway, first success in reception. Next steps: recording the received audio with audacity and adding the transmitter to the mix to be able to make actual contacts. At least the concept I imagined with the rtl-sdr stick as receiver so I can work full-duplex works.

Recent postte 'Coen' in xs4all.adsl een stappenplan om onder Ubuntu 12.04 de MTU van de PPP verbinding naar 1500 bytes te krijgen. Alle lof dus naar Coen, want met zijn stappenplan is het me wel gelukt en is alles nu doorgaand MTU 1500, wat minder issues zou moeten geven.

Na een gezellig avondje stoeien is het gelukt om dit met terugwerkende
kracht voor Ubuntu 12.04 op te lossen met een nieuwe pppd en pppoe versie.

Voor wie durft en bovendien wat Linux ervaring heeft hier de te volgen
stappen:

Nieuwe pppd builden:

mkdir ppp
cd ppp
apt-get source ppp
cd ppp-2.4.5/
wget -O debian/patches/zz_pppoe1500
"http://git.ozlabs.org/?p=ppp.git;a=patch;h=fd1dcdf758418f040da3ed801ab001b5e46854e7"
dch -i
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

[[ppp en ppp-dev installeren]]

Nieuwe pppoe builden:

mkdir pppoe
cd pppoe
wget -4
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/r/rp-pppoe/rp-pppoe_3.11-0ubuntu1.dsc
wget
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/r/rp-pppoe/rp-pppoe_3.11.orig.tar.gz
wget
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/r/rp-pppoe/rp-pppoe_3.11-0ubuntu1.debian.tar.xz
tar -xzvf rp-pppoe_3.11.orig.tar.gz
cd rp-pppoe-3.11/
tar -xf ../rp-pppoe_3.11-0ubuntu1.debian.tar.xz
dch -i
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

[[pppoe installeren]]

Mtu op 1500 zetten: klaar!

Vanaf een losse client leek toch nog MTU 1492 gebruikt te worden, dus heb ik /etc/radvd.conf aangepast om expliciet MTU 1500 mee te geven:

interface eth0.3
{  
   AdvSendAdvert on;
   AdvLinkMTU 1500;

En dan de verdere opties. En dan werkt het inderdaad:

koos@kernighan:~$ tracepath6 ping.xs4all.nl
 1?: [LOCALHOST]                        0.018ms pmtu 1500
 1:  eth0-3.idefix.net                                     1.983ms 
 1:  eth0-3.idefix.net                                     1.858ms 
 2:  lo0.dr12.d12.xs4all.net                              17.910ms 
 3:  0.ae22.xr3.3d12.xs4all.net                           17.957ms 
 4:  no reply

For a first test I looked for the first reasonable pass of an amateur satellite and tried to recieve the morse beacon of HO-68. I have received signals from HO-68 before, but this pass I heard nothing.

I tried a stable regular local source on the 70cm band : the PI2NOS repeater and noticed after a while the frequency display in Gqrx was showing 430.100 MHz where the (GPS stablized) frequency is 430.125 MHz, so the RTL-SDR I use is somewhat off frequency. Maybe in a next test things work better.

Today I had some time to work on the metal case for the amplifier I bought for receiving amateur satellites. I've never been good at metalwork but I think I did ok. First I made sure the place I wanted to put the holes was chosen correctly, taking the size of connectors into account. Especially with metalwork it's "measure twice, cut once". Next I drilled holes with a drill for metalwork (HSS) and used a file for metalwork to make the holes bigger. I visited the local electronics shop to get a small switch for switching the battery power on and off and added a hole for the switch. In the end the amplifier and the cables are mounted inside the case and there is a bnc connector for the Arrow antenna on one side and an SMA connector for the cable to the RTL-SDR stick on the other side.

Battery added for amplifier in metal case

Recently I talked to a fellow radio amateur about my HF reception woes at home and he suggested trying the mini-whip antenna I built a few years ago as reception antenna, using an automatic switch to switch between the transmission and reception antenna.

For the first test I used the mini-whip antenna with the HF downconvertor and an RTL-SDR stick that I bought to receive amateur satellites to check the signal on the computer. The further I move away from the house the better signal I get (less noise, more signals sounding like the amateur radio signals I want). I do notice that when I turn the gain on the RTL-SDR up (or set it to automatic gain) that there is a repeating 'ticking' signal which sounds just like the ticking interference from my own PLC tests.

This could mean that a nearby neighbour has a PLC network without the notches for amateur radio. Or this is just an artefact of the high gain.

Earlier I had the Android application Ham Radio Prefixes - Android Apps on Google Play installed, but it needs some server on the Internet to look up callsigns and determine the country it is assigned to. Sometimes I need to do a lookup off-line, and I noticed fldigi and CQRLOG do that fine when the country data file is installed. So it can be done, I just have to find software that does this right.

On ICQ Podcast Episode 234 - Portable Power Distribution and I heard mention of Pocket Prefix for Android which can be found at Pocket Prefix - Android Apps on Google Play and which works off-line. This was even mentioned on the podcast as one of the advantages. It even gives extra information when available, the given example is that prefix SV is for Greece but SV9 is specific to Crete. Or EA9 is specific to the Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla which are located in Morroco (and therefore count as a contact with the African continent).

It's a nice application, thanks to Derek Turner G4SWY!

Earlier today there was a local powerfailure. I noticed it while being connected remotely to my server at home, it stopped responding and stayed off-line for a while. I checked the website of the electricity distribution network and it showed a local powerfailure.

Initially my reaction was a bit of interest in how low the radio noise levels would be when I could try the radio at home. By the time I got home power was back on so I never found out.

Some systems at home had to be started by hand, but eventually everything was up and running again, with new kernels booted. Everything came up fine including PPPoE to the outside world.

Later in the evening I noticed the old weatherstation in the shed which measures the temperature and humidity inside the shed seemed inoperational. Checking that weatherstation eventually led to a diagnoses that the 12 volt powersupply for that weatherstation had failed. It was only delivering 7.2 volt. To disconnect that weatherstation for diagnosis I completely shut down the shed computer ritchie. After that it did not come up again. Power came up and the harddisk started spinning but nothing happened after that.

So I also took that computer in for diagnosis. Connected to a keyboard and monitor everything came up fine. Disconnected from the monitor nothing came up.

Slowly it dawned on me that this might be related to an issue which I had read on the PC Engines Alix.1d page :

BIOS update

* beta various updates (release MFGPT timers)
* beta fix VGA DDC issue (boot hang)

Which seemed to be the problem which suddenly started acting up for me which it never did before. But the BIOS clock was also reset so I guess the whole setup was erased and I just did not notice because the default settings were good enough to boot anyway and ntpd sets the clock soon after boot. A simple solution would be a BIOS upgrade.

But preparing a CF card to boot freedos seemed a long way to flash the bios so I tried it via the Heavy Duty Boot pxeboot environment which booted FreeDOS nicely on the alix.1c but it rebooted as soon as I started SB.COM. I guess sb.com searches for bios images on C:\ and the FreeDOS floppy image is A:\

In the end I searched for a workaround and found mention in PC hangs up when no monitor attached - Ubuntu bug #243257 of a wire between pins 12 and 7 in the VGA connector. A piece of wire was bent and inserted into the vga connector and now the weatherstation computer ritchie boots up again.

Next plan is to do the BIOS upgrade via flashrom: In searching for information about the Alix 1.c bios upgrade I'd like to do I came across mention of flashrom.

This weekend after the antenna installation was done I had some time to participate in the EA RTTY contest 2017. I only participated on Sunday afternoon on the 20 meter band so I entered in the SO20 DX category.

The end result was 35 QSO's (contacts). Less than the results I had in the EA RTTY contest in 2016 but I had less time and energy available.

Antenna for 2m/70cm, Diamond X-30N, mounted on roof of dormer

Parts for mounting the Diamond X-30N which I bought in October on the roof were collected in the months since October and it was finally clear enough weather for a fellow radio amateur with lots more climbing experience and the right gear to climb on top of our dormer and install it.

There are rubber granulate pads on the roof to avoid damage, a metal frame sold as a mount for satellite dishes to which the antenna is mounted, 4 concrete tiles in the mount to weigh it down on the roof. The coax enters the house alongside a chimney.

After the work on the roof it was good to drink a beer to celebrate and afterwards I routed the cable further to my shack.

The first fast test was calling CQ on a local 2 meter frequency and someone from my radio club answered immediately.

The second big test was participating in a radio roundtable held on Sunday evening. This went fine, net control at a distance of somewhat over 30 kilometers gave me a 55 report (audio readability 5 and signal level 5). So the antenna is clearly doing what it is supposed to do. It's also nice to see the base noise level on the 2 meter band is near zero.

I was looking for a metal case to put the low(ish) noise amplifier in and maybe the RTL-SDR. The RTL-SDR should also be shielded from the amplifier and from the computer as both RTL-SDR and computer cause their own signals.

The first cheap source of metal cases I could think of was old cigar boxes. Altoid tins are not available here. So I asked someone who I know who smokes cigars who had a number of old metal cigar boxes. Next step, finding the way to get the right holes in the boxes for the SMA and BNC connectors, and for the USB connection to the computer. Ideal would be to lend / find a punch for those holes.

Recently it seems radio noise levels on the HF bands have gone up again so I spend more time trying to make contacts in JT65 mode since that mode is more robust against noise than PSK31.

To do this I use the WSJT-X software under Ubuntu Linux. WSJT-X is written by Joe Taylor KJ1T. The Ubuntu hams packages had WSJT-X 1.1 and I frequently ran across the problem that it crashes when the Internet connection to pskreporter is impossible when sending spots. In my setup the Internet connection drops regularly when I'm active with JT65 or PSK31 so that was an annoyance. Logged as Ubuntu bug #1673040: wsjtx crashes when internet connection is interrupted.

But this weekend I was listening to Linux in the Ham Shack Episode #184 and in the presenters talking about re-installing a Linux system for amateur radio I heard two words: wsjtx ppa. As soon as possible I looked it up and found WSJTX General Availability Release PPA, followed the installation instructions and upgraded to WSJT-X 1.7.

The main improvement is that it decodes better so I may make further contacts. Sofar it hasn't crashed on an interrupted Internet connection.

I see one problem: it doesn't like talking to my radio via rigctld, giving an error. When I stop rigctld as started by Cqrlog and let WSJT-X control the radio directly via hamlib things work fine. And suddenly Cqrlog sees the QSO in progress and logs it when done.

Laatste beeld van de webcam op HCC dagen 2005.

Uit de archieven omdat ik de server waar dit ooit op draaide wil herinstalleren voor andere projecten.

Bij de HCC PCgg netwerkgroep hadden we ooit een netwerk gebaseerd op PLC (powerline communicatie) waarbij ethernet over stroomdraden gaat. Daar heb ik ook scripts voor gebouwd om statistieken te verzamelen over de doorvoer. Op de locatie in Maarn was dat voor de verbinding naar buiten niet zo briljant, zie de rapporten in Bijeenkomst 20 maart 2010 - hcc!pc netwerkgroep.

Maar voordat ik de scripts weggooi die deze gegevens verzamelden en er grafiekjes van maakten nog even voor de eeuwigheid. Het testdlan script gaat uit van output van dlanlist als:

koos@metcalfe:~$ dlanlist eth0
Type    MAC address        Mbps TX/RX       Version/Product
local   00:0B:3B:5F:95:AB  ---.-- / ---.--  INT6000-MAC-3-3-3348-00-2764-20080808-FINAL-B devolo dLAN 200 AVplus [MT2165]
remote  00:0B:3B:6F:AE:90   73.50 / 112.88  INT6000-MAC-3-3-3348-00-2764-20080808-FINAL-B

• testdlan vraag dlanlist van devolo voor de huidige snelheid van devolo interfaces op netwerkkaart(en)
• graphdlan maak grafieken per dag

De opzet van de scripts was om altijd te draaien als de machine actief was en achteraf overzichten te hebben per dag activiteit (meestal zaterdagen van 10:00 tot 17:00).

With the hardware available it's now time to test the first part of the software setup: whether I can have running software defined radio.

To (re)install Gqrx I followed the instructions at Install Gqrx SDR on Ubuntu Linux. The first 'sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove' steps removed a lot of software and the latter 'sudo apt-get install' steps added newer (or maybe the same) versions. But I was glad to do a full reinstall, I have had weird problems with gqrx versions before. The laptop on which I am doing this has had an install of gqrx before, but was upgraded from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in the mean time, so a clean reinstall seemed a good idea.

I plugged in the RTL-SDR stick and checked whether no drivers were installed, which was indeed still correct. The kernel messages:

[156490.915435] usb 2-2: new high-speed USB device number 7 using xhci_hcd
[156491.111136] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=2838
[156491.111141] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[156491.111143] usb 2-2: Product: RTL2838UHIDIR
[156491.111145] usb 2-2: Manufacturer: Realtek
[156491.111147] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: 00000001

To make sure the drivers aren't loaded, I have a /etc/modprobe.d/local-blacklist.conf with:

blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
blacklist rtl2830
blacklist rtl2832
blacklist lirc_dev

To test it with the 'minimal' setup I started with just the RTL-SDR and a simple antenna, and Gqrx. Enabled remote control in Gqrx and added a radio 'gqrx-sdr' in Gpredict with host 'localhost' and port '7356' (default for gqrx remote control) and Radio type 'RX only', PTT status 'none'.

Gqrx controlled by Gpredict, tracking a satellite

Now I can select this radio as '1. Device' in the 'Gpredict Radio Control' window, and select 'Engage' when the right satellite, transponder and 'Track' are selected, after which Gqrx nicely follows the frequency Gpredict has calculated.

No signal yet as I am testing this indoors with the small default antenna that came with the RTL-SDR stick. That will not pick up weak signals!

I still want to get active on amateur satellites again, but the main reason is that the amount of work per contact is a lot more than for example in a digimode contest. But I still want to make those 'special' contacts, especially when the amount of local radio noise on HF is bothering me.

One of the most important improvements in making contacts on amateur satellites is working 'full duplex', meaning receiving signals while transmitting. The expensive way to reach that goal is buying a second amateur radio capable of receiving in FM and SSB modes in the 2 meter and 70 centimeter amateur bands and having computer aided tuning so gpredict can control the receiving frequency.

The less expensive way to reach that goal is using software defined radio. The good news is that Gqrx SDR can be controlled by other software which as the page shows is intended for remote control by Gpredict. All I needed now was reception hardware. Since the first RTL-SDR device I bought is always in use for receiving ADS-B signals from airplanes I decided to buy another cheap one to get me started. So it was on the shopping list for a recent visit to a hamfest.

At the hamfest I found a RTL-SDR stick with mcx connector and an mcx to bnc cable. But the same guy also sold cheap low(ish) noise amplifiers with SMA connectors and a 9V battery connector for power. So at one of the booths selling cable assemblies I found an mcx to male sma cable and a female sma to bnc cable, and a male to male sma cable.

The plan is to put this all together in some metal case to shield the lna from the outside world. Maybe also shield the amplifier from the RTL-SDR stick so it won't pick up any extra noise.

Should this work it would be possible to think of an upgrade with better SDR hardware and/or a pre-amplifier at the antenna side.

RTL-SDR stick and BNC cable

LNA and extra cables

I have Gooogle Sightseeing on my 'regular visit' list because they found really interesting places all over the world and I liked to make a virtual visit to those places myself.

But lately the site hasn't been updated much and now I notice it has three 'Groundhog day' articles on the front page: Groundhog Day for 2017, Groundhog Day for 2016 and Groundhog Day for 2015. The last non-Groundhog Day article is from May 2015.

For some circles I am active in the chat system of choice is jabber because it can be setup to demand encrypted links and has a nice array of client software which can deal with one client replacing the connection of another.

So I found gajim as client software for linux. But gajim has the habit of automatically changing text emoticons to images. I don't like that, if someone types (bf888) I want to see that and not have the last 8) replaced by an image of an emoticon with glasses.

Searching for a solution found Emoticons - Wiki gajim/gajim which states:

You are free, however, to disable emoticons completely, if you find them disturbing.

But no information on how to disable them all. I found in the advanced settings the option emoticons_theme which points at subdirs of /usr/share/gajim/data/emoticons in my installation (ubuntu). So I created a directory none with none/emoticons.py containing:

# coding=utf-8
emoticons = {
        'doesnotexist.png': ['fDpK6OGDFCCLmq5MNjihfpjZuLontjkWp5XG5V7wTIAVXwaJ'],
}

Leaving the list empty with just {} gave an error. My python knowledge is nonexistant so I took this shortcut.

And now a :-) stays a :-) as I wanted.

I was plagued by thunderbird/enigmail in one installation not wanting to send PGP-encrypted messages. It took me a while to debug because I seemed to be the first one to come across it. The error messages are not very helpful with a lot of SIGEXPIRED in them followed by a KEYEXPIRED. I found someone with probably the same problem at Enigmail stopped working: KEYEXPIRED/SIGEXPIRED - Super User but no usable answer at that time.

Searching further found me [Enigmail] enigmail won't let me encrypt messages anymore which does show another problem with old keys in the further thread. I started removing old keys showing with '00 00 00' fingerprints until I found my old 'home' key in the ring (0x2C663B5DF0D7C263). After that the error message changed to the key being unavailable. I dug through ~/.gnupgp/gpg.conf looking for mentions, and found:

#default-key F0D7C263

already disabled, and:

encrypt-to F0D7C263

when I changed that last one to a newer and better fitting key the problem was solved. There was a mention of F0D7C263 at the end of the enigmail error message but it was hard to draw conclusions about what it was doing there.

So as usual: good encryption is hard. And good error messages are hard too. I added a suggestion to the superuser.com message so others may spend less time debugging this problem.

Een tijd geleden heb ik een soldeerstation gekocht van Velleman, een Soldeerstation keramisch 48W VTSSC30. Die gebruik ik ook regelmatig naar alle tevredenheid.

Tot recent het steeds meer moeite ging kosten. De conclusie was uiteindelijk dat de stift aan het verslijten is, wat heel logisch is. Ik was even bang dat ik niet zomaar een losse stift kon krijgen, maar na dat ik deze gekocht had via Conrad blijkt die ook via Radio Centrum verkrijgbaar: Soldeerpunt 1,6mm Velleman VTSSC10/20/30/40 soldeerstation.

Stift vervangen, probleem opgelost. Grappig is dat volgens de Radio Centrum website de originele meegeleverde stift 1.6mm is terwijl ik in het overzicht van Velleman soldeerstiften bij Radio Centrum zie dat ik de 2mm versie had. Misschien moet ik nog eens een 0.8mm punt er bij kopen voor klein soldeerwerk.

Update: Radio Centrum zit dicht bij de winkel waar ik koffie haal, dus ik kwam er langs en heb gelijk een 0.8mm punt aangeschaft. Gelukkig hebben we nog een echte electronica winkel in Utrecht.

In een artikel in de Volkskrant vandaag KPN: introductie 5G bemoeilijkt door inlichtingendiensten - Volkskrant met daarin:

Het ministerie van Economische Zaken (EZ) biedt telecombedrijven in een recente beleidsnota aan andere frequentiebanden te veilen, omdat het voor de 3500 MHz-band vastzit aan een contract met het ministerie van Defensie tot aan 2026. De satellieten van de veiligheidsdiensten in het Friese Burum communiceren al jaren via deze hoge frequentie.

Volgens mij is dat helemaal niet "communiceren" maar alleen maar heel erg goed luisteren. In een eerdere zaak rond het gebruik van 3500 MHz kwam de nationale veiligheid ook voorbij, Enige wimax-provider in Nederland stopt ermee - Tweakers met daarin:

De reden voor het stoppen is dat Aerea zijn netwerk niet naar de noordelijke helft van Nederland mocht uitbreiden. Defensie wilde dat niet, omdat de 3,5GHz-frequentie het satellietgrondstation Station12, dat in handen is van Defensie, zou storen.

Met wat redeneren en nazoeken is wel te bedenken waar defensie/aivd/mivd zo graag naar wil luisteren: mobiele communicatie satellieten die in dat frequentiegebied signaal naar de aarde zenden.

Van tijd tot tijd lezen we verhalen over hoe vanuit Burum satelliet telefonie wordt afgeluisterd, zoals bijvoorbeeld Data uit Burum leiden naar piraten en terroristen - nrc.nl. Een beetje uitzoeken levert op dat onder andere de diverse Paksat satellieten zoals Paksat-1 - Wikipedia English die allerlei communicatiediensten leveren op de C-band op frequenties vanaf 3500 MHz. Waaronder satelliet-telefonie. En Nederland ligt aan de rand van het gebied waar deze signalen nog (zwak) te ontvangen zijn: Paksat-1R coverage map - Satbeams.

Mijn conclusie is dat de 'communicatie' waar het over gaat het afluisteren van de downlink communicatie van onder andere de Paksat-1R is.

I usually keep dump1090 running on a raspberry pi. It seems it is quite easy to share the data from dump1090 with Plane Finder so I decided to give that a try.

With the installation instructions via the Share your data with Plane Finder page I had the software installed easily. But I needed to visit the configuration page of the software via IPv4... while I disabled IPv4 on the raspberry so it took some changes to make it work again. Next thing the software was reporting the data was available fine but not uploading to the Plane Finder server. Checking with strace shows that the software tries to upload via an IPv4-only connection which will not work. Temporary re-enabling IPv4 fixes things, so it's purely an IPv4/IPv6 thing.

At work we (indirectly) get the scanning results from Shadowserver which now includes open VNC servers which is yet another service we don't really want left open to the Internet in general. A few were found which are now actively chased after to get them firewalled/disabled.

I really like the concept of shadowserver. ISPs that want the information can get full overviews of insecure services and botnet activity on their network. A full overview of what shadowserver looks for can be found at The scannings will continue until the Internet improves - Shadowserver.

We stayed in a holiday park in Germany for 6 days and I decided to bring radio, tuner and the 6-40m antenna. So I was DL/PE4KH for a week and operated PSK modes a few times.

In total I made 11 contacts. The 'radio environment' was about as noisy as I am used to at home so no improvement there. Disconnecting the power supply for the television and the cable modem in the bungalow helped a bit in reducing the radio noise.

The interesting part was on Thursday evening when I only heard noise on the 40 meter band and decided to give 80 meter a try. It was active with PSK signals, including from callsigns I recognize as regulars on 20 and 40 meter PSK. My best guess is that 40 meters was unavailable for others too! The interesting part was that the antenna tuner was able to tune the LW-10 antenna for 80 meter. I do guess a lot of power was lost in the tuner as I only was able to make contacts with stations that came in very strong for me.

For the next time:

• Make sure fldigi on the laptop knows about all possible PSK and RTTY home frequencies, including those on bands I don't use a lot.
• Both batteries I brought got depleted really quick when transmitting with 50 watts. I need more battery capacity.

As I process the eqsl confirmations that come in after the Russian Worldwide PSK contest 2017 I start to notice some callsigns are showing up regularly in (digimode) contests. My highest number of confirmed contacts via eqsl which are related to contesting come from YO9AGN, S58X, S51AF, RA3GZ, HG3FMZ, EA3HKA, 9A4FS.

But the number one callsign I have confirmed via eqsl is not a contest station but the Veron club station PI4AA where I try to call in to the net almost every month.

Today is very windy in the Netherlands, with storm with wind gusts of up to 65 km/h and average windspeed of 36 km/h. But the readings shown by the weather station readings shared in the neighbourhood show quite different values:

2017-02-23 21:49:14 :   HIDEKI Wind sensor
        Rolling Code:    15
        Channel:         4
        Battery:         OK
        Temperature:     4.9 C
        Wind Strength:   15.29 km/h
        Direction:       337.5 °

So I don't think those will help a lot for my Weather station Utrecht Overvecht.

This weekend I had time to use the radio and after trying to get some more contacts on the 30 meter band Friday evening I decided to participate in the ongoing digimode contest in the weekend. This was the weekend of the Russian Worldwide PSK contest 2017 (https TLS certificate is broken at the moment).

I had fun doing it, had 124 contacts in the contest. I now have two new countries in the log: Kuwait and Suriname. And Kuwait already confirmed via Logbook of The World. I just uploaded the log (with the last contact rejected as it was too late):

Band  QSOs Dupes Points Mults
160      0     0      0     0
80       0     0      0     0
40      52     0    320    28
20      71     0    223    33
15       0     0      0     0
10       0     0      0     0
======================================
Total  123     0    543    61
Claimed score is 33123 points

Comparing it to my results in the Russian WW PSK contest 2015 I did a lot better. At that time I still had limited access to the 40 meter band which limited my options for PSK traffic.

Today I threw out the longwire antenna and tuned it for the 30 meter amateur band (10.100 - 10.150 MHz). I first tried the PSK part of the band but that was completely silent. I tried the JT65/JT9 part, and that part was buzzing. And beeping, and other sounds. I made several contacts in Europe in the morning which was as expected. But in the evening the computer/radio was still running and I noticed some US callsigns, and answered one, and had a JT9 contact with K8SIA.

After that it was time to get the longwire antenna back in the house again. All in all another good experience with the 30 meter band.

I noticed recently the number of radio contacts made by my new callsign PE4KH which I started using in March 2016 was getting close to the number of radio contacts made by my previous callsign PD4KH between March 2013 and March 2016. A typical rise in contacts, mostly due to my skills improving and participating in contests. So I wanted to view the rise per month and did some searching how to ask the cqrlog databases and plot the results.

Oh, and now PE4KH has more contacts after a few new contacts logged in PSK31 mode on the 20 meter band today.

Vermont Counties map, from Vermont county map - Wikimedia

I still try to make radio contacts to far away places even with current radio propagation at low levels. At the moment the last hours of the afternoon before sunset seem to give options towards the west (USA and Canada).

Last week I got home early one day, fired up the radio for PSK31 on 20 meters and saw K2EQ again.

This Sunday I saw in the fldigi screen:

CQ Vermont QSO Party K1VMT K1VMT

and answered with my call without having any idea what the Vermont QSO party is about, but having Vermont in the log would mean a new US state.

The exchange was made and I dug up from the noise that the answer included LAMoille which is a county in Vermont. It all made a lot more sense when I viewed the Vermont QSO party website. I kept an eye open for CQ's from other Vermont stations but never saw any. So I entered my log with one entry for the Vermont QSO party.

The c't magazine this month had a few tips on linux powersaving. I tried them on the homeserver and saw indeed a very slight reduction in power use as logged by the UPS.

For powersaving in sound card(s):

# echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save

This can cause plopping sounds on some sound cards.

For powersaving in disk communication:

# cd /sys/class/scsi_host/
# for i in host*/link_power_management_policy; do echo min_power > "$i"; done

A posting about reading 433.920 MHz signals triggered the idea I had ages ago to decode those signals and see what weather stations are available nearby. The original posting 433,92Mhz ontvangen (Dutch) was about receiving remote controls (KlikAanKlikUit) and had a screenshot of some Linux software for receiving those signals but no name of the software (that would be useful information).

But a simple google search found me rtl_433 on github which receives and decodes all kinds of signals on 433.922 MHz.

I downloaded it on the raspberry pi for radio experiments, and it is working fine receiving weather information from probably nearby weather stations. At least one outside temperature and humidity sensor, one inside temperature and humidity and one wind and temperature sensor. This last one could be nice for my weather station!

2017-01-27 21:00:27 :   HIDEKI Wind sensor
        Rolling Code:    15
        Channel:         4
        Battery:         OK
        Temperature:     3.6 C
        Wind Strength:   5.31 km/h
        Direction:       67.5 °

and a rain sensor:

2017-01-27 21:01:05 :   HIDEKI Rain sensor
        Rolling Code:    0
        Channel:         4
        Battery:         OK
        Rain:    648.2 mm

Thanks for sharing, neighbours!

Ongeveer een jaar geleden ging ik over op het Draytek Vigor 130 VDSL modem om weer een configuratie te krijgen waar ik maximale controle heb.

Het nog openstaande punt is dat ik de ppp configuratie graag naar een MTU van 1500 bytes wil. En dat dat toen niet lukte in Vigor VDSL modem in gebruik en Xs4all VDSL met DrayTek Vigor 130 VDSL modem en PPP eindpunt op Linux (ubuntu) server.

Wat ik al goed had was de MTU van de ethernet interfaces hoger en het vinkje op de Draytek aangepast. Maar als ik de mtu/mru hoger forceerde in de ppp opties ging het mis.

Nu kwam voorbij in xs4all.general over dit onderwerp:

> 1500 wordt ondersteund door Xs4all en je test eerst bij 1492 welk pakket
> via ping erdoor gaat zonder in stukken gebroken te worden.
> Daarna zet je de MTU naar 1500 en kijkt of je inderdaad 8 bits meer door
> router kunt drukken zonder dat die gebroken wordt.

Wel zorgen dat het apparaat waar je de PPPoE termineert RFC4638
implementeert.
Die moet dan in de PADI een extra tag plaatsen (PPP payload is 1500
bytes), en de BRAS zet dat ook weet in zijn PADO antwoord.
Zo maar een grotere MTU gebruiken gaat niet werken...

De PPPoE sessie komt bij mij vanaf de thuisserver met rp-pppoe. Even zoeken leverde mij op dat voor rp-pppoe met MaxPayload onderhandeling ik minstens 3.11 nodig heb, en bij de huidige ubuntu versie zit nog 3.8. Tijd om een nieuwere versie te testen.

Update: Daarvoor moeten zowel de pppoe binary als de rp-pppoe.so plugin voor pppd bijgewerkt worden, en dat lukt me op dit moment even niet. Gelukkig had ik de oude pppoe binaries expres klaar staan en kon ik dus heel snel terug.

In Geluidsoverlast van vliegtuigen had ik het vooral over het opsporen van het vliegtuig om de klacht te kunnen melden, maar er was nog een extra detail: het vliegtuig vloog om deze tijd en bij deze lage temperaturen (het vriest momenteel ook overdag) om warmtelekken in de stadsverwarming te vinden.

Ik kan zo wel vertellen dat de stadsverwarming een groot warmtelek is, er zijn keurige strepen hier door de wijk waar het nooit vriest omdat de leidingen er onder liggen. Erg aardig van Eneco, maar degenen die veroordeeld zijn tot stadsverwarming betalen er wel de hoofdprijs voor.

Mijn ervaring met stadsverwarming is dat het voor hetzelfde warmtegebruik veel duurder is dan aardgas of electriciteit en dat het met een bijzonder lage efficïentie getransporteerd wordt. In mijn vorige huis (een flat) had ik stadsverwarming die zoveel warmte lekte op allerlei manieren dat ik de hoofdkranen ervan tot het minimum had dichtgedraaid en dan ergens in November wel eens het raam dichtdeed omdat het toch wel fris begon te worden. Maar omdat het blokverwarming was (een stadsverwarmingsaansluiting voor het hele gebouw en een verdeelsleutel voor het warmtegebruik per appartement) betaalde ik wel meer dan 100 euro per maand voor de warmte die ik zo snel mogelijk afvoerde.

Toen ik van een appartement naar een woonhuis ging was ik ineens een stuk minder per maand kwijt voor warmte omdat dat woonhuis een hoog rendement verwarmingsketel heeft.

Van een andere gebruiker van stadsverwarming momenteel weet ik dat die een absurd hoog bedrag betaald om het een beetje redelijke temperatuur te krijgen.

Het gebeurt van tijd tot tijd dat we hier extra lang en veel herrie van een vliegtuig of helikopter hebben. Vanavond weer iets waarvan we ons eerst afvroegen of het een helikopter of een vliegtuig was, maar wat wel heel hardnekkig in de buurt bleef vliegen.

De website van de rijksoverheid met de vraag Waar kan ik terecht met klachten over geluidsoverlast van vliegtuigen? is niet heel behulpzaam:

U kunt klachten over geluidsoverlast van vliegtuigen melden bij het vliegveld waar die vliegtuigen opstijgen of landen.

Het onhandige is alleen dat standaard niet zo goed aan een vliegtuig te horen of te zien is van welk vliegveld dit is opgestegen.

Maar, ik heb meestal dump1090 draaien om transpondersignalen van vliegtuigen te ontvangen en daarin zag ik meer informatie: geen latitude/longitude (altijd verdacht) maar wel hoogte (hardnekkig 1600 voet = 625 meter). En ook de ADSHEX code: 458D73 waarmee ik het vliegtuig en de vlucht snel kon vinden: Romaero BN-2-A-21 (OY-CKS) - planefinder.net wat aangaf dat het vanaf vliegveld "Rotterdam the Hague airport" komt. De website van dat vliegveld is vooral voor passagiers en niet voor meldingen geluidsoverlast, maar met wat zoeken kwam ik terecht bij Veel gestelde vragen over klachten rond vliegverkeer Rotterdam-The Hague Airport met een keurige verwijzing naar het klachtenformulier wat zelfs heel modern de optie heeft om de vlucht op de kaart te vinden aan de hand van mijn postcode. Daar heb ik de klacht ingediend, want het was echt langdurige herrie.

En dan blijkt er uitleg te zijn via een andere bron: Eneco vliegt dit weekend boven Utrecht en Nieuwegein met de mooie bewering:

Het is de eerste keer dat Eneco een inspectievlucht boven deze regio maakt. Het gaat om een klein en stil vliegtuigje, zegt Eneco, maar de vluchten kunnen wellicht voor enige geluidsoverlast zorgen.

Ze vliegen met een propellorvliegtuig uit 1978, dat is wel klein maar absoluut niet stil.

Update: Ondanks dat ik bij het indienen van de klacht de vlucht heb kunnen aanklikken op de site, afkomstig van en terugkerend naar Rotterdam the Hague Airport komt er als reactie terug:

   Gegevens veroorzaker overlast (meest waarschijnlijke vlucht):
   Vliegtuig afkomstig van of op weg naar RtHA: : Nee
   Vliegtuigtype                    : Britten-Norman BN-2 Islander
   Vluchttype                       : Onvoldoende gegevens beschikbaar
   Type verkeer                     : Onvoldoende gegevens beschikbaar
   Bestemming/herkomst              : Onvoldoende gegevens beschikbaar
   Kortste afstand tot adres klacht : 59 meter
   Hoogte op kortste afstand        : 604 meter

Het type klopt wel, dus dit is echt raar.

Het lijkt alsof het hele afhandelen van klachten over geluidsoverlast van vliegtuigen alleen overweg kan met geluidsoverlast tijdens opstijgen en landen. Nou zitten we hier gelukkig ver genoeg weg van Schiphol dat we geen registratienummers op vliegtuigen kunnen lezen, als we hier overlast hebben is het juist van vliegtuigen die hier iets 'doen'.

So the mobilinkd is now connected to serial over bluetooth on the Raspberry Pi, but now to get APRS data into aprx.

So far aprx does start but I see absolutely no data coming in, even when aprsdroid will see traffic. Something strange.

koos@joy:~ $ sudo aprx -v
2017-01-20 22:05:10.593 aprx start - 2.9.0
2017-01-20 22:05:10.594 TTY /dev/rfcomm0 opened
2017-01-20 22:05:20.624 CONNECT APRSIS aprsc.pa4tw.nl:14580
^C
2017-01-20 22:18:06.115 aprx ending (SIG 2) - 2.9.0
2017-01-20 22:18:06.116 aprx ending (SIG 2) - 2.9.0

It's a good thing aprsc.pa4tw.nl has an IPv6 address as this Raspberry Pi is only configured for IPv6.

Testing with minicom on /dev/rfcomm0 does show the startup messages from the mobilinkd but absolutely no APRS data in KISS format,,,

== BeRTOS AVR/Mobilinkd TNC2
== Version 2.0.1.571
== Voltage: 4019mV
== Starting.

Switching the mobilinkd between the Raspberry Pi and the smartphone with aprsdroid does seem to confuse something, it's not always showing data in aprsdroid either.

Installing the Linux ax25-tools and using kissattach and configuring aprx to use that interface doesn't help either.

Back to the KISS over serial port over bluetooth config I changed the setting 'bluetooth tracking' on the mobilinkd, which is advised for digipeater setups. And now I am seeing something:

koos@joy:~ $ sudo aprx -v
2017-01-20 23:12:17.568 aprx start - 2.9.0
2017-01-20 23:12:17.569 TTY /dev/rfcomm0 opened
9621    PE4KH-8   R     DB0NY>APZ17,DB0KX-2*,PE0FK-10*,PI1SHB*,PA7J-2*,WIDE2*,PI1APU*,LOCAL:!5103.84N/00736.63E#www.g07.de
2017-01-20 23:12:30.378 CONNECT APRSIS aprsc.pa4tw.nl:14580
9728    PE4KH-8   R     PI1APU>APND13:>W3,NL7      PAradigm    operation!
9831    PE4KH-8   R     PA3BXR-9>UQ5QW1,PA7J-2*,WIDE1*,PI1APU*,WIDE2-1:`zDKnA8>/]"3m}431.275MHz=
9867    PE4KH-8   R     PI1SHB>APRX29,PI1APU*,WIDE2-1:!5142.02N/00520.78E#PHG3460/2m Digi/IGate 's-Hertogenbosch
9934    PE4KH-8   R     PA5JB>APU25N,PE2KDK*,PI1APU*,WIDE2*:>202317zDX: PI1SHB 51.42.02N 5.20.78E 76.3km 133 23:13
9942    PE4KH-8   R     PI1DFT>APMI01,PI1SHB*,PI1APU*,WIDE2*:@202317z5159.70N/00420.17E#WX3IN1 Digipeater 2 mtr. pi1dft ziggo.nl
10007   PE4KH-8   R     PI1APV-2>APMI04,PI1DFT*,PA7J-2*,WIDE1*,PI1APU*,LOCAL:@202318z5130.81N/00344.00EI digi vliegveld MIDDEN ZEELAND
10018   PE4KH-8   R     DB0OTV-2>APOT21,DB0KX-2*,PE0FK-10*,PI1SHB*,PI1APU*,WIDE2*:>FILL IN DIGI + D-Star + C4FM QRG = 439,500 MHz -7,6 MHz
10122   PE4KH-8   R     PE9R>APX204,PI1APU*,WIDE2-1:=5202.5 N/00439.0 E-PHG2290QRV PI6NOS/ PI2NOS
10175   PE4KH-8   R     PA7J-2>APMI01,PI1APU*,WIDE2*:@210000z5149.68N/00450.43E-WX3IN1 PA7J Digi & I-gate Hardinxveld
10209   PE4KH-8   R     PD0JAC-10>UQ4XS8,PI1SHB*,PI1APU*,WIDE2-1:`{Mym>5#/>"4/}=
10227   PE4KH-8   R     PA3BI-10>APRS,PI1DFT*,WIDE1*,PA7J-2*,WIDE2*,PI1APU*,LOCAL:!5214.65N/00426.30E-000/000www.isemann.nl/A=000696
10277   PE4KH-8   R     PI1APV-2>APMI04,PI1DFT*,PA7J-2*,WIDE2*,PI1APU*,LOCAL::PI1APV-2 :BITS.11111111,Telemetry
10316   PE4KH-8   R     PI1SHB>APRX29,PI1APU*,WIDE2-1:!5142.02N/00520.78E#PHG3460/2m Digi/IGate 's-Hertogenbosch

And the results are showing up via the aprsc dashboard on aprsc.pa4tw.nl. Almost all packets I receive and forward are rejected as duplicate packets, but I have seen some packets accepted. So I guess I'm not really needed as an I-gate.

So I want to run APRS on the Raspberry Pi. My ultimate goal is to announce the meeting of our local radio club over 2 meter APRS but I will start with just playing "I-gate" which means I receive messages over the air and forward them to the nearest APRS server on the Internet which will then probably reject them because I'm not the only one receiving them.

The first step is to link the Raspberry Pi to a radio. The easiest way is (in my opinion) to link using the mobilinkd which uses serial over bluetooth, something the Raspberry understands.

I looked up how to use bluetooth on the raspberry and found Installing Bluetooth - Raspberry Pi Projects but using the suggested graphical tools requires a lot of packages:

koos@joy:~ $ sudo apt-get install bluetooth bluez blueman
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
bluez is already the newest version.
bluez set to manually installed.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  adwaita-icon-theme at-spi2-core colord colord-data dconf-gsettings-backend
  dconf-service fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core fonts-droid
  gconf-service gconf2-common ghostscript gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1
  gir1.2-atk-1.0 gir1.2-freedesktop gir1.2-gconf-2.0 gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0
  gir1.2-glib-2.0 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-notify-0.7 gir1.2-pango-1.0
  glib-networking glib-networking-common glib-networking-services
  gnome-icon-theme gsettings-desktop-schemas gsfonts hicolor-icon-theme
  imagemagick-common indicator-application libappindicator3-1 libasyncns0
  libatk-bridge2.0-0 libatk1.0-0 libatk1.0-data libatspi2.0-0 libavahi-client3
  libbluetooth3 libcairo-gobject2 libcairo2 libcanberra-gtk3-0
  libcanberra-gtk3-module libcanberra0 libcolord2 libcolorhug2 libcroco3
  libcups2 libcupsfilters1 libcupsimage2 libdatrie1 libdbus-glib-1-2
  libdbusmenu-glib4 libdbusmenu-gtk3-4 libdconf1 libexif12 libfftw3-double3
  libfile-copy-recursive-perl libflac8 libfontconfig1 libgconf-2-4 libgd3
  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-common libgirepository-1.0-1
  libgphoto2-6 libgphoto2-l10n libgphoto2-port10 libgraphite2-3 libgs9
  libgs9-common libgtk-3-0 libgtk-3-bin libgtk-3-common libgudev-1.0-0
  libgusb2 libharfbuzz0b libice6 libieee1284-3 libijs-0.35 libindicator3-7
  libjasper1 libjbig0 libjbig2dec0 libjpeg8 libjson-glib-1.0-0
  libjson-glib-1.0-common liblcms2-2 liblqr-1-0 libltdl7 libmagickcore-6.q16-2
  libmagickwand-6.q16-2 libnotify4 libogg0 libopenobex1 libpam-systemd
  libpango-1.0-0 libpango1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libpangoft2-1.0-0
  libpangox-1.0-0 libpangoxft-1.0-0 libpaper-utils libpaper1 libpixman-1-0
  libpolkit-agent-1-0 libpolkit-backend-1-0 libpolkit-gobject-1-0 libproxy1
  libpulse-mainloop-glib0 libpulse0 librest-0.7-0 librsvg2-2 librsvg2-common
  libsane libsane-common libsane-extras libsane-extras-common libsm6
  libsndfile1 libsoup-gnome2.4-1 libsoup2.4-1 libstartup-notification0 libtdb1
  libthai-data libthai0 libtiff5 libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2 libvorbisfile3
  libvpx1 libwayland-client0 libwayland-cursor0 libx11-xcb1 libxcb-render0
  libxcb-shm0 libxcb-util0 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxfixes3
  libxft2 libxi6 libxinerama1 libxkbcommon0 libxpm4 libxrandr2 libxrender1
  libxtst6 notification-daemon obex-data-server policykit-1 poppler-data
  python-cairo python-dbus python-dbus-dev python-gi python-gi-cairo
  python-gobject python-gobject-2 sane-utils update-inetd x11-common
Suggested packages:
  bluez-cups bluez-obexd ghostscript-x libcanberra-gtk0 libcanberra-pulse
  cups-common libfftw3-bin libfftw3-dev libgd-tools gphoto2 gtkam gvfs
  libjasper-runtime liblcms2-utils libmagickcore-6.q16-2-extra pulseaudio
  librsvg2-bin hplip hpoj poppler-utils fonts-japanese-mincho
  fonts-ipafont-mincho fonts-japanese-gothic fonts-ipafont-gothic
  fonts-arphic-ukai fonts-arphic-uming fonts-nanum python-dbus-doc
  python-dbus-dbg python-gobject-2-dbg unpaper
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  adwaita-icon-theme at-spi2-core blueman bluetooth colord colord-data
  dconf-gsettings-backend dconf-service fontconfig fontconfig-config
  fonts-dejavu-core fonts-droid gconf-service gconf2-common ghostscript
  gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1 gir1.2-atk-1.0 gir1.2-freedesktop gir1.2-gconf-2.0
  gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0 gir1.2-glib-2.0 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-notify-0.7
  gir1.2-pango-1.0 glib-networking glib-networking-common
  glib-networking-services gnome-icon-theme gsettings-desktop-schemas gsfonts
  hicolor-icon-theme imagemagick-common indicator-application
  libappindicator3-1 libasyncns0 libatk-bridge2.0-0 libatk1.0-0 libatk1.0-data
  libatspi2.0-0 libavahi-client3 libbluetooth3 libcairo-gobject2 libcairo2
  libcanberra-gtk3-0 libcanberra-gtk3-module libcanberra0 libcolord2
  libcolorhug2 libcroco3 libcups2 libcupsfilters1 libcupsimage2 libdatrie1
  libdbus-glib-1-2 libdbusmenu-glib4 libdbusmenu-gtk3-4 libdconf1 libexif12
  libfftw3-double3 libfile-copy-recursive-perl libflac8 libfontconfig1
  libgconf-2-4 libgd3 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-common
  libgirepository-1.0-1 libgphoto2-6 libgphoto2-l10n libgphoto2-port10
  libgraphite2-3 libgs9 libgs9-common libgtk-3-0 libgtk-3-bin libgtk-3-common
  libgudev-1.0-0 libgusb2 libharfbuzz0b libice6 libieee1284-3 libijs-0.35
  libindicator3-7 libjasper1 libjbig0 libjbig2dec0 libjpeg8 libjson-glib-1.0-0
  libjson-glib-1.0-common liblcms2-2 liblqr-1-0 libltdl7 libmagickcore-6.q16-2
  libmagickwand-6.q16-2 libnotify4 libogg0 libopenobex1 libpam-systemd
  libpango-1.0-0 libpango1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libpangoft2-1.0-0
  libpangox-1.0-0 libpangoxft-1.0-0 libpaper-utils libpaper1 libpixman-1-0
  libpolkit-agent-1-0 libpolkit-backend-1-0 libpolkit-gobject-1-0 libproxy1
  libpulse-mainloop-glib0 libpulse0 librest-0.7-0 librsvg2-2 librsvg2-common
  libsane libsane-common libsane-extras libsane-extras-common libsm6
  libsndfile1 libsoup-gnome2.4-1 libsoup2.4-1 libstartup-notification0 libtdb1
  libthai-data libthai0 libtiff5 libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2 libvorbisfile3
  libvpx1 libwayland-client0 libwayland-cursor0 libx11-xcb1 libxcb-render0
  libxcb-shm0 libxcb-util0 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxfixes3
  libxft2 libxi6 libxinerama1 libxkbcommon0 libxpm4 libxrandr2 libxrender1
  libxtst6 notification-daemon obex-data-server policykit-1 poppler-data
  python-cairo python-dbus python-dbus-dev python-gi python-gi-cairo
  python-gobject python-gobject-2 sane-utils update-inetd x11-common
0 upgraded, 165 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 65.6 MB of archives.
After this operation, 189 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.

I don't need the whole graphical environment (I run my Raspberry Pi headless, so it doesn't have a graphical environment).

So I searched some more and found the command bluetoothctl which does pairing in text mode, exactly what I want. It took some trying:

koos@joy:~ $ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
        30:14:11:xx:xx:xx       Mobilinkd TNC2
koos@joy:~ $ bluetoothctl 
[NEW] Controller B8:27:EB:xx:xx:xx joy [default]
bluetooth]# pair
Missing device address argument
[bluetooth]# scan
Missing on/off argument
[bluetooth]# scan on
Discovery started
[CHG] Controller B8:27:EB:xx:xx:xx Discovering: yes
[NEW] Device 9C:20:7B:xx:xx:xx 9C-20-7B-XX-XX-XX
[NEW] Device D0:03:4B:xx:xx:xx D0-03-4B-XX-XX-XX
[NEW] Device F4:F5:D8:xx:xx:xx F4-F5-D8-XX-XX-XX
[NEW] Device 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx 30-14-11-XX-XX-XX
[bluetooth]# pair 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx
Attempting to pair with 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx
Failed to pair: org.bluez.Error.AuthenticationFailed
[bluetooth]# ?
Invalid command
[bluetooth]# help
Available commands:
  list                       List available controllers
  show [ctrl]                Controller information
  select <ctrl>              Select default controller
  devices                    List available devices
  paired-devices             List paired devices
  power <on/off>             Set controller power
  pairable <on/off>          Set controller pairable mode
  discoverable <on/off>      Set controller discoverable mode
  agent <on/off/capability>  Enable/disable agent with given capability
  default-agent              Set agent as the default one
  scan <on/off>              Scan for devices
  info <dev>                 Device information
  pair <dev>                 Pair with device
  trust <dev>                Trust device
  untrust <dev>              Untrust device
  block <dev>                Block device
  unblock <dev>              Unblock device
  remove <dev>               Remove device
  connect <dev>              Connect device
  disconnect <dev>           Disconnect device
  version                    Display version
  quit                       Quit program
[bluetooth]# pairable on
Changing pairable on succeeded
[bluetooth]# pair 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx
Attempting to pair with 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx
[CHG] Device 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx Connected: yes
[CHG] Device 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx Name: Mobilinkd TNC2
[CHG] Device 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx Alias: Mobilinkd TNC2
Failed to pair: org.bluez.Error.AuthenticationFailed
[CHG] Device 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx Connected: no
[bluetooth]# agent on
Agent registered
[bluetooth]# pair 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx
Attempting to pair with 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx
[CHG] Device 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx Connected: yes
Request PIN code
[agent] Enter PIN code: 1234
[CHG] Device 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx UUIDs:
        00001101-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
[CHG] Device 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx Paired: yes
Pairing successful
[CHG] Device 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx Connected: no
[bluetooth]# 

So I have to set 'scan on', 'pairable on' and 'agent on' to get in a state where a 'pair' command will start the bluetooth pairing process and ask for a pincode.

Now we have a pairing, and I could add a serial connection over this. By hand this can be done with commandline rfcomm:

koos@joy:~ $ sudo rfcomm connect /dev/rfcomm0 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx
Connected /dev/rfcomm0 to 30:14:11:xx:xx:xx on channel 1
Press CTRL-C for hangup

And in another terminal:

koos@joy:~ $ cat /dev/rfcomm0 


== BeRTOS AVR/Mobilinkd TNC2

== Version 2.0.1.571

== Voltage: 4045mV

== Starting.

So there is communications possible! Now to get aprs data from the mobilinkd. This should happen via the KISS protocol, but at this time I have no idea what that would like.

Radio amateurs who make contacts over the borders constantly live in two timezones: both their local timezone and the UTC timezone. Logging contacts with UTC timestamps ensures the timestamps align across different parts of the world.

To help with this logging programs for amateur radio like CQRLOG will show the current time in UTC and log in UTC.

But I also like having a desktop clock in Linux with both the local time and the UTC time. One of the reasons is with WSJT-X: in this mode transmissions start at second :00 and end at second :50 so I have to check the WSJT-X screen every minute between seconds 50 and 00 (or every second minute when I'm in a contact). This gets tedious and I get distracted when there is 50 or 110 seconds to just wait.

There are hardware 'amateur radio' clocks like the CK-2 LED Digital Dual Time Zone Clock which is over 200 US dollars and looks like it would fit into a missile launch command center. Or from MFJ: MFJ-148RC dual time LCD clock, atomic W/GMT ZONE, id timer at nearly 60 US dollars.

I decided to just look for some software for this task and after a few searches I ended up with PyHamClock which is now running on my amateur radio desktop system.

I had the UBA PSK63 prefix contest in my planning again this year. This year I set up the antennas in advance, checked the contestmacros and I was ready. Some things at home delayed the start a bit, so I did not fire of a CQ UBA PSK63 PFX TEST right at 12:00 UTC but I managed nicely.

In the end I made 133 contacts. I started on 20 meters but that 'dried out' soon especially after the sun started to come down. I switched to 40 meters and this was the first time in this contest that I had access to the part of the 40 meter band below 7.050 MHz, which is where all my 40 meter contacts were made. Late in the evening 40 meter started showing some more distant stations, I saw Indonesia and Surinam callsigns but they did not hear my reply (which was not for lack of trying).

Total 133 contacts, 59 on the 20 meter band and 74 on the 40 meter band, so I entered as SOAB (single operator all band). A simple script counts 65 prefixes on 20 meter and 52 prefixes on 40 meter so that would make my claimed score 15561 points.

Looking at my contesting results the rates of contacts are improving (even with radio propagation getting worse) so I think I am doing fine.

This morning cqrlog crashed soon after I started it. On a restart it crashed instantly without even giving me any option to select anything.

Since there was some mysql corruption in my system anyway I decided to completely wipe out the databases/configuration, start over, import the backups again and be on my way. I never got that far, every time shortly after initializing cqrlog it started crashing. So I started testing what could be causing this and ended up with the DXCC update being the cause. So I did not do this update, loaded my logs from the backup, improved some things in my configuration and reported my findings via mail to de cqrlog developer. I can live with the DXCC tables being somewhat outdated, I have contacts with stable countries here in Europe.

I hope an update comes out soon for cqrlog. Also noted in the cqrlog forums where at least one other user has seen the same workaround. I haven't posted it on the forum yet as I wasn't registered there.

Update 2017-01-12: During the day an update for cqrlog was made available which fixes the problem. Applause to the developers of cqrlog for responding this fast.

This weekend I wasn't planning on radio contesting but some other plans got changed and in the evenings the 40 meter band around 7.040 MHz was filled with the deedle deedle of RTTY signals. It was the ARRL RTTY Roundup so I participated some hours. Given the limited time and the not so optimal propagation I did not expect a top score.

In the end I made 62 contacts. Better than my score in the ARRL RTTY Roundup 2016 where I made 24 contacts (after logs were checked).

Today I had time for outdoor amateur radio but it was a bit cold. So I took the car to recreation area "De Leyen" near Groenekan again, which I also did in April 2015 with warmer weather.

This time it was cold enough to stay in the car and still get cold after a few hours. I tried and worked 20 meter PSK31 and SSB, and again had the luxury of the environment there being almost free of radionoise on 20 meters. On 40 meters it was quite different, the only thing I heard from the radio was the typical noise of electrified wire nearby.

No loads of contacts, PSK31 wasn't very busy. I had the advantage of hearing stations a lot better on SSB (voice) but they did not hear my reply over the pile-up of other stations trying to contact them. I heard VP8LP which is impossible for me to hear at home, but he did not hear my replies.

The interesting contact was with A70X which is a radio expedition to Al-Safliyah island in Qatar.

Again on reddit /r/amateurradio there was a thread HNY! What are your 2017 Amateur Radio resolutions? so I checked the results for My 2016 Amateur Radio resolutions and thought about what I want to do in 2017 with amateur radio.

So, first to review what I hoped to do in 2016:

• Pass the exam for the full license on 2 March

Passed.

• Participate in "Mills on the air" in May

Prepared, and failed: antenna wasn't working and by the time things were fixed the 40 meter band wasn't cooperating.

• Making amateur satellite contacts when the weather permits

No contacts made, I got an antenna rotor and built a holder for the arrow antenna on that rotor, but I only used it to receive SSTV from the ISS.

• Participate in a few digimode contests 'seriously' (preparing, using an outside antenna, optimizing score). Sofar I usuallly go 'oh there is a contest I'll throw in my call and see if I can score some points'

Done: did better in a few contests compared to my 2015 scores. Also worked on and improved my contest macros. I even did a little voice contesting.

• Bring some radio stuff on summer holiday (a full license makes this possible in a lot more countries around here)

Brought the radio and an endfed antenna on a holiday in northern England. Found out the endfed gets into problems when cold (which was probably also the reason "Mills on the air" failed first). And by the time the weather was nice enough for the endfed to work again the battery of the radio was drained.

So, for 2017:

• Improve the holiday/portable setup with solar power and a lightweight multiband inverted V.
• Keep doing the digimode contests
• Maybe those satellites, time/weather permitting
• Get a 2m/70cm vertical antenna on the roof of the dormer. Antenna and a mount for a flat roof are already waiting: Testing an antenna for the 2 meter and 70 centimeter amateur bands and I have plans and materials to make the white antenna less visible: Amateur radio antenna camouflage.

Ter ere van het aanzetten van de zender Lopik te IJsselstein voor de regionale multiplex Randstad een nieuwe scan. Van de regionale multiplexen komen 6B Oost-Noord NL en 7A Zuid NL ook goed genoeg binnen bij een scan met een antennelocatie zo hoog mogelijk aan huis.

Condities zijn duidelijk anders dan bij de DAB services scan 11 November 2016: dit keer zijn de regionale multiplexen 6B Noord-Oost Nederland en 7A Zuid NL goed genoeg om te kunnen luisteren, en zijn de andere MTVNL multiplexen niet eens gezien.

Jan  1 00:59:59 greenblatt kernel: [2538111.748198] Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC

I usually distribute the leap second file to all servers I control to make sure there are no strange problems around it.

I wish everyone a good 2017!