Sunny weather

I hope I don't jinx it by writing this, but I think my weather station is now working. Everything is showing the values expected, including the rain which shows 0 mm as we haven't had any. Trust the Cumbrian weather to not rain when you want it to.

It was actually Olga who got everything working. I had lost patience with it and was all for sending it back. Olga patiently went through the manual (which she found was poorly written) and double-checked everything. She even used my test meter to check the voltage of the newly installed batteries. She found that the rechargeable alkaline batteries supplied for the sensor/transmitter unit were only giving 1.3V each. So she took them out and replaced them with some new Energizer alkaline cells. And everything including the rain sensor started working!

The manual says "Insert 2xAA 1.5V rechargeable batteries into the battery compartment of the remote sensor and immediately afterwards 3xAA alkaline batteries in the base station." It didn't say anything about charging them first. If I had provided my own rechargeable batteries I would obviously have charged them first. But as they came shrinkwrapped in the box I assumed they were ready to use. False assumption! It was as simple as that!

Duff stuff

I don't know why it is, but whenever I buy some piece of gear I always seem to end up with duff stuff. My weather station that I received a few days ago will not register any rain. A little voice says "why do you need a gadget to tell you if it's raining in Cumbria?" but that's not the point. I would really like it to work. I have sent an email to Nevada (the dealer not the US state) but have yet to receive a reply. Watch this space.

My UV-3R+ has also developed a fault, or at least its battery has. It started having a flat battery when I didn't expect it, but irregularly enough for me to think that perhaps I forgot to switch it off. But now the battery won't charge up. The charger works and I can measure a charging voltage on the battery pins but when I remove the battery from the charger the voltage across the two internal contacts is about 1.3V. I've ordered a replacement from 409Shop.

Watch Hill - LDO100

It has turned to rain for this Bank Holiday Monday, but the weather on Saturday and Sunday was glorious. Clear blue skies and a fresh breeze. Perfect days for walking. On Saturday I felt quite depressed thinking about what I might have been doing on such a day before I became ill with a brain tumour. So I determined on Sunday to try to reach a summit. There is really only one possibility from home without transport to get to the starting point: Watch Hill a mile or so to the east of Cockermouth.

G4ILO on LDO-100

Back in the '90s when I lived on the east side of the town I regularly used to walk to this summit. It used to take me about half an hour of brisk walking from my front door to the lower of the two summits; forty-five minutes to reach the higher one known as Setmurthy. (Cockermouth locals also know it as The Hay.)

Today we live on the opposite side of Cockermouth which adds at least another mile through the centre of the town. I still was a regular visitor to the hill but having a car I could drive to a point on the farthest side where there was a lay-by and I could reach the top in just 15 minutes. So it was one of my favourite spots for portable operating.

Today my walking pace is somewhat slower than it used to be. It took us about two hours to reach the first summit, including a stop for coffee. I half expected that we would have to turn back before reaching the summit but the sight of it was just too tempting and that kept me going.

Given that I wasn't certain I would even make it to the top I carried just a hand-held VHF rig, the Kenwood TH-D72. I intended that the walk would be tracked on APRS but for some reason only a small section was recorded. I carried a 5/8 wave telescopic antenna to improve the range on 2m but my first CQ calls didn't raise anybody.

The Kenwood is rather a complicated radio and it is too easy to turn a knob or press a button accidentally. I also need reading glasses to read the display and see what buttons I am pressing. Some setting had been disturbed and I had managed to get the 'B' side of the radio, used for APRS, switched to 70cm. With Olga's help reading the display I was able to get the radio set up as it should be and I made two QSOs to activate this summit which is LDO-100 in Wainwright's Outlying Fells.

Returning home it was downhill all the way to the town centre. It should have been easy but I my legs were tired. I think I'd overdone it! There was still a climb back up to reach home so we finished the journey in a taxi!

I'm still a long way from back to normal. I doubt that I'll ever get back to how I used to be for reasons I'll enumerate in the other blog. But for now I feel that a milestone has been passed and I'm happy with what I managed to do today. If only I could get my driving licence back I would be able to reach many other easy summits.

WebProp hiatus

Some time on the afternoon of 21 May WebProp stopped updating. The first person to notice it (actually the only person to notice it) was Mirek, OK1DUB, who sent me an email.

This is a screenshot not a live instance of the program

I SFTP'd into the web server to check and sure enough the files containing the propagation information extracted from the WWV 3-hourly bulletins had not been updated. They were updated when I ran the script manually so my script was OK. The likely explanation was that cron, the Linux job scheduler, had stopped running. I filed a ticket with Hawk Host's support department.

They claimed that cron was still running, though the evidence of my own eyes showed that it wasn't. It took me a while to convince them that there really was a problem but we got there in the end. This morning when I logged on to my computer the latest propagation information was being displayed again. Hopefully my cron jobs will now stay running.

The case of the disappearing weather objects.

I have just spent what seems like several hours trying to find out why my weather station data sent by Cumulus to the APRS network vanishes without trace. I have tried using the wxnow.txt method of generating APRS weather objects in APRSISCE and that does work, but unfortunately it messes with the MYCALL setting in my Kenwood TM-D710 converse mode TNC. So I thought that I would avoid the problem by getting Cumulus to send the data to APRS-IS directly.

The data packets were being sent but they never showed up on aprs.fi. I produced debug logs for both Cumulus and APRSISCE. These showed the packets being sent. So where did they disappear to?

To cut a long story short, Cumulus was sending the data packet with a path of TCPXX*. This is listed as "deprecated" in the APRS spec but it is actually blocked by the APRS-IS network software. The CWOP (Citizens Weather Observer Program) which I believe runs on an older version of the software, is not so picky so no-one had encountered the problem before. Can you believe that I must be the first person to try sending weather data to the APRS network using the Cumulus software?