Radio and rails...

I seem to be collecting projects but making no progress on any of them! Well, ok I have five on the go, of which one is started and one nearly, and three are in boxes still. Since Es’Hail-2 (QO-100) went up I've been planning to set up a receiver for it, and later on hopefully a transmitter as well. One thing at a time (or in my case it seems no things at any time!) So, I have an acceptable LNB, not a good one but should suffice until I get a more decent one. I now have a bias tee, some relevant connectors, I have a roll of CT125 satellite cable somewhere and I am now waiting for a 120cm satellite dish and pole to arrive. If this arrives today I may even get it working by tomorrow, otherwise next week. The Creed 444 is the one project that has at least had some progress. For that, I now just need to wire up the 50-way D connector to the signalling unit and then it should type to itself, otherwise it will need adjusting as that's all that is left if the text is still garbled. Then there is…

Well I fiddled with the teleprinter some more, wondering if I could at least get it to print with just 30-0-30VDC - it needs 80-0-80. Nothing. I tried connecting directly to the relevant pins for the receiving relay but could not feel any resistance when this was applied. Odd, because I could measure its resistance with a multimeter, so what's up. Strangely the next time I tried I could no longer measure the resistance. Might have been me. Then it occurred to me that on the 444 everything comes out on the 50-way D connector and you can get directly at the receiver coil, and I can see the relevant ohms. So, re-wiring the lash-up and still with 30-0-30V and with a resistor in series just in case and it burst into life. Almost. It did print, or rather tried. It got most of the letters wrong, but is at least trying. Most likely the voltage is just not quite enough, or my lash-up resistor is denying it sufficient current but I'd rather not risk the coil right now. However, and more of a concern was that although it went through the motions, the carriage did not move. It was…

Getting to grips with the Creed 444... everything seemed fine and it all rotated ok by hand so with the help of eBay I got the proper power socket and wired it up today. Things did not go entirely to plan... 1st attempt. Lots of loud noise from the motor. Well, at least it spins... the motor has a height adjustment at the rear which engages the worm with the drive gear at the front and this was completely undone. Adjusted... 2nd attempt. The lights went out! Hmmm. So, a tiny strand of copper wire had linked between the earth and live on the plug. Yes, the same one I had just soldered up carefully. Grrr. 3rd attempt and it runs. Key presses work the sequence, the WRU works too. As yet no print as I need to put a ribbon on and some paper in, but more importantly sort out the data side of things. I wonder what the WRU says... I could work it out by hand but I'll leave that until I get it to print. Equally, I wonder if I can find a blank one to put my callsign into... now that would be an ideal…

So I now have a Creed 444 teleprinter. I've been after a teleprinter for about 2 years now. When I was still at school I used to buy, strip, repair and sell Creed 7E's - maybe 7 or 8 passed through my hands and on to others for pocket money. Back then I had two 7Es for myself, as well as a tape reader, tape punch and a valved TU hanging off a B40 / B41 setup. Weight was not an issue in my basement workshop... But I've never had one of the more modern units like the 444 (yes, modern is a relative term here!) Having manhandled the beast from the car to the workshop I now need to learn how it is put together so I can be sure it's not going to fly into bits when I power it up. However, hopefully I'll get it running and then get an interface set up. I doubt it will be allowed in the shack (aka the little bedroom) so it may well have to run in the workshop - but that does give the excuse to acquire a nice old comms receiver to go with...

I finally upgraded to 18.04, an advantage of which is I am finally rid of the Unity desktop and back to Gnome. I never 'got' Unity and had added there Gnome add-ons which made it Gnome-like but quirky. For some reason, the system would always launch a service process via upstart that sat there doing nothing every time I unlocked the screen... resulting in the process table filing up before I realised. The upgrade caught me out however. For some reason it did not bring across php-mysql or the Stomp library but both were easy to put back in. I use Stomp to pull in Network Rail Open Data, something I've been fiddling with recently but more of that some time later on. It also seems to default to a later CIFS protocol than my poor old backup NAS devices use meaning they would not mount, so I had to add vers=1.0 to the lines in /etc/fstab to solve that one. Finally, until I find more, Apache would not see PHP even though PHP had been upgraded so it needed a2enmod php7.2 and a bounce of Apache. That one is particularly annoying as without it Apache merrily shows The World…