On
2013 August 24 this became the legacy page.
It is no longer the active page of my core amateur radio focus.
In December 2012, the page looked like it does below, I just moved it
verbatim; there's a lot of detailed reporting work in there that's all
real. Sometime late in that month, just before the New Year, I
spent a weekend getting the serial port working between the DSP-10 and
a Keyspan USB adapter to the Mac, with some software that I got from
the internet to begin to run it. This was the first step towards
writing my own software on both the host (Mac) and radio (DSP-10)
ends. Well, the second step. As you can see here, I spent
much of 2009 learning enough Cocoa and Objective-C to feel that I could
do the Mac end of the programming. I got that serial source code
off the web, realizing that I would not want to put forth the effort to
really understand how to do it from scratch for myself.
In early January 2013 I planned out some more steps. Then I
looked at my plan. It didn't look like much fun. I bought
an Arduino to be the serial interface then realized I didn't need a
serial interface in the middle of a serial interface. Playing
with the Arduino was fun,
however and I hope to find more uses for little boxes like that.
Getting serial ports working was never fun and nothing about modern
computing wants to help you. But there was the DSP-10 with a
serial port. There is no doubt that I have the experience and
skill to ultimately accomplish my goal - build my own DSP-10 user
interface on a Mac, write an AD 2181 assembler and take over the
EZ-LITE end of the code, understand all the hardware and software to
the nth degree, do a good job of architecting and
documenting, and ultimately get up to the starting line for what I
really wanted to be doing with this equipment. Yeah, what was
that goal again?
At that point I'd been on this project for 13 years, or 40, depending
on how you counted it. (See the preamble to Phase
One.) I was 56 and the long term plan was beginning to
contemplate retirement and a move to a different location. I have
three unbuilt DSP-10 kits under my bench, each would take 50 hours to
complete but all of their technology is 1990s, you can't get the parts
anymore, and despite an occasional surge of some kind of activity,
there really hasn't been a whole lot going on in the development group
for some years. There was a lot of potential and possibility
here, but I am not going to live long enough to do much of what I'm
setting up here to do, if I live long enough to get to the starting
line in the first place.
On 2013 February 12 I took out my three lists: "Old Closure List
20%", "Utility List 30%", and "BWT List 50%" and looked over
them. I spent a couple of hours bringing my accounting list up to
date. It showed that between 2009 January 1 and 2013 February 12
I had spend 976.9 hours and $12,468 on amatuer radio. That was
237.6 hours and $3031.83 per year. Of that, 47% was "moving
foward (BWT)", 31% was "utility/maintenance" and 22% was "operating",
not too bad against the 50/30/20 goal. It was the end of a long
evening. I decided that I'd spent too much time keeping
recordsagain and not enough doing something. I decided that
nothing I was looking at in the near term lists looked like any
fun. I decided that I was not anywhere close to participating in
the parts of the avocation that I wanted to be participating in.
I decided that I was not going to keep the self accounting system
anymore (I spent 346.8 hours and $2410 getting myself on 23 cm) and I
wrote on all those multi-page lists: "Abandon in place, subsume"
and "Obsolete" and "Not doing any of this - Archived."
This crises was not unlike the one that occurred when I left AMSAT-NA
leadership in 1991. I remember that day in April or so that year
when I made up an 8 x 8 matrix of everything my life consisted of and
worked out all 64 co-influences and discovered that AMSAT officialdom
was a negative influence on all eight
of them, including itself!
Indeed, what am I trying to
do here? What am I really
trying to do here? What am I doing
here as opposed to what I think
I'm doing here?
All good questions. I've gone decades thinking I've known the
answers. Now I don't.
Disoriented and anchorless, I realized immediately that there would be
no quick answer to this, no quick turn to some obvious new
direction. I would need to stand down and think for a time,
perhaps a year or more.
At the same time the JPL ARC crashed. Our 445.2 / 224.08
repeater, to which we'd had no dependable site access for some years,
went off the air mysteriously. It was a crises. Having
built up remarkable capabilities since the 1970s: seven
repeaters, two well equipped shacks, an EmComm van, and countless
equipment in storage, suddenly nothing was on the air. The club
had not met regularly for years, the president of record had been laid
off, another key member was in the hospital long term, and now all the
equipment was down. A group of a dozen concerned core members met
one noon and decided to organize themselves and put things back on
track.
Back home, I realized that I had several kits: test equipment,
assessories, even a new radio, that I'd not gotten to or even read
about. I listed and prioritized these. The San Onofre
nuclear power plant nearby starting into decomissioning, by early June
I had my Elektor
Improved Radiation Meter built and working, but not working
right. Then I realized I was still spinning my wheels, with even
less focus.
We drove off to John's graduation from Baylor and on the way out and
back discussed many things, among them this. The JPL ARC and the SBMS were pulling and
pushing me to do many things and offering many opportunities. How
should I respond?
Then the ARRL June VHF came up and I put in a fairly common, nominal
effort, a couple dozen contacts from the home station, just on an "as
available" basis while I was doing other things. Then, realizing
what I was missing out on, I realized what I should do for the interim
year while I was "thinking about it." I should focus on a nice,
full-bore-style camp-out event for the June 2014 June VHF
Contest. And all the events between then and now could be used as
intermediate deadlines to get various preparations done. This has
already had unexpected side effects. I've built up that
Hamtronics LP4-30 (in LP4-35 mode) that I've had in my desk drawer for
30 years for the August UHF contest, and it worked the first
time! I'm on 432 with a nice new M^2 440-18 yagi, something that
had been a "next stretch goal" with the DSP-10 from the beginning,
either a transverter or a 70 cm DSP-10 build. Now I'm just there
and not thinking about building up that capability from scratch just
for the self-education of it any longer. That amplifier would
have been the last step of my evolution to 70 cm. Now it has
become the only step and,
ironically, has finally gotten built at all!
Yes, it seems like cheating to just have a rig that does it. The
old goals are still well ingrained.
So I'm in an interim and on the way. I'm glad I built the DSP-10
and learned what I learned in the process. I may yet build
another one, that remains to be determined. I'm glad I did what I
did (despite the bending of the rules that it took) and learned what I
learned, but there is a lot to be worked out. Maybe I will have
to have a PC in the shack after all. Maybe I will have to do all
my work at audio. (Well, the DSP-10 does it at 10-20 KHz, which
is barely "super-audio" so it's not really all that different.) I
don't know. Today it's mostly questions.
But here are some hints:
What do I want to be doing? Space Radio. Exploring the next
20-30 dB into the noise. Those are still true.
Space Radio means moonbounce and meteors, not so much satellites
although I'll play around a little when I'm equipped again.
Getting into the noise has already been done, I just need to join the
community and figure out where I can do. There are local SBMS
members who are already doing things but I want to find a way to
contribute in the software, maybe to extend capabilities.
Apart from big goals, what do I enjoy doing in the moment?
Getting things to work: hardware, operation, software, even teams.
All I ever wanted was an architecture that brought those goals and
activities together into a coherent, long term but ultimately
achievable (in a lifetime) plan. Everything was there but the
achievability. Once again I'm going to have to raise the bar
higher, cut out more stuff that's peripheral.
I'm not a "muster and deploy" type. That means I'll probably take
formal EmComm all the way off the list. Not that I was getting to
it anyway.
The utility category always felt like cheating, not being "every chip
every bit." Like I was as capable on my own as the electronics
industry of Japan!
That "utility" category included putting ~$2500 of equipment in my new
truck in early 2010. I use that a lot. Not that there's
anyone on HF to talk to.
There will no longer be a utility category (but see the old link
below). It's all radio.
I spent a lot of time and money in "utility." That means I always
knew this.
Moved to Legacy at 897 hits. This legacy
page is no longer counted.
Introduction: Build a
station on a personally designed architecture featuring hardware and
software hackability for ... unusual ... operations.
Mantras: Hackability,Space Radio
Status:
Operational at
47.7 dBm and 70K receive system temperature on 2 meters.
Operational at 42.3 dBm and 900K system temperature on 23 cm.
Principles
- BWT = Barely Works Technology. We're doing stuff here that
"barely works."
- Build rather than buy
when there's something to be learned, in depth. "Build" can mean
anything
from Heathkit (we all wish!) to self design, etching, and
scrounging.
- Narrowband rocks! Everything about narrowband is easier for the
experimenter.
- It's the journey and the
destination.
- Narrowband rocks! Everything about narrowband is easier for the
experimenter.
- Sometimes buy, sometimes build. I used to build everything so
I'd know intimately about it but I've found that life is too short to
know intimately about everything.
The K6QPV/B DM12mq on 1296.300. Sometimes it's armchair.
Sometimes it's a blip. Always visible, often audible at 200 km.
See the frequency drift with temperature diurnally? Is that
transmit or receive side? (Both) See the spurs?
They're not always there.
See the microwave oven? See the radar?
MUD Swapmeet 23CM35 in the air, 11/16/12.
Old 8-element with new 35 element.
Short Term Forecast
Get off the PC.
Mac BWUI, loader, and interface.
Mac AD-2181 assembler.
Longer Term Forecast - 10 MHz reference, maybe PIC based or equiv.
- Az/El antennas (2, .23, .7)
- 432
- Operational Tests (EME2 -- PUA, JT)
- 6 meters will be important (meteors, etc., Space Radio).
- HF - band (4 MHz) at a time for narrowband. Order: 40
(WJST) (& 30 or 75?), 10, ...
- .03
Evolving Principles - All Bands! But, microwave engineering is going to be
challenging unless I develop some mechanical skill, or friends...
Below the line: 1.3, .33, .09, .06, .015, .007, .003
Architecturally it is supposed
to look like this. Test
Equipment supports and
enables everything. Phase
One
-- Initial construction and operation. Phase
Two --
Characterization. Phase
Three --
Software. Phase
Four
-- Hardware. Phase
Five
-- Advanced Operation. (This is where the Space Radio goals occur.)
