Radio and rails...

Background My Windows PC has a 4th generation i7 chip and will not take Windows 11. I am not about to run an unpatched Windows of any version nor am I prepared to upgrade a perfectly usable PC just so I can use W11 so I will need to dump Windows before the end of life date in October 2025. I counted 40 programs that I use, two of which are games so do not really count. Of the 38, only a few were hardcore Windows packages where there was no existing equivalent or anything similar enough. Some of the main ones had paid-for licenses, for example VARA and SatPC32 - somehow those need to work on Linux! I decided I would keep the two PCs even after one no longer ran Windows. It may seem odd to have two identical Linux systems but I find it convenient to have one PC for each of my HF rigs - even though wsjt-x, for example has profiles and can support several rigs that may not be the case with each bit of software that I use, and there may be items specific to each rig. The PCs are almost identical, both…

A pleasant view after a hard morning's graft down the line... coffee and diesel

A couple of new arrivals, a (new) Yaesu FTM510D and an (old) Yaesu FRG9600. On the FTM510D it is unheard of for me to actually get something so new. New, yes, but usually at least a year after launch. But this is new new. I was actually about to order a FTM500D when, fortunately the advert for this poped up. And it is way ahead of my FTM100D that this is replacing. First off, I like the display. it's big but not too big, colourful and gives all the right information. Not shown here is the information you see from a memory chanel which includes the callsign (or whatever you program in), frequence, mode and tone. It seems to find the GPS a lot faster than the FTM100D or my FT5D. There are, of course a lot of variables, for example cold start times, or the fact that somehow the shack finds GPS hard despite the perfect sky view from SE to SW. (Mobile phones never seem to have an issue). But the FTM100D would sometimes not find a GPS signal in hours. The FT2D was even worse. I like the controls too, with volume top left and press for…

Given there is a new DV gateway on 70cm near my QTH I wanted to add it to the MD380. The first issue is I had completely forgotten how! Remarkably, the radio has plenty of battery so it was duly plugged into the Windows PC via the TYT USB lead. The TYT software failed to find the radio and on checking Device Manager it showed no driver. Off to the web to find one. Nope. I found a link to nowhere, found a driver that didn't work, and another which would not even install. By now I was beginning to remember things about code plugs... Off to the Linux box then. I found Editcp with with that I found my memory! I had used this before but DMR isn't really my thing these days so it sort of fell off the disk when I upgraded PCs a couple of years ago. Anyway, Editcp found the radio without fuss and downloaded it. After remmebering all the places one needs to add stuff to add a single chanel I had oen set up for the new local gateway. But I can't get in... perhaps it is just too far. I tried via…

Now the competition is over here is the best image I received during the Fram2 mission: I received several images in total including slides 1 through to 8, of which about half were full or nearly full images. The setup here was SatPC32 driving the TS2000X connected to a 70cm QFH antenna in the loft. This really needs to be outside but that will have to wait.