Radio and rails...

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…

Hamshack Hotline (HH) is a FREE dedicated voip telecom service for the Ham Radio community. (taken from their website - see https://hamshackhotline.com ) I heard about this via, if I remember a post on Facebook. It sounded interesting, and free, and so I purchased a refurbished Cisco SPA504G VoIP phone from a trader on eBay. Once you register with them they send a link to a configuration file for the phone and this makes it all work. So, what do you get? Well, review the website but basically a VoIP phone and an online phone directory. The line is full featured with 'do not disturb' and an answering machine. The exchanges are set up in various places - I am connected to the European one (HHEU). There is also an exchange for unlicensed members. RF links are being set up too for those with an amateur radio licence. As the service expands this could be a very interesting facility, and for the price of the phone - around £20 - one I could not resist. They support a small range of SIP phones and I chose the 504G because it uses PoE, meaning no wall-wart as it gets its power via…

The RSGB certificate arrived today and Ofcom already had the licence waiting so I chose 2#0IGP (thus 2E0IGP from home at least, as I'm rarely out of England!). I tried other combinations but nothing that I wanted was available so I decided to keep the IGP, regardless of the fact it actually means nothing! I shall be rather more choosy when I eventually pass the Advanced exam.

Passed the Intermediate exam today - now wait for the 2E-whatever callsign... then I can wind the wick up if needed. Mind you, the autotuner can only cope with 30W digi anyway, and it's been fun seeing how far I can get with 10. Actually, the important thing to me is access to those microwave bands that the Foundation does not give, and also the ability to use homemade transmitters. Time to tidy the workshop!