Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Hardware”

Elecraft K4 Case

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

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).

Controlling the Elecraft K4 and KPA1500 with Home Assistant

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

Network upgrades

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

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.

Fun with Airplane Data

I have started playing with ADS-B data again. For those that do not know, ADS-B is a system where planes send their position, speed, heading and other telemetry to the ground via a radio on typically 1090 Mhz. This is unencrypted data that anyone with a receiver and antennas can pickup and use.

The above chart is generated by the PiAware software running on a Raspberry Pi 3B. The planes and position reports you see are all received locally by me with a small antennas sitting on the window sill in the ham shack.

If you are interested in this, you need a few things to get started.

  1. Raspberry Pi (3b will do or a 4).
  2. SDR Receiver (FlightAware sells a unit on Amazon or you can get one of the European TV dongles).
  3. Antenna (Bigger and higher the better).
  4. Network connection

I also added a specific 1090 Mhz antenna from FlightAware. My plan is to mount the Raspberry PI, USB Receiver, POE extractor for power to the Pi and antenna in a NEMA-4 waterproof box on my tower. This way I avoid coax loss at 1090 Mhz. I will plug the connection Ethernet cable going to my tower into the box and send network and power up that way. I can only imagine how far away I will receive signals when the pI is on the tower.

To conserve write cycles on the SD card in the PI, I also added a service called log2ram. This changes /var/log to go to a RAM drive then every hour or so sweeps the logs to disk for safe keeping. It also does it upon halt or reboot.

I will post pictures of the NEMA 4 project as I finish it up.

Chronology of a New Ham Radio Release

Part of any new radio release is a treasure-trove of commentary on the new radio’s email reflector. This is a summary of those topics so when you order your new radio you can recognize some of these common patterns. I started this with the Icom 9700 and it has been true for every new radio since then.

  • Discussion if the rumored radio will actually be sold and when.
  • General hand-wring regarding the vendor’s included/missing features.
  • Consternation regarding how long it is taking to release anything.
  • The inevitable price guessing (and first round of retail economics and pricing strategies with a side of currency exchange issues).
  • The first round of commentary based on the aforementioned speculated price as to why “The old model will do me just fine, thank you” or “That is too much for that style radio so I will not buy that” with no discussion if the writer actually could afford one.
  • The first lull in activity as people seem resolved to wait patiently (a very short lull).
  • First hamfest sightings which then cause the cycle to repeat after lambasting the temerity of the videographer to not show the exact feature others wanted to see.
  • More discussion of price as the dealers start to take reservations.
  • Speculation if one should buy a so-called gray market radio (i.e., buy a radio for the US market in the UK/Japan/EU and modify it). This is always coupled with another round of currency valuation discussions where people attempt to equate the price strictly on the current exchange rate without regards to local market dynamics that really set a price.
  • US market price announcements by varying dealers couple with another round of pricing discussions that frequently including basic retail economics discussions like overhead (or lecturing some on why they are not considering overhead). These discussions show a population subset that will never be happy with a price unless the manufacture sent them one for free to keep forever.
  • First orders converted from reservations take place, which starts a general discussion on why one’s dealer can take orders before another.
  • Debates about how many items arrived in a pallet when pictures of cardboard boxes are shared. Detailed discussion of packing systems including how many units are packed in a box.
  • First customer ship with a barrage of list traffic stating “Ordered mine today”.
  • Rigs start to arrive coupled with a few unboxing YouTube videos again lambasting the videographer for not showing specific features.
  • Discussions of the features as people learn about the radios and the naysayers stating, “The old model did it better so I will keep my old one”. One has to see the separate psychology paper on the thought process of how one dismisses a new model for the old when for some, buying the new one was not really in the cards anyway. One theory is it’s a way for one to justify to themselves their inability to buy a new one so casting aspersions on the newer model makes them feel better.
  • Barrage of reports stating “My radio arrived today” emails to various lists.
  • As more shipments arrive and operational limitations arise, a voracious discussion why feature A or B was included or left out. Another round of discussions on the economics of manufacturer scope decisions as a function of pricing in the desired market. Much input from retired experts that used to manage something similar for XYZ Corp.
  • The resident and highly valued test engineers run the new radio through its paces. These results are interpreted by the masses as either confirmation of the aforementioned biases towards the old radios compared to the new one or serve to confirm one’s decision to be an early adopter. Frequently another round of discussions about the need for a specific feature starts again.
  • The testing phase is closely coupled with countless discussions on the specifications of a feature that perhaps one in 1000 users of the new radio will ever use (i.e., setting the DSTAR position of a 9700 that never leaves the shack with a GPS versus simply entering in one’s non-changing Lat/Long manually). This highlights the point that the fact that a feature will not be used by most does not mean it cannot be debated ad infinitum.
  • The population generally settles down until the first radios have the inevitable failures of a few. Chastising those deemed foolish to be early adopters commences with the naysayers relishing in a ubiquitous round of “I told you so” and “This is why I wait to buy”.
  • First round of price drops with again another shot at the early adopters and then some lamenting they feel robbed that they paid 100 currency units more for a radio and their dealers are awful for not refunding the difference 6 months after the fact.

All the while, the various moderators of the lists try to weigh a careful balance of letting the group have their discussions and deciding when to shut down a discussion. Also note that these are not absolute rules. It is possible that one can raise a topic late in the game about currency exchange rates and prices (see active R&L Discussion on 9700 mailing list).

Operating from Home

Thanks to Clayton KJ4RUS going up the tower along with ground crew Bob N2ESP, Pat AA0O and Ed NZ1Q, I have a wire antennas on the tower. Clayton climbed the tower to put a rope in the tower standoff’s pulley and the ground crew connected things so the antennas could be raised. The ends were tied off and it all seems to work well.

The picture below is of a contact I made on FT8 showing the coverage of the antennas on 20 meters. This looks like a great pattern for Field Day. Everywhere with a time flag is a station that heard my signal. The station in Brazil heard me at -10 db and the one in Washington State at -16 db.

My thanks to all that helped!

The Tower Shopping List

My goal with this tower is to built an exception satellite station so I can try for WAS and DXCC on Satellite. While WAS is doable, the DXCC part will need lots of low angle AO-7 passes and FO-29 passes. With that in mind, I decided to install some very high gain antennas. I like the quality of construction of other antennas I have from M2 so I decided for their biggest satellite antennas. Of course, I also need an rotator to adjust both the Azimuth and elevation. I opted for separate rotators in case I decide I want to put a small HF beam at the bottom of the mast.

Here is the bill of materials (BOM):

  • AlfaSpid RAK Rotator inside tower
  • AlfaSpid RAEL Elevation Rotator
  • KF7P AlfaSpid Flat-plate adapter
  • DXE-AS455G Accessory Shelf
  • DXE-TB-300 Thrust Bearing
  • DXE-ST200CM-22 Chrome-Moly 22’ mast
  • Rohn ROH-BPL55G tower bearing plate
  • KF7P Antennas Standoff Arm
  • KF7P Standoff Stabilizer Arm
  • M2 Crossboom HD FG 11’
  • M2 436CP42UG 430 Mhz Yagi (18’)
  • M2 2MCP22 2m Yagi (19’)

Tower base is firmly in the ground

The concrete is in the ground secured by a good amount of concrete. The contractor that rebuilt the house is doing the base and house brackets for this project. We had some false starts on the hole. Specifically, the first one they dug was too far from the house relative to the house bracket. The second hole was too far from the house in the other direction (the house bracket would have hung over). I really do not understand why it is so hard to look at a set of plans.

4 sections of Rohn 55G ready to go up
The tube for the tower base (only using part of that but looks like we have enough for a few more towers)
Hole number 1. The hole ended up being moved two times because the crew kept missing the mark to make sure it fit in the right place.