Last Field Day Preps Are Done

The satellite antennas and tower were taken down to the Iowa this afternoon, and were assembled and ready to go or Field Day.

We'll have a table and pop-up, and I'm taking my two folding camping chairs and a large cooler full of ice, sodas, water, and "sports drinks" to keep hydrated with.

We were pretty much cooked by the time we had things done, as there's NO breeze on that side and elevation on the ship, so it might be a bit brutal on Saturday, as we'll be in full sun until about 1600 when the Sun is far enough West to "set" behind the superstructure.

And I'm taking my "real" camera tomorrow so I'll have something better than cellphone pix to submit to the AMSAT Journal and QST!

And of course, you'll see them here first......

Busy, Busy Day

Spent the day running around the ship, and looking at the places the Ops and Security folks agreed to allow me to mount my satellite antennas for Field Day.

We'll be on the portside O1 level, using what's called "The Admiral's Veranda".

I have a completely clear view to the North, East, and South, with the West pretty much blocked by the superstructure and turret #2.

BUT......I plotted all of the satellite passes from 1800UTC Saturday when Field Day starts, till 1800 UTC when it ends, and NONE of the passes will be to the West far enough to be blocked.

And since there's an office area on the other side of the portholes, they'll open a porthole for me to run my extension cord through, saving me the trouble of lugging my generator, drip containment pan, fuel, and fire extinguishers aboard.

Then after I dropped off the Field Day signs to one of the members of the other radio club, and checked my mail, I came home and finished designing a simple step-start/inrush protector for a friend on the Celica Supra forum. He's got a turbocharged Toyota 1UZ 4.0 liter V8 in his Mark-II Supra, and is using a set of Taurus electric fans to pull air through his custom aluminum radiator.

The problem is on high-sped the fans draw 70 Amps on start-up, and clobber his electrical system. So, a series resistor that limits the current to about 20 Amps, and gets shorted out after 2 seconds, shoild do the job.

Thursday is take the whole satellite station apart, and put everything back in the storage boxes, and wait for Friday when we move it all down to the Iowa and at least put the antennas back together and align them.

And I finally got to check out my new headset/boom mic!

I got the "Deluxe" upgrade kit that included gel ear pads with cotton cover "socks", and a nice, big soft, fuzzy head band.

These things look identical to the David Clark H10-30 aviation headsets I have, but have "standard" plugs on them instead of the Aviation-type plugs, and are about half the price.

They sound great, seal out 99% of the background noise, have great transmit audio, and are extremely comfortable.

And I'm hitting the rack!

See you all later........

Yes, I'm Messing With The Layout

I got kind of tired of the orange and brown, so I picked another canned theme, and tweaked it a bit.

If it displays weirdly on your PC, PLEASE LET ME KNOW, and I'll try and make it more compatible to more readers.

I have a 24" wide-screen monitor, but a lot of you may not, so what looks "good" to me might look really bad to you.....

Happy Father's Day!

To all my fellow Dads out there....

Satellite Station On-The-Air and Working

Got the cross-boom mounted through the elevation rotor, mounted the preamps and antennas, connected all the cables, and walked the tower up.

And I had it all finished 30 minutes after the last satellite passes (of the satellites I normally use) of the day.

RATS!

So, I decided to give SO-50, an FM satellite, a try, and I talked to one of my friends in Arizona.

The next satellite I wanted to try was AO-73, aka "FUNCube-1", which is one of the reasons the SDR USB "dongles" got popular. I'd heard the earlier pass, but I'd never made the correct changes to my tracking and control program to use it, so while I was able to hear the downlink, it was so late in the pass I was able to manually juggle the radio knobs fast enough to make any contacts through it.

And on the next pass, it was too low to the east, and almost behind my garage, so no joy there, either.

I did manage to copy a lot of packet radio traffic from the Space Station tonight, but they probably won't be active on Field Day.

Oh, well.......I have about 4 hours on Sunday to do some further testing before we have to leave to go to the Father's Day festivities on the Iowa.

This is Why I Missed a Day a Couple of Weeks Ago!

Since it's been announced, the show they were filming down at the ship was "American Ninja Warrior".

I don't watch this type of show because I'm not interested in it, but plenty of people do.

It was a MAJOR production for us, and parking was a mess.

Getting on and off the ship wasn't fun, either!

Thanks to "Big Stick Ops" for the picture! He was brave enough to go aboard that week, while us timid radio guys stayed home....

Field Day Preps and Father's Day

As I told my wife this afternoon, "I'm in Field Day Mode".

Reserved the trailer this morning, and got my laptop out and spent the afternoon updating all the software on it that needed updating.

I didn't do that last year, and wasted a couple of hours updating it "enough" that Windoze would quit squawking.

I also didn't set up all the equipment in the back yard, and test it, last year, so all the tales of woe I had were brought on myself by me. I had taken incompatible equipment (rotator motors didn't match the control box), left things at home because I'd taken them out of the "Field Day" equipment boxes that I thought were all properly packed, and other errors caused by not doing a trial run before declaring the equipment good-to-go.

That's NOT going to happen this year, as I'll be operating my satellite station on the Iowa, and if that operation doesn't go smooth. I'll have a serious amount of egg on my face, and our Amateur Radio Association will look kind of stoopid!

SO.....tomorrow morning all the stuff will be dragged out of the garage and gone through, sorted out, and checked. Saturday morning I'll start assembling the antennas, preamps and power leads, coaxial cables, and rotors. Generally takes me about two hours the first time, as I find my tools and the specific hardware used to hold it all together.

Sunday is Father's Day, so I'm going to have fun, and if the antenna system is put together, it only takes about 30 minutes to set up the radio and laptop, and I'll operate for a bit.

Sunday afternoon we're going down to the Iowa for "BBQ's and Brews", their Father's Day celebration.

That leaves Sunday through Tuesday as the shake-down run. Wednesday is "Grey Radio Day" on the Iowa for me, and Thursday is pick up the trailer and dismantle the station. Friday my son is coming over to help me load up, and then down to the ship, lug the equipment aboard, and set it up. We'll light it all off Friday for the smoke test, and then Field Day starts Saturday at 1100 local.

I really want to be ready for the first satellite to come over the horizon this year, unlike last year when I really didn't get operating until late Saturday afternoon!

"Music Under The Guns" on the Battleship IOWA

Almost forgot to post this.

Last Saturday we had a "Volunteer Recruitment Fair" where prospective volunteers came and talked to representatives from all the various departments and groups to see if they'd like to join the crew and help with the ship.

I was sitting in for the leader of our "Gray Radio Group" who was on vacation, and met a lot of people who were definitely interested in joining the crew and working on the ship.

After the fair was over, my wife came down to the ship to join me for the "Music Under The Guns" program.

The Iowa runs several very low-cost ($10 or less per person) programs that include music, movies, and other events.

This month was music, and we had the tribute band "Fortunate Son"  playing for us from 1430 to 1700.

I've seen these guys before, and they're great. See them if you ever have the chance to do so. You'll really enjoy them!

And yes, they literally played "under the guns", with the stage set up just aft of Turret #3!

"Electric" V-8 Engine

Pretty clever...

It's one of those "What If...." scenarios where the thinking goes "What if I replaced the internal combustion mechanism (pistons driven by expanding gas) with something else that pushed the connecting rods down to turn the crankshaft?".


See for yourself.....

Rifle Ammo - - Then and Now

My 1000 rounds of 223 came in today, and I went and picked them up. I got a good deal on PMC from our friends at Bulk Ammo, and since the rifle/carbine class I'm taking on Sunday said to bring 100 rounds, and I know I'll be shooting this rifle a lot, I popped and bought the case.

As I was bringing it in from the car, I realized I still had a 50 Cal ammo can full of 30-06 surplus that I got a few weeks ago from the folks at Midway so I could properly feed my M1 Garand.

 

This is British surplus ammo specifically loaded for the M1 Garand, made in the late 1960's in Pakistan, and has gotten very good to excellent customer reviews on the Midway website.

The first lot I bought smelled really musty, just like the reviews have said, but this second lot doesn't stink at all. I'll probably buy more, as "MIL SPEC" M1 Ball ammo doesn't exactly grow on trees anymore, and it's good practice ammo.

I'll save my CMP Hornady ammo for those times when I really need accuracy. And yes, I'll compare the two at the range to see how much sight adjustment I need to do, and keep the info with the rifle.


Since my wife isn't as gunny as most of my readers, I thought she'd be interested in seeing how "front line" rifle ammunition has changed over the years. So, I plopped a couple of rounds of each down on the table, and took a few pix.

First, the 30-06. I remember my Dad telling me this stuff could shoot through two palm trees, and still take out a Japanese solder at 300+ yards.

Pretty impressive stuff. 174gr bullet, traveling at 2650 ft/sec, and producing around 2700 ft-lbs of muzzle energy.

Definitely hits hard!

Then I showed her a "typical" 556/223 round:

This particular PMC round has a 55gr bullet, loaded to produce about 3200 ft/sec, and delivering around 1250 ft-lbs of energy.


Here's the two side by side:

When she held the "Then and Now" rounds in her hand she was astounded at what our troops are carrying these days.

HEY!......I am NOT bad-mouthing the 5.56x45 round, so don't go there!

It is what it is, and our troops still have the 308 round for when things get really tough, but since this is the first time that I've ever put the two rounds side-by-side, I can now understand the furor that occurred when the M16 was first put into service.

And as much as I value my Garand, I know I'm going to really enjoy my M&P15.

Battleship Iowa Wefax Reception Update

For those that have asked about the problems I was having receiving weather fax transmissions using our Signalink and fldigi, I found the problem today, and "fixed" it.

Turns out there was a sample-rate mismatch between what Windows was using for the Signalink USB Audio Codec, and the settings in fldigi.

The settings Windows uses for "Recording" is normally something like 2 channel, 16-bit 44.1khz, the same as it uses for "CD Quality" audio playback, which makes sense since most consumers would want to record something that they could burn to CD and play.

After doing a Google session, and experimenting in fldigi by watching the signal "quality" in the waterfall display, I decided to switch to 2-channel, 16-bit, 48kHz, which Windows calls "DVD Quality".

This made the waterfall look much better as far as Signal-to-Noise ratio, but I still couldn't decode anything.

Somehow, I had it stuck in my mind that regardless of what Windows was using, the Signalink was using something else and passing the data directly to fldigi.

UH.....no, that's not how it works.

As soon as I went into the "Modems" setting on fldigi, and set the rate to 48000, I started getting picture decoding, and now we're getting usable weather maps.


Why didn't I have this trouble here at my home station? Well, I'm not using a Signalink on my Flex Radio 5000.

Since the "radio" is running on the same PC that the fldigi software is, I don't need an additional hardware box to digitize the audio from the Flex, and feed it to the program. The audio stays in the digital domain from the "radio" directly to the program using a pair of Virtual Serial Ports, connected together with a Virtual Serial Cable.

And in setting up the two ports and their "cable", I set the bit rate to be the same, so "it just worked".

Just one of the pitfalls of having one foot in the Analog Domain, and the other in the Digital Domain, I guess!


And for those that have asked about why we weren't on for Museum Ships Weekend.....


Well, we had to cancel at the last minute. There was a major film project for an upcoming TV program that resulted in the ship being pretty much shutdown for that complete weekend, as well as the entire week following.

Parking was a major hassle as the parking lot was used for the filming of the event (the ship was basically a backdrop), and access to and from the ship was severely restricted.

We talked with the Museum Ships people, and they would have allowed  us to operate from shore, BUT...we had to be in sight of the ship to do it.

That would have meant operating "mobile" from on-street parking, or finding another lot in sight of the ship where we could overnight with a generator,

It would have been just too much hassle, so we requested the Museum Ships people remove us from the list.

It's kind of a bummer because we were going to use this as a "full-up" test for Field Day, but the welfare of the Iowa comes first, so we accepted it without any bad feelings. They've been so good to us, that we have absolutely no reason to complain about missing a weekend "playing radio"!