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Posts published in “Computers”

Real-time interface of Station Contest Data to Website

By Tom on May 14, 2017

In an effort to involve more of our club members, I had the idea to allow users of the St. Petersburg ARC (SPARC) web page to see in real-time, the status of the contesting efforts at the club station. My vision is something like this…

  • Using the TR4W or N1MM+ contesting software’s feature where contact and radio info is broadcast to the network via UDP, I have a Raspberry Pi-based collector of this information running at the station.
  • This info is parsed using code from a few other projects that already process the XML UDP messages and I place these in a database.
  • A webpage is built from the database with the current radio info (both stations) and a view of the last 50 contacts.
  • I then build a widget to place on the club’s WordPress site to show this information.
  • The net result is a user on the website will be able to see the VFO of each radio, the current operator, and the last X contacts worked. The score of the contest will also be available courtesy of the contest logger’s real-time scoring updates.

I will keep a running history of this project on it’s own page on this blog. If you are interested in participating, let me know. I imagine this could have some general utility for other clubs too.

Station Building

By Tom on June 17, 2013

I ran across a very good blog on building a station. This chap built it from soup to nuts including the room, adding A/C, generator, two contesting operating positions and more. There are many good ideas in his station building series. Look here for more.

JT9 anyone?

By Tom on April 22, 2013

I have been reading about JT-9 recently. It seems that since Joe Large has discontinued support for JT-65HF (due to health issues), JT9 is filling the bill. Has anyone tried JT9 yet? What about the new integration with JT-Alert? I think I will have to give it a try this week.

I also fond out that JT-1 is the typical mode used on HF. You can also use JT9-30 which means each interaction sis 30 minutes. Surely, this cannot mean we transmit for 30 minutes at a time. That is for really weak signal work.

Problems with the Tripp Lite Keyspan USA-49WG

By Tom on December 28, 2012

When I got the Ten Tec Orion 2, I needed a real serial port. I thought this would be a good time to get one a 4 port USB – Serial converter. I opted for the Keyspan USA-49WG as I have had good luck with that brand on my Mac. It has worked mostly OK, but I do get random blue screens of death ( BSOD ). The crash dump reports the 49WG driver. I opened a ticket with Tripp Lite on 28 Dec 2012. I will report back on what happens. Note I am running this with Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on a Dell XPS PC (that was for the search engines).