I recently sold my Yaesu VX-8E because the lack of APRS RF infrastructure in this part of the world rendered that part of its functionality fairly useless and I didn't need two FM hand-helds. My Kenwood TH-F7E is a more useful radio to me because of its ability to receive CW and SSB. The only thing I didn't like about the Kenwood was the lack of a drop-in charger base. To charge the radio you have to uncover a charging socket and then plug in a lead from a wall-wart charger. That might seem like a small inconvenience, but having to crawl around on the floor plugging in the charger, then thread the charging cable through to a safe place to stand the radio while it charged was a bit of a chore. Most hand-helds offer a base charger as an option; even the cheap and nasty Chinese Jingtong had one. I think Kenwood missed an opportunity to sell an accessory here.

I was sure I wasn't the only one lamenting the lack of a base charger for this fine little radio so I posted a question about it on QRZ.com and was pointed by Mel KS2G in the direction of W & W Manufacturing Company of Hicksville NY, who make a range of replacement batteries and chargers for two-way radios and other devices. They offer battery packs for most amateur radios, including the Kenwood TH-F6A which is the US version of the TH-F7E and all of them are charged using a drop-in charger.

The company didn't respond to attempts to contact it via the contact form on its website, but Mel very kindly phoned and obtained an email address for a helpful lady named Flossie, with whom I placed my order.

It wasn't exactly cheap. Since the stock Kenwood battery doesn't have contacts for base charging I had to purchase a replacement battery as well as the charger unit. By the time I paid VAT and tax collection tax it came to half as much as the actual radio.

The new battery has a 2000mAH capacity compared to the 1500mAH of the standard version. The charger is a universal unit and takes plug-in "cups" for different radios, so if I ever sold the TH-F7E I could keep the charger and just buy a "cup" for whatever replaces it. I was a bit disappointed to discover that when placed in the charger the radio faces to the side rather than the front. It doesn't really matter, since you can't use the radio while it is in the charger, and perhaps they do that to discourage the temptation to switch it on. But it would look better if it faced the front.

Also supplied with the charger was a European 220V switched mode 24V 1A power adapter. I really didn't need that, and would have liked the option to save some cost by not having it. I haven't checked to see if it makes any of the usual switched mode warbly noises and broadband hash. I generally avoid switched mode power supplies at all cost. For batteries up to 7.2V which the TH-F7E is, the instruction sheet states that the charger will run from 15V so I am actually running it from my Diamond shack supply that powers my K3, which normally runs at about 14.2V. It worked fine, and charged the new battery in a couple of hours.

I am very pleased with this smart if rather expensive accessory, which will help me make the most of the TH-F7E by keeping it nicely charged up.

Labels: TH-F7E

I have been a subscriber to the Elecraft email reflector almost continuously since 1999 when I ordered my K2, and for most of that time have found it useful. But over the last few weeks I have come to the conclusion that the best thing the company could to do would be to close it.

The reflector has been a good forum for communication between Elecraft and its customers. But postings about the K3 have swamped postings about other Elecraft products, making it a frustrating forum for kit constructors. Now that the K3 has reached maturity there are very few useful suggestions for improvements to be made about it. Instead, most postings now seem to be nit-picking complaints, which often result in ill-tempered responses from others who feel there is nothing to complain about, which generate further ill-tempered replies suggesting that some people don't use their radios and don't even understand the problem.

The overall impression conveyed to any would-be K3 purchaser who subscribes to the reflector is that the K3 is a very flawed radio with some serious problems. That isn't how I see it. The K3 isn't a perfect radio but I don't think there is anything better around at the moment.

The obvious thing to do would be to unsubscribe. Except for the fact that the reflector is the only way to keep up to date with news from Elecraft. If you want to know about new firmware releases and what's in them, or know when new products like the P3 panadapter are ready to be released, the only way to get that information is to subscribe to the reflector. I have repeatedly suggested that Elecraft should create an "elecraft-announce" mailing list that contains only news from the company, and they have equally repeatedly ignored my suggestion.

Because the Elecraft reflector is an email list, every subscriber receives a copy of every posting, including every complaint, whinge, gripe and fanboy denial of the criticisms. This tempts everyone to have their say in topics regardless of whether their contribution is useful. Even if you resist the temptation to comment, reading of these "issues" sows seeds of doubt that perhaps there really is something wrong with the radio after all.

I think the reflector is turning into a public relations disaster for Elecraft that also serves to unnecessarily alarm its current and would-be customers. I think the best thing to do would be to put it out of its misery. But I doubt they will take my advice on this either. :)

Labels: Elecraft, K3

It was a beautiful morning, the sun was shining from a cloudless blue sky and it felt warm, although the temperature was just above freezing. Olga and I decided to go to Keswick, which is one of my favourite places in the entire world, and where I'd live if property prices weren't astronomical. Though being a conservation area in a national park and surrounded by mountains it is probably one of the worst locations for ham radio imaginable.

I thought we would go for a stroll through the town and have a coffee and a look in the shops, which we did, but I also spent rather a lot of time standing around being bored while Olga looked at clothes. I loathe shopping, and would buy everything possible - including groceries - online if I could. If I decide I need something I generally purchase the first thing I see that will do the job. Olga has to examine every possible candidate and then agonizes over the decision for hours. Consequently we rarely buy anything for the house requiring a joint decision as I have usually lost interest in buying anything after my first couple of suggestions have been rejected.

In Keswick we saw very little evidence of any damage caused by the November floods - unlike the devastation that occurred in our home town Cockermouth. We walked down to the lake, where I took this picture using my phone, since I wasn't carrying the camera. The ducks and geese are very tame and you can walk right up to them. I'm sure they would take food from your hand if you had any.

Labels: General, Photography

For months I've been saying that I was going to try building a Pixie II transceiver but I never got around to it. Then Roger G3XBM started writing about an even simpler transceiver that he was experimenting with called the XBM80-2. It is a crystal controlled QRP transceiver for 80m that uses just two transistors and a handful of other parts. It looked so easy to build that I couldn't resist trying to make one. I recently purchased a breadboard to use for experimenting with different circuits so I made up Roger's circuit using it.

I didn't have any 80m QRP frequency crystals but I did have some for 40m, 30m and 20m. Roger had commented that the design should work on other bands and indeed it does. However on 20m the transmitter chirps rather badly. It was much more stable on 40m where I measured 100mW output, and it would probably be better still on 80m, the frequency Roger designed it for.

Reducing the value of L1 helps on the higher frequencies. With a smaller inductance it is possible to see 200mW or more output. However as well as chirp I observed the frequency starting to drift which suggested that perhaps I was running too much power and warming the crystal. The power may be increased or decreased by reducing or increasing the value of R3, which is in series with the key line.

With the transmitter on 40m I noticed the second harmonic on 20m was also very loud. Anything is very loud when you are very close to it and I don't have a spectrum analyzer to measure how the harmonic compares to the main signal, but if I was going to use this little radio into my multiband dipole a low pass filter made for the band in use would be a very good idea.

The main problem with the receiver is that there is almost no audio output below 2KHz. All of the signals I heard were very high pitched. I tuned across the receiver passband while transmitting a carrier and the signal which was clearly audible a few kHz away disappeared at around 2Khz and only reappeared after I tuned through zero-beat and reached 2kHz away on the other side. So I'm not going to hear anyone who called me. This isn't simply the frequency response of the crystal earpiece because I plugged in an external amplifier and it was just the same.

Roger doesn't mention this issue so I wonder if there is something wrong. However it is such a simple circuit that I can't see what to change that would affect this. I tried increasing the coupling capacitor to the audio amplifier stage and it made no difference at all.

With such a simple receiver circuit one should not expect miracles. Nevertheless I did (just!) detect a 1uV signal from my signal generator - though only when it was tuned far enough away from the crystal frequency to make a high pitched tone. If I could solve this problem of not being able to receive signals close to the crystal frequency then this would make an amazing little radio.

Labels: Construction, QRP

Although I don't use Linux on my shack computer - mainly because Windows has all the best apps - Olga and I both use it on the computers we use for business, both for its stability and its freedom from malware hassles. However, the version we were using (Xandros Desktop) was very old and does not appear to be receiving any updates. This was causing us a few problems, mainly due to being stuck on Firefox 2.0 with similarly outdated versions of Flash. So it was time for an update.

I decided to go for Linux Mint. It is a distribution based on the very popular Ubuntu, but it comes with the multimedia plug-ins (such as Flash for the web browser) already installed. This is an important benefit for those of us who want to be Linux users rather than Linux hackers, because installing plug-ins such as Flash under isn't the one-click job it usually is under Windows (at least, it wasn't under Xandros.)

Installation was pretty straightforward, if still not quite as trouble-free as installing Windows usually is. On Olga's laptop a bit of jiggery pokery was required to get the wireless network drivers installed. And on mine the "live" installation CD had to be run in compatibility mode which presumably resulted in a VESA display driver being used, restricting the screen size to 800 x 600. Fixing that involved deleting one line from an obscure configuration file, a solution I found after some time spent Googling. On Windows it could have been done through the graphical interface.

Having got the new version up and running, I find that I can't store files, or at least see them, on the desktop. Because Xandros Linux was based on KDE, I chose the KDE community edition of Linux Mint which I thought would involve fewer changes than the standard version which like Ubuntu uses the Gnome graphical environment. KDE has now reached version 4.1 and apparently one of the "features" of this version is that you can no longer have icons on the desktop. I started searching for a way to enable desktop icons and came across this post, apparently from the Linux hacker who removed the support. You can still put files and icons on the desktop, but you can only see them using a little pop-up folder view applet.

Because someone has a bee in his bonnet about desktop icons, they get removed - tough if you don't like it. I often gripe about Microsoft changing things in new versions of Windows for no good reason. Clearly Linux is no different.

Labels: Computers

G4ILO's Blog is now at its new home http://blog.g4ilo.com and I'm hoping that nothing got left behind in the move!

The actual change from FTP hosting to Blogger hosting was fairly easy. It was just a matter of selecting the "custom domain" option from the publishing options, then clicking the Advanced button and putting in the name I wanted: blog.g4ilo.com.

I also had to specify something called a "Missing Files Redirect" which tells the Blogger server where to look for any files used in the blog that it doesn't have. This is important because although the text content is now served up by Blogger (and presumably any images included in new postings will be hosted there) all the images in my existing postings remain where I uploaded them, on the old server. And I certainly did not want to go through over 300 postings editing all the image locations to provide their full path!

Next I had to go to my web host and create a CNAME record for the new domain blog.g4ilo.com which pointed to ghs.google.com. This basically tells the world via the Domain Name Service (DNS) that blog.g4ilo.com is hosted on Google's server. I then had to wait while this information propagated around the Internet, so I went and helped Olga get the shopping.

That was the easy part. The difficult bit - the part I was concerned about - was ensuring that all references to my blog at its old location would automatically redirect to the new one. Google was promising to build a migration tool that would take care of all this, but I was afraid that it would only take care of the situation where people only had a blog on their server. My blog was cohabiting with my G4ILO's Shack website so I wanted only links to the blog pages to be redirected.

Blogger techs told me "you can write an .htaccess file that can do this" but they seemed to have rather more faith in my ability to do this than I had. The .htaccess file is a configuration file used by Apache web servers that allow them to do more than simply serve the page "blah.html" when someone's browser requests that exact page. None of the .html pages at G4ILO's Shack exist as real files at all. They are all generated on the fly from a MySQL database by a content management system which knows what text is required thanks to an .htaccess file that the CMS authors thankfully provided. And I didn't want to break that.

The .htaccess file uses something called "regular expressions" to match against the filenames that are requested. They caused a perplexed expression to appear on my face because I don't have the kind of mind that is good at puzzles and I just couldn't figure out how to use them. So I did what I normally do when I hit a technical problem: Google to see if someone cleverer than me had had the same problem and managed to solve it.

I found several examples where people had transferred their blog from domain.com/blog, or even from just domain.com where the blog was the only thing on the server. But eventually I managed to find some examples which, with a bit of trial and error testing, seems to do the job of redirecting all requests for blog files to the new server. For the benefit of those following in my footsteps, the lines I had to insert in my .htaccess file are:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog.html$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/
RedirectMatch permanent ^/rss.xml$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/rss.xml
RedirectMatch permanent ^/atom.xml$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/atom.xml
RedirectMatch permanent ^/20([0-9][0-9])_([0-9][0-9])_([0-9][0-9])_archive.html$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/20$1_$2_$3_archive.html
RedirectMatch permanent ^/20([0-9][0-9])/(.*)$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/20$1/$2
RedirectMatch permanent ^/labels/(.*).html$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/search/label/$1

These take care of, respectively, my old blog main page (blog.html), the RSS and Atom feeds, the archives, the individual posts, and the labels.

The thing that caused the most head scratching in the end was the bit of code that displays the last ten blog topics on the front page of G4ILO's Shack. This is generated from the RSS XML file produced by Blogger but for some reason it worked with the copy that was stored on my server but not with the one obtained direct from Blogger even though they looked practically identical. But after more trial and error that issue was also resolved at around midnight last night.

I'm crossing my fingers, but I think it all works. I have deleted all the blog files off the old server now, apart from the uploaded images of course and a few other files used by the template. Please let me know if you notice anything that seems wrong.

My blog address is now blog.g4ilo.com and you should update it if you are not receiving updates. But because of the redirection, hopefully you won't need to. Now I'm going for a lie down. Somebody please pass me an ice pack!

Labels: Computers, Website

As I wrote in my last post a couple of days ago, Blogger is terminating its FTP service that allowed me to publish my blog on my g4ilo.com server. This will therefore be the last post to this server.

I am hoping to be able to migrate the blog to a new location which will be blog.g4ilo.com. It is frustrating to sit and wait for Blogger to come up with a migration tool that may or may not work, because I have several interesting things that I want to write about that I don't wish to be prematurely consigned to the bit bucket. So I am going to attempt to move the blog myself. Don't be surprised if things go a bit haywire in the process.

If the address you see in your browser address bar is blog.g4ilo.com (instead of www.g4ilo.com) you will know that the move has at least partially worked. The hard part is going to be ensuring that links to pages using the old address are redirected seamlessly to the new one. This is supposed to be achievable using something called .htaccess, but it is rocket science and I will probably need help with it from Blogger techs or other clever people.

So fingers crossed, here we go.

Labels: Website

Like many ham radio blogs, this one uses Google's Blogger. Unlike most ham radio blogs, this one is hosted on my own web server (well, not really my own web server, just some cheap shared web hosting that I already had for my G4ILO's Shack website.) I use Blogger's FTP option to upload my blog pages to my server. I made that decision when I started this blog simply because I already had a website and server and I thought it would help improve my site's popularity to have the blog pages under my g4ilo.com domain instead of Blogger's. Plus any add-in service that works on a per domain basis such as the ClustrMaps visitor tracker or Ham Banner Exchange works for the whole site, including the blog.

There have been times when I cursed this decision, notably during the occasions when Blogger's FTP uploading didn't work. Also, this is becoming a pretty big blog and any update that affects all the pages means the entire blog has to be re-uploaded, which can take a long time. But I really felt that I had passed the point of no return for changing this decision as my blog now consisted of too many pages and I couldn't see how to switch without losing all my existing content, or at least breaking all the links.

Blogger has now given me notice that they are going to shut down their FTP service on March 26, so I now have no choice. I will not for much longer be able to continue publishing my blog on this site. The email claims that Blogger is developing a tool that will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL which will handle "the vast majority of situations." But it would not surprise me at all to discover that one of the situations it will not handle is that where a blog shares a domain with a website running under a content management system that already uses a complicated .htaccess script to create virtual web pages from a CMS database.

This looks like one of those situations where if that's where I have to get to, it would be better not to start from here. I don't like messy solutions, so leaving the existing blog pages as a kind of historical archive and starting afresh isn't an option. There are a couple of ham bloggers (you know who you are) who still have pages from earlier attempts online (and even one or two who appear to have two different blogs containing many of the same posts) and it's confusing when you fetch up at some of those pages and find they don't link to any recent content. So if I have to start over, it really will be a clean, fresh start. Though at the moment the thought of junking over 300 pages makes me wonder why I bother at all.

Until I know where I am going with this, there seems little point in adding more content to the existing blog. If anyone reading this has already done what Google is forcing me to do and could help me do it without waiting to see what tools they can come up with and whether they will work then I would welcome your assistance or advice.

Labels: Website