A question this morning from Scott KQ4AOP caused me to Google this old book On page 59 I found the article about my first transmitter. Someone has put a copy of the entire book on the interenet. Here it is:
Read more at RSGB.co.uk 
Read more at RSGB.co.uk Its another gig sitting my “Grand Kittens” for my daughter as she and her hubby will be out of town from September 20th for a week. I guess I did a good job when they went to Cuba last January so I got invited back… I will be operating /p from Ottawa from September 21st to September 27th.
Most of my operating will be from September 23rd onwards.
As you can see from the above pic… they like having me around (one cat at least)
This time its a bit different because the car will be going with them to their rental cottage which is about 2 hours north of Ottawa.
However I plan to take both my Portable Station and my Transportable Station with me so I can activate some POTA locations with the Xiegu X5105 and also use my Yaesu FT 891 as I control the Trans Provincial Net for my 11am slot.
Before we go any further please remember that all my RF Plans you will see below are if the weather is good. I don’t like operating outside in the rain and neither do my radios….
The closest park to where they live is a City Park and not a POTA park.
The park has two sport fields and they have bleachers so it will be easy as I will have somewhere to sit along with strap my MFJ 33 foot mast to so the EFHW will have some altitude.
That will allow me to act as NCS with a 100w station with a full size antenna.
Once the net is over I will be packing up and heading back to the apartment for lunch. In the afternoons…. Once again if the weather is cooperating I plan to take the X5105 out to one or two of the local POTA Parks for a couple of hours. Check POTA Spots….
Due to the fact of not having access to a vehicle I will be heading out either on foot or public transport. After checking the POTA map it seems there are quite a few POTA sites that are fairly easy to access via the Bus and LRT service. However a few of the “Locals” have mentioned that they might pick me up and we could do an activation as a group so you never know.
They say that “getting there is half the fun” and this might be the case.
Stay tuned…
73bob
Yes its an old picture but the hobby has been fun since the 1990’s
Slightly random… I have a Cisco SPA504G VoIP phone which I acquired ages ago and connected to Hamshack Hotline back when the UK still got 5 digit numbers.
The phone isn a 4-line one and subsequently I got a Hams over IP number for line 2, then an extended freedom network number on line 3. After that the phone sat for ages with only the three lines in green, waiting for a fourth.
I did consider buying a VoIP service to transfer our POTS number to once we upgraded to FTTP and lost the copper line. But then, all we used the landline phone for was ignoring junk calls, only ever making calls using my mobile phone which has free minutes and SMS, or using WhatsApp. So the landline went.
And still that fourth line was dark, just sitting there.
Along came CNet. I have had an interest in all things telephony and telegraphy from an early age. I always wanted a small mechanical PABX – I still don’t have one but I do have an eye out for a couple of old dial phones from my childhood. And that’s where the interest in CNet came from. Having investigated further I realised I could use that fourth line for access, and so it happened.
4 lines green…
Its another gig sitting my “Grand Kittens” for my daughter as she and her hubby will be out of town from September 20th for a week. I guess I did a good job when they went to Cuba last January so I got invited back… I will be operating /p from Ottawa from September 21st to September 27th.
Most of my operating will be from September 23rd onwards.
As you can see from the above pic… they like having me around (one cat at least)
This time its a bit different because the car will be going with them to their rental cottage which is about 2 hours north of Ottawa.
However I plan to take both my Portable Station and my Transportable Station with me so I can activate some POTA locations with the Xiegu X5105 and also use my Yaesu FT 891 as I control the Trans Provincial Net for my 11am slot.
Before we go any further please remember that all my RF Plans you will see below are if the weather is good. I don’t like operating outside in the rain and neither do my radios….
The closest park to where they live is a City Park and not a POTA park.
The park has two sport fields and they have bleachers so it will be easy as I will have somewhere to sit along with strap my MFJ 33 foot mast to so the EFHW will have some altitude.
That will allow me to act as NCS with a 100w station with a full size antenna.
Once the net is over I will be packing up and heading back to the apartment for lunch. In the afternoons…. Once again if the weather is cooperating I plan to take the X5105 out to one or two of the local POTA Parks for a couple of hours. Check POTA Spots….
Due to the fact of not having access to a vehicle I will be heading out either on foot or public transport. After checking the POTA map it seems there are quite a few POTA sites that are fairly easy to access via the Bus and LRT service. However a few of the “Locals” have mentioned that they might pick me up and we could do an activation as a group so you never know.
They say that “getting there is half the fun” and this might be the case.
Stay tuned…
73bob
Yes its an old picture but the hobby has been fun since the 1990’s
Ever since we moved into the village of Eyke we’ve suffered with power cuts and power surges. It’s been that bad that we have a number of uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) dotted around the house to keep important things running when the power goes out.
Of late it’s been getting worse, not just the power cuts but, the power bouncing on and off very quickly for period of 10-15secs when the power comes back on. Unfortunately we had a particularly bad power bounce when the power came back on and it killed the main UPS for the IT equipment rack and also took out my RAID storage array that I use for backups.
On top of this the main server computer also took a hit and its solid state (SSD) drives started to fail. This left me in a position where I had no backups to recover from and had to get all the data off the running virtual machines (VMs) before the SSDs failed.
My old server that I decommissioned some months ago was now my radio shack PC and so had a desktop operating system on it and lots of HAM radio software installed and configured but, I needed to press it back into service as a server again, very quickly!
So after backing up the desktop data I rebuilt the computer as a server again and began the tedious job of building new VMs and migrating the configuration and data over from the old VMs.
You’re probably wondering why I didn’t just transfer the VMs over hole to the replacement server?
To do this I’d need to shut them down to get a clean snapshot however, when I tried it with a small, unimportant VM it became corrupt during the shutdown process and could no longer be transferred to the replacement server.
Not wanting to take the risk with any of the other VMs due to having lost all the backups, I decided to replicate all the VMs manually. Needless to say this isn’t a 5min job!
So, after a rather long week rebuilding everything I now have all the services up and running on the replacement server and the damaged server ready to be stripped down to an empty case and rebuilt from scratch.
This has meant that at times my M0AWS Blog, The Matrix server and other online services have been offline for short periods but, sadly there was nothing I could do about it. Unfortunately the national grid/power companies take no responsibility for such events and say they only guarantee the frequency of the mains power (50Hz) not the voltage!
The last entry in the old UPS log was an over voltage alert showing 1000v!
With a new UPS in place and online, we’ve already had a number of power cuts and it’s handled them well, lets hope we don’t get another big one!
Backups are now running again on external drives that are disconnected when not in use to protect them from power surges and all the services successfully migrated over to the replacement server.
More soon ….
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