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Posts published by “Tom”

Hello. I have been licensed since 1980. I am currently the president of the St. Petersburg Amateur Radio Club (SPARC). I am a founding member of the Upper Pinellas Amateur Radio Club (UPARC) as well as a past-president and past club secretary. I am a Life Member of the ARRL as well as a member of the ARRL Maxim Society. Additionally, I am a life member of AMSAT, a member of the Clearwater Amateur Radio Society and a past-president and member of the Utah Amateur Radio Club. I hold 9 band DXCC covering 160 meters through 10 meters. I am also a member of the ARRL's A-1 Operator's Club. I mostly chase DX, POTA parks and dabble in contests both at home and with SPARC. I also work on the development of several amateur radio software projects including TR4W among other open source projects. I am a dyed in the wool Elecraft fan utilizing my K4D and KPA1500 for HF but also have more Icom radios than any one person should own. I also have a growing Begali key addiction that seems to keep growing. I also have a nice collection of older radios, Mac computers and HF 1500 watt amplifiers. Professionally, I own a software consulting company and have been involved in software development and IT continuous for the past 39 years.

I am running for the ARRL Southeastern Division Director

By Tom on August 18, 2025

Greetings! Thanks for stopping by my personal website. I am running in the 2025 election for the position of ARRL Southeastern Division Director. I appreciate you clicking on my website to learn more about me.

The menu above has some information about my campaign. You will find a page on Why I am Running for Southeastern Division Director as well as some information about me.

There is also a handout suitable for printing if you would be so inclined to share this with your club.

Please feel free to check out this website’s articles since it explains quite a bit about my experience as a ham and the various things I do in amateur radio.

I would be glad to discuss any part of my candidacy with you and answer any questions you may have. Please do not hesitate to either email me at ny4i@ny4i.com or text/call at 813-205-6388.  I look forward to hearing from you.

DXCC Update…

By Tom on July 28, 2025

Well I realized I never actually applied for the CW or Digital DXCC as I was not listed in the DXCC standings. So I sent that in and was granted those as well. I was glad to hear the ARRL board authorized a new 10 Band DXCC. There was 5B DXCC as a specific award but the other bands were just added on. So while I have 9B DXCC (160, 80, 40, 20, 17, 15, 12 and 10 meters), there is not a specific award for 9B DXCC. With the new 10 band DXCC, once I get just 73 more countries on 6 meters (thats’s a challenge), 10 band DXCC and Bob’s your uncle…

Here are my current DXCC standings…

  • 307 Total (305 honor roll countries since two of those are now deleted entities).
  • 291 on CW
  • 232 on Phone
  • 163 on Digital
  • And bringing up the rear, 6 on Satellite and 17 on 6 Meters 🙂
Screenshot

Elecraft K4 Case

By Tom on March 23, 2025

In preparation for a remote POTA and CQ WPX SSB outing, I wanted a case for my Elecraft K4D. After looking around for anyone that may have used a Pelican case, I stumbled upon a reference to Elecraft’s web site where they have a soft-side case for the K4. It comes with foam to surround the radio. As it is soft-side, it is not made to be checked but who would do that to a K4? This is one where the radio will be with you either in an overhead or in your trunk. This case is available for $150 direct from Elecraft via this link: https://elecraft.com/products/es100-k4-carrying-case

I took advantage of Elecraft’s free shipping when ordering from a hamfest as I ordered mine at the Orlando Hamcation.

Here are some pictures from when I packed up the K4 today for my upcoming trip to Crooked River State Park for the Greater Atlanta RISK Tournament.

Cutout for Connectors

Foam as received complete with cutouts in place for storage

Shack Update 2023

By Tom on March 18, 2023

It has been awhile since I posted about the QTH so here goes. Beth and I moved in September 2022 to Clearwater, FL. We decided it was time to leave the beach. While it was certainly pretty looking over the water from the rocking chair on the deck, honestly the wind was getting a bit too much for me. Fortunately, the buyers wanted to leave the tower there so I did not have to arrange for that to come down. A few of the guys from SPARC came over the took down the vertical on top of the tower and the OCF antenna.

Skipping forward to this place in Clearwater, Beth wanted to be on a golf course for the social and tennis aspects of it. I wanted a poll again and to be closer to northern Pinellas to be closer to the gang in UPARC. Madeira Beach was too much of a haul to go to things up here so it is nicer to have people closer to us. Of course, my main concern was avoiding going back to a place with deed restrictions at all costs. We had a few false starts on this house on the Countryside Country Club golf course but we finally settled on a good price and bought it. Oh and there are absolutely ZERO deed restrictions of any kind!!!! This is one of the few places that backs right up to a golf course that does not have deed restrictions. This was a great find.

While this house is bigger (4174 sq. ft.), it is one level with a 3 car garage. We had a much bigger garage in Madeira Beach which meant more places to store my ham stuff. That is both good and bad as I tend to forget what I had in that much space. I have been struggling trying to decide if I want to put up a tower here. Given my style of operating HF, I settled on a roof tower on the flat roof over our lanai out back. I ordered a Mosley MP-33-NW antenna to go on the roof tower with an Alfa Spid RAK rotor I had laying around for my tower project in Madeira Beach. That antenna does not get here until some time in June if Mosley’s estimate holds true so I am thinking int he interim, putting a 6m beam I again already had on the roof tower for June’s Sporadic-E season to pick up some 6m contacts.

In the shack, I reused most everything I had in the prior house. The great guys at UPARC came over and put the Morgan lightning arrestors in the KF7P box and sunk a ground rod. They also put up the tri-band vertical (2m, 70cm, 23cm) and even found a way to install the 40m – 10m OCF antenna I had on the Madeira Beach tower previously.

The Elecraft K4 works great with the Elecraft KPA-1500 (it is like having a 150 watt transceiver). The KPA-1500 tunes the antenna everywhere it needs to and the antenna works great for as low as it is and being essentially a dipole. I am looking forward to the beam to get a bit more gain on 20m, 15m and 10m and the rotatable dipole elements on 17m and 12m.

The Flex station (Flex-6600, PG-Xl and TG-XL are installed in the corner of the new shack as station number 2. It sure would be nice to have a Maestro when they finally start shipping that again. I plan to also make the Flex station available for people to use as a remote so people that may not have an HF station at home can use my station when I am not using it during the workday (yes, 4 more years of work until retirement).

5B WAS Finally…

By Tom on March 18, 2023

It took 40 years, but I finally finished WAS on 10m to achieve 5B WAS. Actually, I already had WAS on 30 and 17 so I not have 7B WAS with just North Dakota and Mississippi needed on 12m (assuming I get a QSL on LOTW for an Oklahoma station I worked recently).

Controlling the Elecraft K4 and KPA1500 with Home Assistant

By Tom on March 10, 2022

For awhile now I have wanted to be able to have my “Goodnight” scene in HomeAssistant turn off my network attached ham gear. I finally had a chance to do some experimenting and created this config to turn on and off the KPA1500.This sends a command via UDP to the amp to turn it off and uses Wake_On_LAN to turn it on. A similar thing could be added for other device types. This is added to the configuration.yaml file.

Put your real MAC address of the amp next to mac. If you mac address is 54:10:01:02:0A:0B, then the line will read mac: 54:10:01:02:0A:0B

switch:
– platform: wake_on_lan
name: Elecraft KPA1500 Amplifier
mac: 54:10:01:02:0A:0B
turn_off:
service: shell_command.turn_off_kpa1500shell_command:
turn_off_kpa1500: “echo ‘^ON0;’ | nc -u 192.168.1.2 1500”

It assumed the IP address of your amp is 192.168.1.2 and it is listening on the default port 1500. Note this is a UDP connection so the command is sent with netcat (nc). ^ON0; turns off the amp. Reference to wake_on_LAN in HomeAssistant is here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/wake_on_lan/. This also assumes you are on the same network as the amplifier.

If you are doing this from a script on a Raspberry PI for example, you can use etherwake (sudo apt-get install etherwake)

Now for the K4…
Since the K4 does not yet support Wake_On_LAN, you have to resort to the old ways to remotely turn on the radio. But once the radio is on, then HA can check the status and allow you to turn it off. So for my use case, I can send a command to the radio to turn off as part of my ham shack off scene (goodnight).
In the switch section of the configuration.yaml, add the following:
– platform: telnet
    switches:
      k4:
        name: “Elecraft K4 Transceiver”
        resource: “192.168.1.108”
        port: 9200
        command_off: “PS0;”
        command_on: “PS1;”
        command_state: “PS;”
        value_template: “{{ ‘PS1’ in value }}”
        timeout: 0.9

Connecting a Kohler Generator to Home Assistant (work in progress)

By Tom on September 15, 2021

*** There is now an Add-On for the Kohler Generator. ***

I have been playing around with Home Assistant (HA). Briefly, it is a management system for IoT and other devices that is hosted internally (on a Raspberry Pi in my ham shack). With Home Assistant, it is natural to look for all the things that are already programmed to connect with and check their status. I already have the following items in Home Assistant:

  • Lutron Caseta Switches
  • Wemo Switches
  • Rain Machine Sprinkler Controller
  • Honeywell WiFI Thermostats
  • Pi-Hole
  • SensorPush temperature and humidity monitors
  • Insteon Plugs
  • Samsung TVs
  • HP LASERJet printer
  • Ring Doorbell
  • Synology DSM
  • UniFi UDM Pro

One device I was curious if I could connect is our Kohler 24KW generator. The Kohler generator has an Ethernet jack on it which is connected into one of my isolated VLANs (lest someone open the generator and try to get into my network–same idea for the wired Ring doorbell). Kohler uses its own cloud service called OnCue Plus to collect state on the generator and control it. In researching this, I found a page that described the authentication call followed but the call to get the state of the generator. This was posted by Russell Salerno in March of 2018. It seems easy enough to write some code for HA to periodically poll this API. Of course, getting into the details of this to control the generator will require some reverse engineering as I do not believe Kohler publishes an API.

The site I found the info was here: https://community.openhab.org/t/looking-for-an-easy-binding-template-to-write-a-binding-for-kohler-generator/42120/2

I am recreating the data here in case it disappears:

The protocol is straightforward:

Step 1: Get session key if none is available.

https://api.kohler.com/krm/v1/users/connect?username=YOUR_USERNAME&password=YOUR_PASSWORD&dateformat=m-d%20g:i%20A

This returns some json elements, one of which is a session key. Use the session key to get current status of the generator.

Step 2: Get generator status using session key

https://api.kohler.com/krm/v1/devices/listdevices?sessionkey=SESSIONKEY_FROM_STEP_ONE&parameters=[4,11,60,69,102,91,114,115,549]&events=active&showperipheraldetails=true

The numbers are data elements that correspond to items of interest. A complete table of these items is here (again from Russell’s post).

I will update this post as I make some progress and learn how to code up my own Home Assistant integration.

Network upgrades

By Tom on April 22, 2021

While it pains me to say it, the cable Internet service is fairly reliable here. The one BIG exception is when we have power outages. One can imagine that Spectrum has never heard of a UPS to use on their router along the way between each home and their cable plant. When we get power outages here in Madeira Beach due to thunderstorms, it is not unusual for the Internet to go out. Sometimes it is just a few seconds and other times it has gone into the minutes. We had a case in March 2021 where the Internet was down for 6 hours (by far the largest time out of service in the 5 years we have been here). The following is a bit of background on the network changes using UniFi equipment. The second post in this series goes into the LTE network backup device and how the VLANs ensure that things like TVs and other heavy streaming users do not utilize the LTE backup (and hit the data limit I have on my 5 GB/month plan). But first–the gear and VLANs.

Coupled with this issues, I discovered that the UPS in my LAN rack was not working properly. I suspected a dead battery but it has been intermittent. So while it may have been overkill, I decided to pull the UPS out of the cabinet (Cyber Power brand which I now disfavor). I replaced it with an APC UPS with a network interface for monitoring.

At the same time, we also removed two Ubiquiti 24 port POE EdgeSwitches and installed a single UniFi 48 port POE switch. This was to get the switch more in line with the UniFi framework (since I already have the UDM Pro). This lets me setup VLANs a bit easier. I could have still done what I needed with the EdgeSwitches but I traded cost for ease of configuration.

The goal of all this was to allow me to easily setup multiple networks to segment the traffic on my LAN. But first, some background is necessary.

I have many Internet of Things (IoT) devices like WeMo lights switches, Amazon Echos (Alexa), Lutron Caseta switches, a Ring doorbell (hardwired by POE), the Kohler generator, smart thermostats, a sprinkle controller and some other miscellaneous items. A common security practice is to set these devices up so they cannot access the main LAN. This is based on the idea that if there were a security issue in one of these IoT devices (such as its is compromised by the proverbial hacker) they could not access any devices except other IoT devices. So the question is how do we do this?

The answer is VLANs. In the UniFi world, these are setup a unique networks. The UDM Pro abstracts VLANs into different Networks. Each network is served up am IP address from a different network (192.168.X.Y) where each network is a different value (or subnet) of X. With some additional firewall rules, the “sub” networks cannot talk to the main LAN network. There are some exceptions for the main DNS servers (PiHoles) which are on the main LAN. A firewall rule also prevents the sub networks from accessing the ssh and web interfaces on the UDM Pro gateway.

My next post will be about using an LTE backup device from UniFi to make sure if the main Internet goes down everything still has connectivity. Well, almost everything as we do not want Netflix to use LTE as a backup–contrary to the conventional wisdom by others in the house, NetFlix is not critical :).

Networking Info for the UDM Pro No Internet Detected error

By Tom on March 22, 2021

Just a note for anyone else searching for UDM Pro No Internet Detected issue.

I have a Netgear cable modem so it is not a router at all. I installed the UDM Pro but it could never get to the Internet. I searched and found some references to setting the time but my time was correct. I then read something about the UDM Pro wanting to get to “something” but not telling us what. For some reason, that clicked as a potential DNS issue. Sure enough, on the Advanced options on the UDM Pro, I saw the Internet set to DHCP as it should be but no DNS filled in. Since this is a router, it appears that the DHCP from Spectrum did NOT send the DNS servers along. I filled in DNS with the 8.8.8.8 for Google and it worked.

Note the UDM Pro updated itself but never left the screen. After 10 minutes, I went to the default 192.168.1.1 again and it came up with the full interface.

I hope this helps someone else.