US Navy/Marine Corps MARS Program To End

"MARS" in this case means "Military Auxiliary Radio System", a radio network of non-military stations (Hams) allowed to communicate on military frequencies.

I was encouraged to join the MARS network, but the requirements for actually operating on-the-air are pretty stringent as to the amount of time required, so I declined the invitation.

MARS station have very unique callsigns, as in the case of the Battleship Iowa, NNN0CIA. No idea how we managed the "CIA" suffix, but it always gets a chuckle when radio people visit the Comm Center on the Iowa.

Besides handling routine traffic such as "Health and Welfare" messages, the MARS network is also a complete stand-alone emergency radio network with direct connection to the US Military. And the MARS stations get activated for the Armed Forces Day Cross-Band Test, which allows Amateur radio operators to communicate directly with the military radio stations by transmitting in the Amateur Radio bands, while listening outside the Amateur bands to the military frequencies.

We also have a MARS digipeater for the MARS packet radio network (yes, packet is still alive!) that get excellent coverage due to the antenna being on the top of the ship which gives an unobstructed radio view of the coast line from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

Back in 2009 the Navy/Marine Corps segment of MARS was almost shut down, but a change from "Affiliated" to "Auxiliary" status saved the money, and the Navy/Marine Corps segment of the program.

Well, this time it's for real. From The ARRL Letter:

US Navy-Marine Corps MARS Program to End: The US Department of Defense is phasing out the US Navy-Marine Corps Military Auxiliary Radio System http://www.navymars.org/ (MARS) program. Its operational mission will transition to the other MARS service branches by the end of September. MARS volunteers are Amateur Radio operators who provide auxiliary or emergency communications to local, national, and international emergency and safety organizations, as an adjunct to normal communications.
"The intent of the transition is to best align the program to support national mission requirements," the announcement said. Chris Jensen of Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station Atlantic (NCTAMS LANT) told ARRL that the Navy no longer has any service-specific requirements for Navy-Marine Corps MARS and is working within DoD to transition the program into Army and Air Force MARS by September 30.
The announcement encouraged current Navy-Marine Corps MARS members and clubs to submit applications to the US Army MARS or US Air Force MARS programs as soon as possible.
"The US Navy greatly appreciates the thousands of MARS volunteers, past and present, who have been integral to the success of MARS," the announcement concluded.
An individual very familiar with the MARS program said the change was not unexpected and came to a head as the US Strategic Command embraced Army MARS as the lead branch for contingency communication and Air Force MARS began partnering with the US Army program on the operations side.
"The Army and Air Force MARS branches have an obvious role in providing contingency communications for the 50 states," said the individual, who preferred not to be identified by name. "Members are everywhere 'on the ground,' and experience in Afghanistan and Iraq has proven the tactical usefulness of HF on land. There was no similar role for the landlocked membership of Navy-Marine Corps MARS."
He said the MARS program can use all the volunteers it can attract. Read more http://www.arrl.org/news/us-navy-marine-corps-mars-program-to-end.

The Army and Air Force segments will continue to exist and operate, but "Navy MARS" and "Marine MARS" will be gone forever as of 30 September.

We'll probably be assigned a new callsign for the Iowa, and the digipeater will get reprogrammed, but it's good that at least a portion of MARS will continue to exist.

Battleship Iowa Transmitter Progress **We're Getting There!**

Well, good news!

I took my accurate, calibrated, LP-100A Digital Vector RF Wattmeter in today, and we re-ran the tests on the transmitters today using the LP-100A rather than the built-in panel meters.

We also wanted to make sure each exciter was outputting its 100 milliwatts (+20dBm) of rated power.

First, a little background....

The Iowa originally had 11 transmitters; 10 on shock mounts in a racked arrangement, two high and 5 wide, "odd" units on the top, and the "even" units below them, with #11 sitting by itself at the far left end of the rack mounts.

Numbers 2 and 8 were missing from the ship when she came out of the reserve fleet, leaving us with nine units. Three of the nine were stripped of usable parts in the PA (Power Amplifier) assemblies, leaving us with six more-or-less intact units. We might be able to "mix-and-match"  the three partially stripped ones to make a seventh unit, or just keep them "As Is", or as a possible source of "spares", as we really don't have any reason in the world to have seven functioning transmitters!

Originally the "need" was to have two, fully function transmitters, one being the primary unit, and the other being it's back-up, for "Special Event" use, such as the Military/Amateur Crossband Event, or perhaps Museum Ships Weekend.

As of today, two of the units has an exciter with 100mW (+20dBm) or more (+23dBm) of drive power, and one exciter is low on output, only doing 50 mW (+17dBm).

The two with the "good" exciters easily exceeded 1200 Watts output ( ! ), while the one with the "low" exciter did about 800 Watts output.

This is significantly different that what the panel meters read, by a factor of 2 to 3!

And we have another transmitter that appears to be good, as far as the PA Plate Voltage and Current go, but with a dead exciter that only puts out about .5dBm, a little over a milliwatt.

And it took quite a load off us as to trying to figure out where the "missing" RF Power was going. It wasn't "missing", it just wasn't being measured!


And on the Ham Radio side, I installed, and got operational, a Signalink USB interface box on our Kenwood TS-850 HF radio. As soon as I finish my homebrew soundcard interface, we'll have two stations capable of digital operation on such modes as SSTV, PSK31, RTTY, and other modes.

Panoramic Views of Battleship Iowa Internal Spaces

These have been updated again, with some new areas to virtually explore.

I've seen most of these spaces, and the photography is excellent. These panoramas are actually better than viewing them in person, as the lighting is much better.

It's still quite a thrill to actually visit these spaces, but the panoramas bring out more detail than you'd normally notice, and you can spend as long as you want looking at things.

Battleship Iowa Panoramic Views

Small Block Chevy Time-Lapse Rebuild

This is pretty neat!

They start with an oily, crusty "lump" of an engine, tear it down, bore, hone, and deck the block, rebuild the rods, put hardened seats in the heads, mill them, and then put it all back together all shiny and pretty.

I've lost count on how many times I've done this with Chevy, Ford, and Pontiac V8s, and an unknown number of 4 and 6 cylinder engines!

Nothing real high-performance, as it started as a 2-bbl, a two-bolt block with a cast crank and pressed-in rocker studs, but I'll bet it purrs like a kitten now....

Best Prefilght Ever by a Southwest Flight Attendant

You've probably seen this before, but it's still funny!

HackRF One First Use

Well, I was able to get it running on Windoze using SDR Console V2.2 (the olde V1.5 will NOT work), and SDR#.

No joy with HDSDR, at least not with any of the DLL's I tried, and I'm not about to risk trashing my Windows PC by trying to get GNURadio to run on it.

And I was finally able to get it to run on Gqrx on my Linux box by removing, and then reinstalling, Gqrx. Gqrx uses a block of code (gr-osmosdr) to communicate with the device, and if that code isn't on your machine when you install Gqrx, it won't detect and use it if you install it after Gqrx.

Once I did the "RnR" to Gqrx, the HackRF showed up in the list of drivers to use, and it's running happily right now, and I'm listening to KLOS with it.

The more I delve into the documentation (what there is of it), the more I realize that the only way you'll be able to make this little puppy sit up and shake, and roll over and bark, is to use it with GNURadio. ALL of the "Plug and Play" software out there treats it pretty much the same as a "$10 USB Dongle", and can't take advantage of the flexibility of what GNURadio can do with it.

And it's still just an 8-bit receiver, like a $10 dongle, even though it can generate some RF as a transmitter. Read the link to get a basic understanding of 8, 12, or 16-bits in this context.

Is it worth $300?

That's a tough question to answer. If you want something to plug-and-play, then you're probably better off with a $10 dongle, or one of the better ones available out there. It will plug right in to a Windows or Linux PC, and work with minimum effort.

If you have the time to spend to learn how to set up a GNURadio "definition", AND you understand what you want to do, then this might be for you.

And if you're really serious about a DIY SDR for whatever purpose, you'll find other choices out there that may suit your intended use better.

I haven't decided yet if I'll keep this little guy, or eBay it. I don't really need it for anything I'm doing, but it's a great platform to learn GNURadio on.

HackRF One Arrived Today

For those that don't know, a HackRF One is a small, Software-Defined Radio, meaning that it lacks most of the hardware in a "regular" Superheterodyne radio (mixers, local oscillators, IF filters, etc), and performs many of the normal radio functions in software, using Digital Signal Processing routines.

I've been on-the-fence about buying one of these since they came out (like I need another SDR in the house!), but a recent post over at The Silicon Graybeard's place pushed me over the edge.

My previous SDR experiments I've posted here have been about using the "$20 USB Dongles" to do things like receive pictures from the APT weather satellites, and the "FUNCube Pro" dongle, which is around $175 these days, but offers vastly superior performance compared to the "pocket change" USB dongles.

The HackRF One module goes for around $300, plus shipping and any accessories you order with it, and it will be interesting to see how the receive section compares to the FUNCube Pro + dongle I have.

One of the more interesting things about the HackRF is that it will also transmit, albeit at very low power levels, typically from +5dBm, about 3.2mW, to +15dBm, about 32mW.

I wasn't making much progress with it until I finally got some "permissions" set right so a normal user could access the USB port it runs on, but now I've done my first "Hello World" with it, using GNURadio Companion, an application that generates Python code to interface to GNU Radio, and run the radio from the flow-chart style elements you enter in to it.

Here's a screenshot of my first experiment:

The FFT Plot is a slice of the local FM radio spectrum out here in La-La Land.

I can't take any credit for coming up with this, as I learned how to do this from watching the excellent tutorials on the HackRF website.

I've always been put off by GNU Radio, as I've only tried to run it from the Command Line, and always had pretty mediocre results. It's one of those programs that's too configurable, and if you don't understand what you're doing, your results will be disappointing.

Enter the GNU Radio Companion, and now that I've viewed a few of the tutorials, one of those little light bulbs went "CLICK!" in my head, and I'll probably be able to make some progress.

For being FOSS, GNU Radio is a full-featured, industrial-strength developer environment for doing SDR experiments with a staggering array of hardware.

And now that I've started learning how to use the GNU Radio Companion, I might make use of GNU Radio in a much more efficient manner.

Rats! More Plumbing Problems.....

WELL....the plumbing repair didn't work out. My wife started doing laundry last week, and the water started bubbling up again.

We had our plumber friend come over, and he installed another clean-out tee at the garage, and had a friend of his come over with the BIG power snake, and snake the line from the garage to past where it tees into the drain from the house.

They didn't really find any obstructions, and the line is clear from the garage to the street.

Final diagnosis is that the pipe is running up hill from the garage to the house clean-out tee, and water doesn't run uphill very well. It probably got in this condition from land movement and earthquakes over the seventy years since the pipe was installed when they built the house in 1942.

SO......about half the digging is done, and there's another 20 or so feet to go to get to the junction. Monday morning they'll be back out here to finish digging out the old clay-pipe line, and replace it with new ABS pipe, with the correct downhill slope to it, and backfill the trench.

And I was just getting the back yard to look decent.

At least we're getting a big break on the cost of the job, which usually runs about $100/linear foot of pipe replaced.

Since these guys are friends of out good friend, the whole job will "only" cost $1500 instead of $4000 for 40 feet of line replaced.

Oh, the joys of being a homeowner!

240th Anniversary of The Battles of Lexington and Concord

A.K.A. "The Shot Heard 'Round The World".

And today is also the anniversaries of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the raid at Waco, and the #2 turret explosion on the USS Iowa.

Thanks to The Survival Blog for jogging my memory on theses events.

Not much else to post today, just waiting for the Long Beach Grand Prix to start......

C-17 Tooling Up For Auction

Well, we all knew this day would come. Just sad to  see it come so soon.

Full article here.

Busy Day on the Iowa

We had a special tour of 45 people who went through the USC Naval ROTC program today.

Some were retired, some were active duty, and all had a good time.

Only about half of them wanted to see the Engineering spaces and the Radio areas, so we broke them into three groups of seven, and rotated the groups through the Comm Center on the main Deck, the Transmitter Room down on Broadway, and the Aft Main/Secondary Plot, which is where the Ford Mark-8 and Mark-1 Fire Control Rangerkeepers (computers), and the Stable Elements are located.

Last week we had a group from a local radio club do the same special tour, and if interest keeps up, it *might* get added to the list of "Special Tours" that are offered.

No "official" word on it yet, but we're hoping.

Tomorrow (Sunday) we're giving the same tour to a VIP, a Radioman who served on the USS Missouri during WWII, and since there's only going to be him, myself, and another tour guide, I'm taking my camera!

It was just too busy today and last Saturday for me to be taking any pictures, but tomorrow will be different.

The Aft Main/Secondary Plot is pretty unique, as they took special care of it during storage in the reserve fleet. The paint inside the spaces looks fresh, the floors are super clean, and it's amazingly well preserved.

I'm going to go charge my camera batteries now and get things set out on the dining table so it'll be "In My Face" tomorrow morning. I really want to get some pictures!