[pskmail] A few reflections from a week away
- From: Pär Crusefalk <per@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: pskmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:02:41 +0200
Hi,
Had a nice week with some excellent skiing in Sälen. Btw here is a video
of someone going fast down one of the slopes there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3S3SE6BFGg
Anyway. I set up my FT-817ND with a 6 m fishing rod vertical fed by an
MFJ-902 tuner at the base of the antenna (housed in a waterproof box,
I like to tune at the antenna in order to tune the antenna and not the
coax). Only had two radials with me so could have been a more efficient
antenna but it worked.
First issue was that I set up fldigi using RTS ptt over /dev/ttyUSB2.
Worked fine until I rearranged the usb connections (fldigi crashed right
away). Had some issues with fldigi locking up serial ports, that killed
the GPS (got nothing from it). When I replugged everything and started
over with all the configs it worked fine. Except for the occasional
fldigi freeze that is.
Started listening on 10148 and had endless traffic there, ARQ
connections that seemed to never end. I also had 40 meters set up as a
backup frequency to my server but changing band means I have some tuning
to do at the antenna (looking hard at getting the elecraft T1 ATU to
make that switch much faster). Anyway, as I had no way of getting
through the endless traffic I called it a night and left the PC to do
timed position beacons. Also decided to try THOR22.
In the morning I found several nice QSL's received by servers. But, when
checking the pskmailers map it seemed I was not on it. Further checking
at aprs.fi showed that the data was invalid:
2012-04-08 18:20:51 UTC:
SM0RWO-7>PSKAPR,TCPIP*,qAS,DL4OAH-8:!6111.47N/01300.162E 196/000/ QRP
[Invalid uncompressed location]
2012-04-08 20:46:12 UTC:
SM0RWO-7>PSKAPR,TCPIP*,qAS,9A1CRA:!6111.47N/01300.162E 196/000/ QRP
[Invalid uncompressed location]
2012-04-09 05:42:04 UTC:
SM0RWO-7>PSKAPR,TCPIP*,qAS,DL9YCS-3:!6111.47N/01300.162E 196/000/ QRP
[Invalid uncompressed location]
2012-04-09 05:51:46 UTC:
SM0RWO-7>PSKAPR,TCPIP*,qAS,DL9YCS-3:!6111.47N/01300.162E 196/000/ QRP
[Invalid uncompressed location]
2012-04-09 06:03:38 UTC:
SM0RWO-7>PSKAPR,TCPIP*,qAS,DL9YCS-3:!6111.47N/01300.162E 196/000/ QRP
[Invalid uncompressed location]
Hmm, so I unchecked compress and sent again. Now it worked. I see an
obvious difference when looking at the data that worked and the frame
that did not.
2012-04-09 06:03:38 UTC:
SM0RWO-7>PSKAPR,TCPIP*,qAS,DL9YCS-3:!6111.47N/01300.162E 196/000/ QRP
[Invalid uncompressed location]
2012-04-09 06:05:55 UTC:
SM0RWO-7>PSKAPR,TCPIP*,qAS,DL9YCS-3:!6111.47N/01300.98E-QRP
The rest of the week was an endless "fight" over the pc. Anton, 9 yo, is
just starting to develop games using Scratch. That is a programming
language for beginners that teaches kids the real principles of software
development: http://info.scratch.mit.edu/About_Scratch
So, I could have worked much, much more but what I take from the week is
anyway:
1. Fldigi is not stable and can not be relied upon. Crashed several
times, often frozen in the mornings.
2. We need a way to let the weak, mobile stations at least enjoy
unconnected mode. A separate APRS only frequency for example. It took me
about 6 hours to get through the crowd now.
3. Compressed position bug apparent.
4. The THOR-modes are very, very nice. Helped me send several pskaprs
emails during really poor condx.
5. I need to get Anton his own laptop...
I suppose #2 is what we should discuss.
73 de Per, sm0rwo
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