• The Yaesu is Dead. Long live the Yaesu. ( Yaesu, FT-900, FT-710 )

  Earlier last week, I went to turn on my FT-900, only to find that I had a PLL unlock from about 24MHz to 29MHz on AM & SSB. Luckily, it was still under warranty, so I filed a claim, sent in my radio and waited.

  Unfortunately, my FT-900 was deemed “unrepairable”. They’re sending me a check for the cost that was paid for the radio.

  So began the hunt for a new radio. I finally settled on a Yaesu FT-710 FIELD. Ham Radio Outlet had a good deal on it for $899.99, so I bit the bullet. Luckily the check from the FT-900 will cover a little over half of the cost for the new radio. It has more bells & whistles than the old radio, so I’m learning. So far, I haven’t had any complaints (except for today, since the Ham Radio Gods saw fit to close every band I can access as a Tech).

• AZ Repeater Listings ( Arizona, repeaters, repeaterbook, Arizona Repeater Owners Frequency Coordination Committee, Amateur Radio Council of Arizona )

  I got tired of the errors with RepeaterBook, so I visited the Arizona Repeater Owners Frequency Coordination Committee’s website. They provide various PDF files to download for 6m-23cm repeaters.

  The PDFs are nice, but the tables in them are difficult to read for those of us who need bigger type (read “blind-as-a-bat), so I extracted the information from the tables into CSV files and loaded them on this site. They can be found at https://wy7emt.radio/az-repeaters.php.

  I’ll keep them updated as each new version comes out (which isn’t very often).

• More Site Updates ( updates, W7JBT, Space, Contact, General, scripts, python3, ISS, International Space Station )

  Did some more site updates over the past several days.

• Page Updates ( HF, operations, band conditions, MUF, FoF2, WWV, Space, weather, NOAA )

  HF Operations

  I’ve changed the old “MUF” page to provide additional information useful to HF operations
  and renamed it, fittingly, to “HF Operations”. It now includes the current HF band conditions
  for 80-40m, 30-20m, 17-15m and 12-10m. It also includes the current calculated MUF and calculated atmospheric noise level. These are all figured or observed from WWV (Boulder, CO, US).

  Space Weather

  The Space Weather page, “Space” has had the accordion menus removed in favor of direct links to the data.
  It now also includes the latest observed NOAA Space Weather Scales.

• Service for John Todd ( slient key, John Todd, W7JBT, Sheridan, Wyoming, Last Call, Brandmeister, talkgroup, 31566, Northeast Wyoming )

  The services for John (W7JBT) will be on October 24 at 14:00 UTC-7:00 at The Rock Church in Sheridan, WY. Absolute address is pending confirmation.

• New Domain ( wy7emt.lltodd.family, wy7emt.radio, domain name, change, new )

  You may have noticed a bit of redirecting going on if you tried using the wy7emt.lltodd.family domain.

• DAPNet POCSAG node coming! ( YouTube, video, DAPNet, Hampager, paging, coverage, Spurious Emissions, N4RTD )

  I’m in the process of getting a DAPNet paging node set up. I have all of the equipment, just waiting to get the antenna installed.

• BBS Email and News ( SMTP, POP3, News, BBS, BPQ32, BPQ, STDVAZ:WY7EMT-7, EMTBBS:WY7EMT-1 )

  Since none of the apps I can find seem to want to play nice with the BBS, I’ve disabled SMTP, POP3 & News ports (8025,8110,8119 respectively). To access your messages and read news on the BBS, you can either connect with the node or open the web page and click on the WebMail link to log in and read all of it in your browser. If I can ever figure out what the issue is with BPQ, I’ll re-enable those ports and post a message here.

• Data updates ( data, update, pages )

  To reduce the stress on the servers hosting remote data, I’ve set the scripts to download the appropriate data ONLY if the provider’s timestamp is newer than the one here. This should also reduce my server traffic.

• BBS hardware move complete ( hardware, swap, BBS )

  The hardware move was completed late yesterday afternoon and the node’s been running good for the past 24 hours (with the exception of changing a setting or two and having to restart today).

• Moving linbpq to new machine ( server, swap, BBS, node, STDVAZ:WY7EMT-7 )

  I have to shutdown my big server to save a little bit of electricity.

• Node is available again ( firewall, crash, node, BBS, online )

  It took me a little longer than I’d planned, but the firewall is back up and operating normally again.

• CRASH ( firewall, crash, node, BBS, offline )

  The firewall decided to update itself this afternoon and crashed in the middle of it.

• BBS ( BBS, node, packet, linbpq, BPQ32, N2UEM, G8BPQ, PHXAZ:N2UEM-7, Arizona, AZ, Phoenix, Saint David )

  I decided to use the server at home for a little more than streaming movies. I bit the bullet this past week and set up a packet BBS.

• NeverNeverNeverNEVER ( checkinstall, GNU, CTRL-C, unusable system, unbootable system, bug, NeverDoThis )

  When I build code off of Github, I use checkinstall to help manage the package installation. I discovered a rather nasty surprise when I stupidly interrupted checkinstall with CTRL-C… an unusable, unbootable system. Go figure.

• Yet Another APRS Client ( APRS, Xastir, YAAC, Yet Another APRS Client, TNC, serial, APRS-IS, client, SourceForge, JAVA, KA2DDO )

  I’ve been using Xastir for APRS for years now. Unfortunately, it’s really looking dated. I was searching around the other day and stumbled acrossa JAVA-based client called YAAC (Yet Another APRS Client) by KA2DDO. I’ve been testing it for the past few days, and it seems like a stable and fast client with a bunch of options. You can use a serial TNC, network TNC, APRS-IS and a bunch of others.

• J-Pole Coverage Map ( coverage, map, antenna, free, web tool, SPLAT, Radio Mobile Online, VE2DBE, STDVAZ:WY7EMT-7, DAPNET )

  I finally took the time to plot out the coverage for my J-Pole antenna. This is, of course, based on ideal numbers. Since I don’t have an analyzer, I don’t have the actual feed loss or gain to work with. Even so, it appears to be close enough to what I know about the basics (+/- a few kilometers).

• mmdvmhost-websocketboard-pistar ( MMDVM, pi-star, pistar, dashboard, DG9VH, MMDVMHost-Websocketboard, github, GitHub, repo, repository )

  So I found this really great websocket-based dashboard for MMDVM. Only problem was that it didn’t really work with pi-star.

• Tags become keywords ( posts, keywords, tags )

  So I’ve managed to finally get the “tags” function working in my page-editing script.

• Initial APRS password generator ( APRS, APRS-IS, password )

  This is an initial test of an APRS-IS password generator.

• QSL Card Layout ( QSL card, QSL )

  So this is the basic design for my QSL cards. My layout software doesn’t export, so I had to recreate it using image editing software.
  They’ll be slightly different, but this is the general idea.

• General upgrade ( birthday, Yaesu, FT-900, HF, radio, gear )

  Thanks to my better half, I’ve managed to get my hands on a Yaesu FT-900 with internal antenna tuner. Still have to build a wire antenna for it and get a straight key, but I’m still studying to upgrade to General anyhow, so it’ll give me time to get things ordered and built.

• Moving In ( website )

  Pardon the dust as I complete the website.

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