Radio and rails...

I have an old netbook, a Samsung NF110 that is hopelessly underpowered now with only 1Gb RAM and a 1.66GHz Atom CPU. It used to run Windows 7 (can you imagine?!) and was ok for basic word processing when I got the thing and had a really good battery life. I installed Ubuntu on this a while ago and found it very slow. I recently put Ubuntu 18.04 on, simply because I use this on the desktop. Yesterday I wanted to see if it could provide another screen and run pskreporter and it sat there for 10 minutes allegedly loading Firefox. Hmmm. I remembered at that point that I had planned to put it on eBay anyway but wondered why on earth it was just so slow with Linux. Enter Lubuntu. Lubuntu 12.10 has given the poor little thing a new lease on life. It is actually usable and no Gnome awkwardness. I'd still rather it had a little more RAM (like, I dunno, 8 times as much!) but it always was a handy little PC so it can remain in the shack now. And on Lubuntu - well sort of - I installed LXDE on the shack PC as…

I'll just leave this here... So... many... buttons!

I finally decided to rebuild the shack PC given that just about everything was going daft. I suspect this is a result of various software installs while testing new stuff that were not fully deinstalled. Yeah I know I should test in a VM... Anyway, a complete fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04 with it formatting the disk has got the PC back to normality. Almost. Networking works again with the inbuild (un)helpful config rather than me setting it up by hand each boot via a script. And I remembered to sort Gnome out so I can get the classic view rather than the daft dock setup. But there are two oddities... first off, the rather annoying way the screen layout changes (un)helpfully (!) when you touch the to left corner with the mouse. This can be disabled but when done so the Applications menu - the leftmost top bar menu - is no longer accessible. No amount of permutations of the toggles via gnome-tweaks will sort that. But more annoying I have lost almost all decode highlights in wsjt-x. The only ones that work are CQ, tx and my call, nothing else. I've tried every combination. It's not wsjt-x (I…

Propagation on 6m is fascinating at times. These past few days there has been a pipe between here and southern Spain, hopping over France with no French stations seen on FT8. It has appeared at various times through the day, and on occasion has been wider at the other end, extending in an arc to parts of Italy. My 6m bit of wet string in the loft is fairly level and runs east-west so perhaps it will favour Spain (whereas the 20m bit is practically an inverted Vee and covers generally well) As I type this Spanish pipe has been shut off again but it has been there three days in a row at various times of day.

Been rearranging the workshop today because I ended up spreading stuff about rather illogically. I also wanted to add some boards to the roof joists to stop leaves blowing in - the eaves are open and the shed is not insulated. It's surprising how difficult it is to manoeuvre and fit an 8'x4' foot plywood sheet into an 8'2" x 4'6" space on your own! Anyway, the aim of todays mudding was to prepare for getting all the components and bits and bobs over to one side and to extend the 'projects waiting to be started' shelf which was full! All the woodwork is done now and just needs some shelves and boxing to sort out. Oh yes and there is still the matter of running some SWA Cat6 cable out from the garage which involves lifting flags, digging a trench and other adventures. This work is partly in preparation for Project QO100 as well as the model railway which will go where the components are now. Any heavy work is now all at one end and all electronics and servicing type stuff at the other, roughly 50/50. Pics will follow once I can actually see the benches and it…