Category Archives: Web

This Spewed Out of the Internet #3

Posted on by

0511-0701-3118-0930Here’s some things I found spewing forth from the Internet:

When Charles Simonyi was operating amateur radio station NA1SS from the International Space Station (ISS), I was looking around for the right frequencies to use, including doppler shift. I came across a really good web site on contacting the ISS. Check it out if you are interested in the topic.

According to Amateur Radio Newsline, the Indy cops that got in trouble for using ham radio gear for tactical communication were using modified Yaesu FT-2800 2-Meter Transceivers. With these radios opened up, they can operate outside the ham band on adjacent VHF frequencies. According to ARNewsline:

Some conversations were heard in the VHF police bands, at the bottom of the 2-meter band and on frequencies assigned to the MURS radio service.

MURS stands for Mult-Use Radio Service, an unlicensed radio service defined by the FCC. There are 5 MURS channels available: 151.820, 151.880, 151.940, 154.570 and 154.600 MHz.  These unlicensed channels would be a convenient location to hang out without the potential of interfering with anything important. However, a modifed amateur radio transceiver is not certified for use per Part 95 of the FCC rules.

I have not found any other information on the VHF police frequencies being used. Some departments maintain their licensing for VHF channels after adopting the newer 800 MHz radios. Modified amateur radio equipment is not certified for use on police channels. It sounds like these police officers were also using the low end of the 2-meter ham band. Even if they are licensed, it would be an inappropriate use of the frequencies. And a dumb one….of course someone is going to hear them and figure out what is going on.

You may have heard about Stephen Colbert from the Colbert Report getting his viewers to vote for his name on the new ISS module. It seems that he got the most votes but NASA declined to name the module after him (like that was going to happen). They came up with the alternative of naming a treadmill after him….all in good fun. The video is available on the Comedy Central web site.

On the K3NG Report, there was a funny post about the demise of phone operation on the ham bands, which is caused by the lack of testing for phone operating skill during the licensing process.

On the KB6BU Ham Radio Blog, there is an interesting post about the HP-35 calculator…a classic electronic product and an elegant design. The IEEE named the HP-35 and Hewlett-Packard Company as the recipient of the Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing award.

73, Bob K0NR

This Spewed Out Of The Internet #2

Posted on by

0511-0701-3118-0930Been spending time on airplanes again. I think my business card should show my office as Seat 8C (always go for the aisle seat).

Here’s a few things flying at me on the web. K3NG reports that the new FCC Chairman has a reputation for being data driven, you know, like using facts and everything. I can go for that. Here’s the ARRL story on the FCC Chairman (Julius Genachowski).

In case you missed it (I did), Woz has been on Dancing with the Stars.  Woz is a cool guy, but who cares?

Fark.com had an interesting photoshop sequence that started with a guy adjusting some sort of antenna. Lots of creativity by the photoshopping readers. The poor guy is probably trying to figure out how to receive digital television.

From the Things That Really Matter Department, a big friggin’ asteroid just missed hitting the earth. OK, it missed us by 49,000 miles but in cosmic terms that is half a freckle.

I just noticed this article on the ARRL web site about Laura Smith, the FCC Special Counsel for amateur radio enforcement. She says will probably get her amateur radio license someday but thinks she needs to learn Morse Code first (read the story to understand why).

Closer to home, I have been tuning up my packet radio gear which has been sitting on APRS for the past year or so. It seems the local RACES folks want to use Winlink for emergency comms but I am not sure my TNC is up to the task.

—   73, Bob K0NR

Tweaking the Blog a Bit

Posted on by

wordpress logoThis evening, I am messing around with the blog a bit. I recently updated WordPress to version 2.7, which is a significant upgrade. I am still figuring out what’s new.

I decided the old template had just too much blue, so I switched over to “Journalist”…nice and clean. Also, the main text column is set up wider, which fits most computer monitors better. Maybe too boring, we’ll see. It is soooooo easy to change themes in WordPress.

For several months now, I’ve been using WP-SpamFree which does an awesome job of keeping the comments spamfree.

I finally got around to adding a blogroll. It seemed like just another thing to keep up to date, so I resisted doing it. However, I noticed that my web page was getting lots of hits off some of the other blogs that had me on their blogroll, so time to return the favor.

73, Bob K0NR

Managing Twitter Overload

Posted on by

Twitter is The Next Big Thing on the web…sometimes referred to as microblogging.  (For some background on Twitter, see my earlier post: Twitter: Yet Another Web Thing.)  Several of the ham radio bloggers have tried Twitter and have gotten frustrated with it. Steve K9ZW says that

Basically the few unique bits of information passed are overwhelmed by endless droning Tweets about microcosms of banality trying to add value to the mundane.

I think NØHR captured the issue succinctly by describing Twitter as having a poor Signal-to-Noise Ratio.

I suppose this is what you get from a free, web-based communication service that asks you “What Are You Doing?” and gives you 140 characters to form the answer.

My view is that we are living in a world where the barriers to communication have been dramatically lowered, meaning that there is more information flying in our direction than ever before. Twitter is just the latest example of this. If you “follow” a hundred or so people all tweeting away with their What Are You Doing? stream of consciousness,  you are going to end up with a Pile-O-Stuff of questionable value. To make this useful, you must be careful about who and how many people you follow or apply some kind of filtering/sorting mechanism to keep it under control. I noticed that WA4D expressed a similar view.

This is really no different from when we subscribe to other forms of electronic distribution, such as email lists (e.g., Yahoo groups) and RSS feeds. The reality is that you can easily get overloaded by all of the content out there….more than any human has time or energy to read. So be selective…it is the only way to survive the Information Diarrhea Age.

73, Bob K0NR

Followup on 30 Dec:

I guess I should have specifically stated: I am finding value in Twitter….usually in the form of a pointer to an interesting web page or an insightful observation by one of the people I am following. Your Mileage May Vary.

Favorite Radio Videos

Posted on by

As we head for the end of 2008, I am resisting the urge to do some kind of year-end retrospective. Instead, I’ll pull out some of the best amateur radio and technology-related videos on the web. OK, some of these were completed in earlier years, but this collection represents my favorite video finds on the internet.

Old Goat Field Day

Steve NØTU has captured a number of videos about his hiking / ham radio adventures with his two goats. This one is from Field Day 2008, operating from one of my favorite mountains: Mount Herman. If you like this one, check out Steve’s blog for other videos.

Digital Television Transition

This is a funny video about the transition to Digital TV (fasten your seat belts for that event, coming up in February 2009). It might be poking fun at the elderly, but it is also poking fun at the mess the FCC has created concerning this transition. Why can’t television be simple?

Mountain Dew Commercial with Ham Radio

This is a short Mountain Dew commercial with a reference to vintage ham radio in it.

“Radio Hams” Film

This Pete Smith movie is an oldie but goodie about ham radio….a trip back in time.

N2JMH PSYCHO ROVER

Operating rover in a VHF contest is a fun activity, one that I have been known to do. It does take a bit of a warped mind to truly excel at this….as shown in this video.

The Ham Band

This is a music video by by OZ1XJ and friends, with a ham radio theme to it. You gotta love the guys singing while hanging from a tower!

The Neighbors Find Out About The Ham Radio

This is what happens when the neighbors suspect you of operating a ham radio set.

Amateur Radio Today

This ARRL video with Walter Cronkite narrating is one of my all time favorites as it does a good job of telling the ham radio public service story. It is special to me since it includes coverage of the Hayman Fire….the biggest wildfire in Colorado history, which happened about 15 miles from my home

Got Spam?

Posted on by

How’s your email inbox doing these days? Spamhaus says that spam (also called Unsolicited Commercial Email or UCE) makes up 90% of the email sent in most parts of the world. Since Spamhaus is in the business of providing anti-spam services, it might have a tendency to overestimate the amount of spam.

I have several email accounts for various purposes. One of these is a “junk” account on yahoo that I use for most online purchases and registering at questionable web sites. Examining that inbox, I see 97 messages in the inbox and 647 messages places in the spam folder by Yahoo’s spam filter. Of the 97 messages in the inbox, about half of those are really spam. Another 31 spam messages were sent to a “disposable email address” that I had used at one time. Adding that up, that is a total of 727 spam messages out of 775, which corresponds to 94% spam. Now this is probably a pessimistic measure as this email account is more likely to attract spam and has relatively low legitimate email usage. Still, it is quite amazing how much junk mail it accumulates.

My “real” email accounts have much less spam in them, but it is more difficult to tell the actual percentage. I don’t know for sure what anti-spam measures my ISP uses. On my end, I use Thunderbird’s junk mail controls which seems to catch the majority of the spam. There are quite a few methods available for reducing spam.

The root cause of this is that the internet email protocols were designed with an inherent trust of all users. All of the header information that indicates who sent the email can be easily spoofed, so there is very little accountability in the system. I doubt that the early email inventors anticipated the flood of viagra messages that would occur decades later. This is a classic example of unintended consequences of a new technology. (See Tom Van Vleck’s The History of Electronic Mail for more information.)

So now we spend our time and energy filtering and deleting this nuisance. Even more disturbing are the phishing scams that are showing up in my inbox. There are some very credible fake emails supposedly from major banks and financial institutions that try to get you to log into a fake web page and share your personal account information. Watch out for these!

Various solutions have been proposed to solve the spam problem. Sometimes I think capital punishment might be the answer, but I am not quite ready to propose that……yet. Stay tuned for further updates 🙂

How’s your inbox doing?

73, Bob K0NR

Changing Over to WordPress

Posted on by

WordPressI am in the process of moving my weblog from Blogger over to WordPress to take advantage of the more flexible software tools in that environment. The blog will remain on the k0nr.com domain but under a different directory (www.k0nr.com/wordpress). The old blog files should remain in place, so that existing links are not broken. In theory, this should all be transparent to you, as I will redirect the existing URLs for the main blog ( http://www.k0nr.com/blog ), the RSS feed and the Atom feed.

But this is the worldwide web and there are computers involved, so something is bound to get messed up! Hang in there while I make these changes.

Eventually, I’ll port my web site over so that all of k0nr.com is under WordPress. That is likely to take some time.

73, Bob K0NR

Bits and Pieces

Posted on by

I’ve been out of town quite a bit for work and pleasure, so here’s a catch up post of several bits and pieces.

You may have heard that Sarah Palin’s email got hacked. The background story is here on Wired’s site. The yahoo mail account was apparently accessed using the password reset system. That’s where you have to answer a few personal questions that confirms that you are the owner of the account….or know how to use google. According to Wired, the information required to unlock the account was Palin’s birthdate, ZIP code and where she met her spouse. All of this was acquired by searching the web and making a few educated guesses. How secure is your web-based email account?

Richard Garriott, W5KWQ is following in the footsteps of his father, astronaut Owen Garriot W5LFL by taking a ride in space. The difference is that Richard is buying a ride on a Russian spacecraft, similar to other space tourists. It turns out Richard is a very successful video game designer and can afford the ride. He does plan to make ham radio a key part of the adventure. Check out his web site here.

Meanwhile, China is advancing its manned space program with their first space walk (EVA). Meanwhile, things are moving a bit slower at NASA such that we’ll have to continue to rely on the Russian space program to keep the ISS alive.

The ARRL made the QST magazine archive available online. While this archive is not complete, it has a ton of good articles in it. Great move, ARRL! This is open to ARRL members only. (What, you are not an ARRL member?)

The ARRL is also active on twitter at http://twitter.com/arrl. Now, if I could just figure out the purpose of twitter.

I still have not tried Google’s Chrome browser which makes me one of the few people on the planet that hasn’t done that. I think there are about 10 of us left. (Of course, I don’t own an iPhone either, so go figure.) In general, I am consciously trying to avoid Google as they collect way too much personal information. The NSA should contract their work out to Google.

73, Bob K0NR

Twitter: Yet Another Web Thing

Posted on by

I was just starting to play around with Twitter, mostly to understand what it does. I have been reading about it in the PC magazines and hearing about it via various tech podcasts. About the same time, I noticed that Jeff KE9V mentioned it on his blog.

Twitter is another form of Internet communication commonly referred to as “social networking.” Back before the Internet was invented, our social network consisted of actually talking with people, usually face-to-face or maybe on the telephone. For many amateur radio enthusiasts, we also used wireless radio technology to chat. (Remember when “wireless” meant big iron radios that only qualified experts could use?) Of course, mostly we chat about our radios, so some people question the meaningfulness of that particular social network.

Then the Internet and email came along. Your email address book quickly becomes the definition of your email social network. Email distribution lists popped up for many topics and interests groups (“social networks”). More recently, Yahoo! Groups has attracted hundreds of different ham radio groups to that system. Yahoo! Groups provides file sharing and other features, in addition to the usual email list.

Somewhere along the line, sites such as AOL popularized the Instant Messaging (IM) concept. This was initially just text messaging but more recent versions of IM include voice messaging and file sharing.

Real social networking sites combine a wide range of features such as chat, email, video, file sharing and blogging to allow you to “keep in touch” with people and issues you care about. The most popular social network sites in the US are Facebook and MySpace. These sites let you define who you are connected to and who you want within your inner circle. Like most college-age students, my kids have latched onto Facebook as the way to connect with their friends and share photos and information. (I recently got a Facebook account but my daughters are not sure that this is a good idea….they said something about parents stalking their kids.)

Enter Twitter. Twitter is basically a microblog that lets you spit out the latest thing on your mind….what you are doing, what you are thinking, what you just discovered. It is a random flow of consciousness….or drivel….up to 140 characters at a time. Anyone interested can “follow” you and your comments. It has the flavor of a social network because you define who you want to see comments from (presumably related to people / issues you are interested in). See this video for a quick tutorial on Twitter.

OK, so what does this have to do with ham radio? Every one of these systems, from email to Yahoo! groups to twitter, have ham radio enthusiasts using them. In other words, there are communities, I mean “social networks”, that relate to amateur radio. The problem is that most of them are struggling to reach critical mass. Yahoo! Groups, which is fairly limited and has a number of issues, has gotten over this hurdle. The others are a bit hit and miss.

I am not sure where this leads and how useful this stuff is. For me personally….I am overstimulated. There are too many systems, too many emails, too many logins/profiles to create and maintain.

Now let me get back to twittering.
http://twitter.com/robtwitte

73, Bob K0NR


Posted in Web

HamLinks Toolbar for IE and Firefox

Posted on by

I just came across the NØHR Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox. I just installed the HamLinks toolbar into Internet Explorer. (I had previously given up on Firefox.)

HamLinks: The Ham Radio Toolbar for Firefox and IE

HamLinks is a free ham radio toolbar that extends your (Internet Explorer or Firefox) web browser to give ham radio operators quick access to great ham radio content. It’s completely free, easy to install (and uninstall) and can be configured by the user. No registrations, spyware, spam or other hooks.

The default configuration has a few too many features turned on for my use, so I turned many of them off. (Not a problem, just takes a little configuration.) The features that seem useful to me are:

Powerful search box (QRZ.com, DXwatch, QSL Manager, FindU.com, etc.)
UTC Time
WWV gadget to show propagation bulletins
Propagation Data from WWV

You may decide to keep other features, depending on your ham radio interests. Take a look the toolbar and give it a try.

73, Bob K0NR