Remembering the old school dial-up BBS

All this packet radio progressing around the place reminds me of a time long ago, pre-Internet where dial-up BBSs became the new thing in town. Back then I had a BBC Micro and a modem that ran at two speeds – I forget which now (will edit later!) and I persuaded my mum to get BT in to fit a socket rather than the hard-wired phone we had then. This let me plug the modem in. I used to use a BBS called ‘More Summer Wine’ plus one other but I forgot the name. Much of the activity back then is lost in the mist of time (or rather I just can’t remember) but sending and receiving mail was fun. BBS systems were all a part of the wider FidoNet. Mail would be routed between the various BBS systems, many of which only had the one telephone line and so would be inaccessible while that was happening. Indeed, they were mostly single user anyway, although if the sysop was there you could message them via the console of the BBS which was probably sitting in someone’s bedroom. I am reminded of the many times I would set the BBC and modem up on the hall floor because we only had the one telephone socket. In fact, it would be quite some time between then and when we finally got broadband Internet which for us was not until the later 1990s in our new home.

During that time and working in academia I had routine access to networks and mail and so interest in the BBS systems dwindled. There was a time before the winder Internet became available where we could gain network access to remote systems, all typically mini- or mainframe computers. One such system ran a MUD – Multi-user Dungeons and Dragons – another angle to remote access but this time for gaming rather than BBS. That provided an introduction to online chatrooms because the MUD we used to play on had that feature. One could not only progress through the game but also exchange messages online, the latter becoming the wanted feature vice the game itself.

And here we are. I was never involved in packet radio when it first came to be, but now it has reminded me a lot of those old days of the dial-up BBS.

And FidoNet? It is still there https://www.fidonet.org/

See: https://spectrum.ieee.org/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-bulletin-board-system

Packetering

Made some useful progress on packet radio today. I managed to access a node in Scotland and one near the south coast on 40m, 300 baud. This was using QtSoundModem on the Linux box connected to the FT450D via a Signalink, fed into the random length wire in the loft. Access was via EasyTerm running on the Windows PC at first, but then I managed to compile QtTermTCP so ran that on the Linux box instead. A bit of fun but it proves the possibility of using 40m to interconnect where there is currently no VHF or UHF paths here.

Fingers crossed once I get some wire and metal in the air things will only improve.

Valves, some rare, up for grabs

So… I am out of the valve game. Finally. Of my collection I am keeping the 10 rarest, friends are picking at the list with their wants and the rest are available if anyone is interested. Note that these are not ‘audio’ types and are all CV marked which is what I collected. Some are rare, some very rare, most are mundane but you never know you may find something of interest. The dwindling list, automatically generated is at https://m0rvb.uk/valves/valves.php along with contact information.

Losing face(book)

I’ve been a member of Facebook for many years, joining since before it became the advertising behemoth it is today. Back then I did make fairly regular use of it to interact with friends and colleagues as well as groups. But my use of it dwindled to reading group posts and posting ‘happy birthday’ messages. But I kept it.

As hobbies changed with time and retirement I joined several new groups. Again, really all I did was read posts.

At some stage during this time I also began to use Messenger. I now find that I rarely get any use out of Facebook and only have two contacts in Messenger that I do not have elsewhere. So I thought it time to get rid of Facebook. That did not go as planned!

First, the Messenger app on the Mac decided it would log me out and I cannot log back in. I get as far as the 2FA challenge where it allegedly sends me a text which never arrives. Three goes at that and I just deleted the app, life is too short.

Then I went into Facebook and after being bounced around between Facebook and the overarching Meta sites I was a given a choice of disabling my Facebook account and keeping Messenger, or deleting my Facebook account – which was my aim – but losing Messenger as well.

Choices, choices… so I’ve disabled it pending contacting my only two Messenger contacts and asking them if they have WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal. Hopefully they do, and Facebook can be assigned to (my) history.

Update: 11/1/24 YES! Both contacts use WhatsApp, so… Facebook deleted. Or it will be after 30 days apparently, in case I change my mind (fair enough, nice to have a cooling off period)

New Year resolution

So… that time of year again! Where did the last 63 go… Currently all my antennas are in the loft and this is something I have wanted to address for far too long. So 2024 is going to see some actual metal outdoors.

First on the list is the collinear for GB7RVB. The plan there is to use a TK bracket and put it up on a mast so it is just above the roofline. The issue I will have here is our house is silhouetted against the backdrop of far away hills and I just know there will be complaints. But as we do not have an external TV antenna there are many oversized examples around where people have clearly been done over by unscrupulous installers. We can see Emley Moor mast to the south plus at least two repeaters and our 6 element or so TV antenna in the loft provides perfectly good signal strengths so why the large ‘digital’ antennas? Anyway, they cannot really whinge at me for a collinear given all that metalwork along the rooflines. That’s my defence anyway! Depending on complaints, or hopefully the lack thereof it will probably get a coup, of feet higher as time goes on…

Next the QO100 dish needs to move to the house wall. The current location is about 5 foot off the ground and unsuitable for the new radiation rules. Siting it on the house wall avoids this and means I can up the power to DATV levels.

And for HF… my initial plan is for a random wire the length of the garden, from the house wall to the trees at the top. I have the wire and rope and assorted clamps etc.

I hope I don’t need to revisit this page in 2025 and still have work to do!

QRZ 12 days

I’ve been doing the ’12 days of QRZ’ again this year and managed to get the award yesterday – I started two day late as I forgot about the award. So far I had endorsements for 80m, 40m, 30m and 20m, and today I added 17m and 10m.

A couple of log entries were the same stations over two or three days, I’m not actually stalking you!

It’s fun and frustrating at the same time, logging, sending to QRZ and LoTW and hoping for a match. A few 60m QSOs from yesterday were from stations that had previously logged to LoTW and now are not… but never mind. Just one more day for 60m and 15m to get 12 days in each and the associated endorsements. The award updates automatically once you get sufficient days and go to the awards page again,

Now then, 12m. I did not realise last year, nor this year that it is included, as are all bands. You need to go to the bottom of the awards check page and click on ‘all bands’. So this year I added 3 days (so far) of 12m, 9 to go. I’ve never heard anything on 160m, the wire is so short for that band it is no surprise. I always miss the openings on 6m, and 2m yields very little, so I will probably leave those alone.

Update 24/12/23 – just competed the necessary QSOs for 12m, so I have 80, 60, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12 and 10m. That’s it for this year!

Cariboulite success

Well. Further to my previous post where all hope seemed to have gone out of the window I finally made progress today, but not the way I set out to.

First off, I pulled a Raspberry Pi 4 from another project and sat the CaribouLite HAT on it.

Next was a fresh installation of DragonOS. But this time it did open the ssh port – I’ve no idea why it did not before and note I am being unscientific here as I changed the Pi, but I am not going backwards.

Then, time for install.sh…

All seemed to go well but the software failed to compile completely. Searching on the errors I added #include <memory> to two source files, cariboulite/software/libcariboulite/src/CaribouLiteCpp.cpp and cariboulite/software/libcariboulite/src/CaribouLite.hpp. Stripping out all the ‘apt’s and ‘depmod’ from install.sh and running it again and the software compilation completed! I had already added and commented out the necessary lines in /boot/firmware/config.txt so a reboot was all that was needed to kick it into life. The driver was loaded – lsmod|smi showed this and also /proc/device-tree/hat now exists, both precursors to success according to the notes and YouTube videos.

Running sudo SoapySDRUtils –find showed the card, and, finally (!), running SoapySDRServer –bind and CubicSDR on the Mac mini finds the server on the Pi and I can tune to the local radio station.

Success, but that was a struggle. Mind you, I learned stuff at least!

CaribouLite SDR

I came across this via a post someone made somewhere – actually it might have been an email on a group. Anyway, with a tx/rx range top to 6GHz I thought, why not? It arrived quite quickly from Crowd Supply via Mouser with Crowd Supply charging the VAT but no other taxes on arrival.

I duly mounted it on a spare Raspberry Pi 3B with a fresh Bookworm 64 bit OS and followed the installation instructions at https://github.com/cariboulabs/cariboulite but I always got various errors and never got to a working system. The errors were mainly surrounding the SMI driver and the kernel headers. There seemed no way round this one, and thus no working system.

Following on from another complaint I downloaded and installed DragonOS, a 64 bit variant with lots of SDR utilities built in. Once installed, although the developer stated that ssh is available from first boot and does not need the usual empty ssh file it is not – the system does not open port 22 but does open the vnc port so I then had to find out which of my desktop systems has a vnc viewer as I never use it. When I found one and connected all it gave me was a blank screen. But guess what? Adding an empty ssh file onto the SD card worked, despite the advice!

Following the guidance from one user regarding getting the cariboulite to even install I did a complete upgrade / dist-upgrade cycle and then began the installation process. This time there were no errors about SMI or the kernel headers but there were fatal errors in the general build and no working system at the end.

After countless iterations, reading comments from other users, watching YouTube videos etc. I had to admit defeat and give up.

So there we are. On one hand it serves me right for not finding and reading all the issues before ordering this thing, but on the other given it costs money I rightly expect more, i.e. something that actually works rather than something that will sit in a box until maybe, one day the developer sorts the mess out. As it is I would compare it to the excellent SDRConnect and RSP SDR products which just work – this is the exact opposite!

In a nutshell, don’t bother with this card. But then, you never know, maybe the developer will sort the software and I will re-visit this post in a more positive light.

Update: there is a fork of the software detailed at https://github.com/cariboulabs/cariboulite/discussions/82 but following those instructions in a fresh Bookworm throws up the same kernel header errors and results in no SMI driver. So no go there. I tried the same in a fresh DragonOS – I must have been mistaken about the ned for the ssh file because I added this but DragonOS never opens the ssh port for me. So, no go there either!

All in all this has been a lesson in how to waste many hours for no gain. YMMV. There are a few other web pages with differing views and builds which I may try but as a product this is really, really poorly supported by the developer.

Lost images

Drat, double drat and triple drat. When I moved URLs about this blog, reconstituted from the original before I briefly moved to Write Freely, was all fine. But I overlooked the fact that the WordPress database held onto the old URLs in all the images. So all the original posts that had images now have blank space. I am working my way back through these to sort each post out. Annoyingly it is not just a straight URL swap as there were differences in the older version of WordPress as was, so I need to remove and re-add each one. Oh well…

Update: I think I found and fixed them all.

Broadband upgrades

Not long ago a telegraph pole appeared on the street outside our house to take wires between two existing poles. I think it was placed so that those wires didn’t come across our land as they seem to droop quite a lot. Associated with said pole, and others in the area are pole mounted fittings to do with BT’s full fibre offering. Today, a flyer came in the mail offering full fibre service at various speeds. That will make a change to our current 15Mbps ADSL. But there may be issues.

Do we need the speed? Well, currently we can watch fairly good res YouTube on one TV, a BBC program on another, and all the less bandwidth hogging tasks that happen all the time such as Pi-Star, various Internet links to various bits and bobs, email, general web browsing etc. We only notice issues where video games peg out and Windows OneDrive sets off synchronising at full whack. Currently I have OneDrive (not mine, I don’t even use it!) configured to play nicely (honestly, if you’ve ever let it fully loose it’s a real bandwidth hog, quite unlike iCloud which never seems to get in anyone’s way and still does everything it needs to), and the switch port that the gaming PC is on is throttled so it cannot take the full 15Mbps.

So yes, more speed would be useful. We also found that a YouTube rented 4k video will buffer constantly.

But… and this is a big but, will our chosen ISP deploy cg-nat? This is something many of us will face and the issue is that cg-nat makes it very difficult, if even possible to have incoming connections. Some things will (or should!) just work, like SIP phones as the sessions are initiated by the phone constantly polling the server(s) rather than calls actually coming in. But others – things like Echolink, Allstar, 44net and the AXIP connections used on GB7RVB all need connections coming in as well as out, and cg-nat will break those. Some Pi-star configurations will rely on incoming connections too.Some PC games will not play nicely with cg-nat either.

So that is a concern and it is difficult to get an answer from many ISPs as you never talk to a techie. Some do say so, some offer static IP addresses which, provided they mean public IP addresses exclude the use of cg-nat. With BT I can get that but only if I buy their business offering which is more expensive.

Yes, I could set up a VPN to my VPS and do it that way, assuming the VPN will play with cg-nat. But that adds even more complexity.

There is also the issue of the telephone. We still have a landline although these days it sees very little use and only for inbound calls. Do we ditch the number and rely on mobiles, will SIP phones really work, can I move our number to a SIP service or just get a new number?

And let’s not forget the issue regarding the inability to dial 999 (the emergency number, the UK’s version of 911) in a power cut. With the current switched copper telephone network the phones are powered all the way from the exchange. Not so with fibre as if your in-house fibre modem has no power you have no phone. But for us that is less of an issue really, we have at least one mobile phone in the house at all times, and, hey, I have at least one 2m/70cm FM HT charged at all times. We – collectively, radio amateurs – are generally better off that way.

Anyway, as it stands the flyer only just arrived and I will probably wait for one of the neighbours to take the plunge first! I can’t even remember if I am still on contract with our current ISP as they never called to confirm and it is not possible to find out online (which I find rather stupid for an ISP but there you are).

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