gerryk.com

I am currently building a house, and as such, have a great platform for implementing all the things I have dreamt of but could never manage to achieve in a rented house. Apart from finally having the spaghetti finally embedded in the walls and floors, and having almost enough power and network sockets (you can never actually have enough, right?) I can experiment with centralising control of the house and accessing home telemetry through my phone.

Over the last few weeks, the Galway VHF Group has been testing and putting the final touches to our APRS Digipeater.

Since I qualified for a free upgrade to a Pre, I decided to get one.
My initial impression is that it is a small phone, compared to my previous iPhone 3G. The keyboard is small, but very usable... not as good as the one on the Treo 700w I had about a year or so ago though.

APRS is often misunderstood to mean Automatic Position Reporting System, when, according to creator Bob Bruninga, WB4APR, it actually stands for Automatic Packet Reporting System. Some might maintain that the primary purpose of APRS is vehical tracking and service position reporting, and, while this is not entirely untrue, it does sell short the possibilities of this excellent technology.

The WA1ZMS Trans-Atlantic beacon/transmitter project has had a recent upgrade to
its operation.

Technical Description:
QTH: FM07fm at 4200ft AMSL
Antenna: 2 6ele yagi stack aimed at 60 degrees to Europe
ERP: 7kw!

From Brian Justin, WA1ZMS/4...
---
A land mobile grade base station VHF exciter is used and the 25w driver PA is
keyed for CW modulation. The exciter utilizes a 10MHz frequency reference with
is derived from an HP-Z3801A GPS frequency standard. The TX frequency is

Full Article at Silicon Republic
I have to be honest when I say that this does not inspire confidence. Neither the HSE, nor Eircom has shown themselves to be leading lights of security and disclosure, preferring a more reactive approach of spin in the face of obvious breaches and slips.
It remains to be seen how this plays out, but I, personally, am not expecting any major diversions from form.

It's almost exactly a year since Dan Kaminsky announced what has been described the as "as the most egregious network security flaw in 10 years". Long enough, it could be thought, for the network admins at the world's ISPs to get their shops in order and eliminate the bug. Especially, since the work of actually eliminating the vulnerability had been undertaken by the authors of the various vulnerable versions of Bind within weeks of the announcement, and all that was required at the ISP level is to install the patch.

Yesterday, 17th March (St. Patrick's Day) was also the date of the first castle activation for CASHOTA-Ireland. We chose this day for a number of reasons... it was likely that there would be many stations eager to talk to an Irish station, and it was the first day I would have available.
The castle to be activated was Oranmore Castle, resident of World War II Submarine Commander and twice circumnavigator of the world, Commander Bill King. This Castle was designated EI/001/C for the CASHOTA Award.

We (the Galway VHF Group) have a good many portable operations coming up this year, so, to supplement our portable HF antenna collection, I thought a 20m Moxon might be a nice project.
The only real expense was the 4 fibreglass fishing poles, but they ended up very cheap, even when you factor in postage from the UK.
The design was going to be based around a spreader made from a rectangle of 12mm ply, with 25mm dowel bolted on at the relevant angles.

Ok, there have been a few additions, changes, retirements and so in in the old shack. The current lineup is...

VHF/UHF - Yaesu FT736R
4m - Philips FM1000 with PA4DEN 3.2 firmware
HF - Icom IC756 PROIII
HF Receiver - Drake 2B

There's a little story behind each of these rigs. The ones that make me most happy these days are the Drake 2B and the PROIII.