kc0vcu's blog

The Marathon, can you spare a few minutes?

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:31:22 -0500

Most of us had some involvement in the Twin Cities Marathon this year. Care to comment on what you did? Looking for a quick paragraph. Thanks.

I worked in Net 3 at the 24 mile mark again this year. I saw that we were looking at rain this year, so I got in early and set up a gazebo I picked up for the marathon last year. The staff who was able to stay dry, and keep supplies dry considered it a big hit. The Vadnais Heights Fire and Rescue vehicle showed up this year for the first time at our aid station, and set up their own pop-up gazebo. For the most part the day was quiet. One of the elite runners cramped up 2 blocks past our station, and we handed out a lot of vasline. One runner had a leg wrapped and continued on. Net 3 was run on 800 Mhz radios with talk around on 2-meter simplex. Vadnais Heights also provided a vhf radio that we could get updates from them with if they had to go down the road and needed to provide information back to the net through us. I worked with AB0YQ, Steve Levens, and AC0CZ, Kelli Tubbs, as well as a Ski Patrol EMT, EMT students from one of the local high schools, a couple of sports medicine doctors, an RN and a medical student from one of the local colleges. Even with the rain, I had a great day.

May 31, 2008, pictures of the weather.

Sat, 31 May 2008 21:24:58 -0500

I have long been a fan of the weather. There are a couple of reasons I am not a storm spotter for SkyWarn, but none of them have to do with not being interested in the weather.

As I type this, I'm uploading a bunch of photos I took this evening. Some of the photos in the album are of the hail that was at my apartment, and some of the damage to the building. (Broken glass) But most of the 22 meg of images going up on Picasaweb are of clouds seen at various locations in the Plymouth/New Hope area.

Couple of Repeaters off the air...

Fri, 09 May 2008 09:08:27 -0500

As you may have noticed two of our repeaters are currently off the air. Both the 146.76 and 444.1 repeaters are off the air as the repeaters and antennas are being relocated.

If my recollection from this morning's breakfast conversation is correct, the antennas have been relocated already and are being fed with new hard line to the new location in the building for the repeaters.

Tim got the message on Wednesday evening that the building was ready to have us relocate the equipment, and he and Roger and another person were busy last night actually moving the .76 repeater from its old location to the new room.

Echolink and the 146.76 repeater.

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 15:15:40 -0500

lots of possibilities, a few requests.

Echolink is now installed on the 146.76 repeater. It is available to all users of the repeater, and is available for any echolink user on the internet. At the moment there are a few restrictions placed on the node, and as I get those restrictions well documented, I'll post updates here and elsewhere. Feel free to post questions and I'll do my best to answer for you.

Interesting places in MN.

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 23:13:38 -0500

For the past several years I have been making occasional trips to my dad's place in south eastern MN, and from there forays into Wisconsin and Iowa for various reasons. Well outside of the incidental trip to Iowa in the next year or so, possibly not even that far into the future, I am not going to have a major reason to be traveling. That's because my dad is heading out to the state of Washington for his retirement, which leaves me with a few cousins in the twin cities and surounding communities, and not all that much else.

Road Trip - Antenna Thoughts and Trials

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 01:59:18 -0500

Field days are done, and I've had the opportunity to spend the past month with my son now. This weekend really was our first opportunity to spend some time visiting my dad, and take care of a few things that have been needing to be done at his place.

I decided that it would be a good idea to see what things were like so far as setting up antennas and the like, now that I know a little bit more about the subject.

A few lessons learned...

Mon, 08 May 2006 20:22:53 -0500

If you have been reading my blog, you are probably aware of the loss of one of my radios. Well, ok, three, but only one of them was a ham rig. So I have been looking for a replacement radio for some time, and I finally found both a party willing to sell one at what I consider a reasonable rate, and the funds to provide that party with to buy it from him.

Actually I picked up two radios, One is going to be a replacement for my vx-150 in my APRS setup, the other is pretty much a straight replacement for my Kenwood TM-732a. Since I only need 2-meters for my APRS, and I am not looking for a lot of memories, etc. I found a Radio Shack HTX-212 on eHam. That arrived first, and I was able to use it to do some initial testing.

Postwinter Mad...

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 18:53:16 -0600

I was at Midwinter Madness today (Saturday) and here are my own observations.

The title of this blog entry comes from the fact that, well, it isn't midwinter any more. It's almost a week into the Season of Spring. I was also just a little disapointed in the variety of hardware on the tables. Nothing significant wrong with any of it, just mostly not what I was looking for.

I set out the day planning on picking up a HF rig, and possibly a replacement Mobile dual band vhf/uhf rig. Half the order was filled. I now have a Kenwood 430s hf rig. I can finally listen with a reasonable possibility to the hf bands. Unfortunately unless I wanted a brand new, in the box radio, there was pretty much nothing available in dual band mobile rigs that were of any interest to me.

Getting Into APRS...

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 20:07:35 -0600

What do I need to do to start working APRS?

I've heard the question a few times, and so have you. There are a lot of resources out there for getting involved. Perhaps the best starting point is to take a look at what APRS provides, and decide what you are going to do within APRS. http://eng.usna.navy.mil/~bruninga/aprs.html is the primary starting point, so 'start' there.

You can do anything from an APRS beacon letting the world know where you are, adding APRS to an in-car navigation system, message passing via APRS, monitoring where APRS users are located, through building infrastructure to handle APRS traffic and gateway it to the Internet.

Temporarily Imobile...

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:54:30 -0600

As mentioned on my picture in the Miscelanious Gallery, my car was broken into sometime Monday night, Tuesday morning, and my Kenwood TM-733a was stolen. (Along with a few other items.)

Strangely enough they also ripped out the speaker wire that was supplying power to my trunk, which means that the equipment that was powered there is down as well. At the moment that means my APRS equipment is out of order. This is not a critical long term issue, as I have no problem stringing new wire, though I will re-route through a cleaner path, and there is some logic to putting together a better power system with leads from the battery, or a few other ideas I may have, such as a seprate battery system for my electronics with an independent power down process.

I was Where?

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:15:04 -0600

APRS, or Automatic Position Reporting System gives an amature a way of making available to other amatures, and anyone interested, a way of figuring out about where you are at any given time.

As a brief overview, if you take a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver that outputs a standard called NEMA, and pump that into a small computer with one or another form of a Terminal Network Controler (TNC) connected to a radio that at the very least will transmit on the frequency 144.39 as a packet network transmition. There are both packet repeaters, and Internet gateways for this traffic that amoung other systems transfers the location information to FindU.com.

When am I ON?

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:46:05 -0600

I understand that it can be kind of fun to know when someone is going to be on the air. Sometimes it is even useful information, you can call out for them if you need assistance, or just think they might be around.

I have a somewhat unusual work schedule when compared to a lot of people. In fact this month it prevents me from getting involved in contesting at all. My 'Work Week' starts Wednesday at 7:00 pm cst, and ends most weeks at 7:00 am Saturday morning. My work day is from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am. For those who are familiar with a digital clock, and sometimes drop a couple of hours, that means I normally work a 12 hour day, or a 36 hour week. Every third week I work an additional 12 hours, from 7:00 pm Saturday night, till 7:00 am Sunday morning. This month I get two of these weeks, The 4th, and the 25th. Both contesting weekends.

Hardware, travels, travails, and tribulations..

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 22:36:53 -0600

As noted by the entry date/time, I am just home from the TCFMC meeting. It's been an interesting weekend for me, with very probably a little more to go.

My father was having some problems with e-mail on his computer, as well as some other minor problems with other things on his computer. The e-mail issue would be the worst of them, in that every time he went to get his e-mail, the program would get 'so far' then generate an error, and die. The other problems he has been having relate to his operating system, and the limitations it imposes on his web browser. Specifically he is running Windows 95, and at the moment can't run any of the 'modern' web browsers that want a winnt base platform. This does eliminate a few things as possiblities for him as well, he can't run some of the plugins to IE or Firefox. etc. For the most part he is not concerned enough about those issues to "upgrade" to a new computer, and I am not pushing him that way either.