For a rainy day. 137 years of Popular Science free for browsing. Thanks PopSci and GooG.
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For a rainy day. 137 years of Popular Science free for browsing. Thanks PopSci and GooG. Leave it to the RedmondGeeks to create a useful tool but leave it undocumented rather than make it easily available. And a big thanks to NumberOneSon for showing me the trick. There’s a feature for Windows 7 users called GodMode, which is simply a tool/folder that has a lot of the more useful system administration tasks grouped together in one place. [As opposed to navigating five screens to get to them.] All that is required to use the feature is to create a folder then re-name it. See the link for the details or just goog up the word “godmode” for yourself. No use re-inventing the wheel here. [hey! I didn't name it...] ENVIRONMENT: The following applies to an install of Writelog on a Windows 7 64 bit platform with User Account Control enabled. Probably works for any Windows 7 version. It may also apply to Vista, but that version of Windows has not found its way into my hands, so experiment at your own speed. All installs were done under the administrators account, and testing of the application done in a limited user account. No special permissions were granted to the limited user, nor to any of the directories. BACKGROUND: The new BlogBox is not used down in the KazShack dungeon, but is the day-to-day computer. After a contest, I move the log file up to the main computer and use an install of WriteLog on that box to spew out the Cabrillo, and ADIF backup, and the reports. For my own nefarious reasons, I chose to set the new BlogBox up with an administrative user, and do all of the day-to-day activities within a limited user account. WriteLog is still backwards compatible with older versions of windows, and runs well even on systems with limited resources. That is something that is a useful feature, as it allows a wide choice of hardware platforms to be pressed into service. Plus, I just damn well like WriteLog better than anything else. But since Writelog was designed before the day of user accounts there are some adjustments that need to be made to get it working in Windows 7. THE INSTALL: One approach used by many is to disable User Account Control[UAC] and run the system as the administrator. That’s a judgment call. Diametrically opposed to the goal here…but used with success by many. Another approach that seemed to work is to install it under an account with administrator privileges. But that also falls short of the goal, which is to get it going under a limited user account. When installed as the administrator, the user accounts were able to run the program, but not able to save the configuration settings. The approach that seemed to work is to install WriteLog into its own directory[I named it c:\writelog_install_home]. The install went without a hitch. The real trick is simply to find where everything is right after the install. The important part is locating the “writelog.ini” configuration file. For whatever reason the RedmondGeeks in Windows 7 [and maybe Vista] have an environment variable ["appdata"] that is used for hiding certain bits of data under UAC. The term “hiding” is used deliberately since the directory referenced by the environment variable is indeed hidden. Finding STUFF:
The basic install is all pretty easy once you locate the files. The critical file is the configuration file, “writelog.ini”. In this sort of install there are actually two copies of writelog.ini. One copy is in C:\windows. That copy is an abbreviated version, which has what I expect are the bare minimum bits of info required by WriteLog to run. [NOTE:After installing the program several times it is possible this copy in C:\windows could just be cruft left in place from a previous install.] It seems likely that “writelog.ini” is used to initialize the program. Probably best to ignore that copy of Writelog.ini, and leave it undisturbed. You will need to have admin privileges to edit it. The second copy is stored under the c:\users\xxxxxx\appdata directory in the sub directory \VirtualStore\Windows. The full path in my install was “c:\users\w4kaz\appdata\VirtualStore\Windows\writelog.ini”. THIS is the file used to store config settings for the logged on user, and it is here that customizations should be added. The user copy is created for each user individually and uniquely. That copy is the version that can be customized as required for the particular situation. A lot of WriteLog users have custom versions of their config file for different situations. Rather than maintain numerous copies of the file, it might also be appropriate to define a separate user for each situation. Then all of the copying/management of config files could be avoided by simply logging on to the appropriate user. That’s enough to get the program functional as far as opening logs, exporting reports and files. Testing connectivity is to peripherals is more difficult, since the shack is not in the same location and there are no USB dongles yet in use in the KazShack. The defaulted directories were as follows, after the user had opened the program, and done a “save config”: [Install] [Configuration] [Multipliers] Wave files and data files are defaulted to the user’s documents folder. Customize those as needed. The only real curiosity is that the user writelog.ini install directory was not updated in the final install to reflect the actual install directory. Its probably best to update that entry to reflect the actual installation directory. Installed in this manner I have not yet run into anything that required administrator privileges, or that Writelog be “run as administrator”. But admittedly, I have not yet tested keying CW, .wav file audio, or rig control. The BlogBox is not the computer used for contest logging, nor do I use any USB dongles at this point. In the end, admin privileges may indeed be required for full featured usage that bangs away on the com ports, but in a limited use it is not required. CAVEAT: After I was satisfied the main program was functional, I went through the Writelog directory and executed each of the utility programs. The “tuning indicator and audio snapshot” program received an error window trying to edit the system registry. That program is for use with RTTY, a mode I am not using, so it is not clear to me that the program has actually failed. After acknowledging the error, the program appears to load an be ready for action. UPGRADES: For these tests, Writelog v10.70c was used for the full install. Upgrades 10.71 through 10.75 were then applied via the administrator, with no problems encountered. The program ran for both the administrator and the limited user accounts. And dats da fax, jack….. This year N1LN has been able to find enough operators to be able to host a M/2 effort for the ARRL DX SSB contest. I am fortunate enough to be part of the SSB team this year, and I’m excited about the opportunity. This is a great DX contest, as the DX stations are seeking to work the US stations. If we are fortunate enough to have good operating conditions, it should be a blast. Good 15m or even a chance 10m opening would just make everything better. If the conditions are anything like this past weekends’ DX CW, we are going to have a great contest and a lot of fun operating. Looking at the 2009 results, it appears we have a real shot at creating ripples in the M/2 pond. For 2009 the top 10 in the W/VE M/2 class were: 1 WE3C 6,019,992 4,167 484 EPA 2 N3RS 4,507,461 3,461 441 EPA 3 W4RM 3,431,106 2,857 406 VA 4 K8AZ 2,759,328 2,308 402 OH 5 NR4M 2,565,171 2,170 399 VA 6 KB1H 2,518,431 2,191 391 CT 7 NE3F 1,984,140 1,861 365 EPA 8 K0TV 1,793,412 1,623 372 NH 9 W5WMU 1,654,044 1,459 388 LA 10 NK7U 1,312,464 1,491 296 OR Operating during the CQ WW SSB contest, we managed just over 3000 QSO’s. In better conditions, it is likely we can do better than that. But so will everyone else. After looking at the descriptions of some of the other stations[see links above], its a tough task to join this crowd. All of these stations have larger antenna farms than that at N1LN. Most of the top five have towers over 120′. WE3C has a high 80m rotate-able dipole, as well as 4-squares for 160/80/40. Most also have superior geographic situations working in their favor as well. The promise of good conditions may also lure some stations back into the M/2 category. The poor conditions of the past few years must certainly have caused some to drop back to a single transmitter. We can also hope that ‘other factors’ will NOT be equal. But the chances of bad weather are probably higher in this part of the US than in these more favorable locations. That is not a controllable factor. So it is probably best to think of things we might do to improve our performance. Maximize multipliers. Dig out the weak ones. Be on the right band at the right time. Rate is king. Butts in chairs. A couple of cold 807’s to keep ‘YDU’s pipes going for the duration. Should all other factors be equal, if we are to cause ripples in this pond we will need to be better operators than the other guys. I’d like to think we can at the very least keep them looking in their rear-view-mirrors. “No sweat!” [HA!] The propagation conditions were better to EU than its been for quite a long while. That made the contest a lot more enjoyable than the DX contests have been over the past few years from here in the “cheap seats”[low power into low dipoles]. I’m sure the scores at the big stations will reflect the changes. For my own part it went quite well-even with a small station In the week before the contest, conditions were sounding good, with good openings on 15m and 20m. There was no real plan to put in a heavy effort here, but instead to have fun and get in some CW practice. Check. Mission accomplished. Overall, with conditions so much better it was easy to stay in the chair longer than planned. 15m opened early on both days, just after local sunrise. 20m was hot in the early afternoon, and 40m and 80m both opened to Europe earlier than I usually notice. There were even a few QSO’s on the edges from 160m and 10m. The 160m Q’s were early in the evening, when I was hearing a few EU stations, but they weren’t hearing the dulcet tones emanating from the Kazshack. The 10m QSO’s were very fluttery, with lots of QSB, but worth chasing anyway. The operating plan quickly morphed from “Search and Pounce” into finding a place to try to run. The original idea was to operate “unlimited” and play “S&P2R”. The network connection never got connected after tuning around a bit and shifting the gray matter into run mode. Wedging into a good spot is always a problem, but once found the good conditions had the stations lining up. Sometimes too many – a new experience from the KazShack. But good spots were hard to find and a lot of time running was done at lower rates up in the “nosebleed” areas higher in the band. The runs brought in a lot of surprises. On 40m finding and working the KH6 was a surprise, as well as being called by a TA and a ZC up on 15m . Early on the second day I also found a JA1 on 40m, but no joy – working left coast. Some of the surprises were unusual enough to cause the brain to balk on copying the call sign correctly – V51 in particular. A search and pounce sweep on 10m and 15m bagged ZM1A on 15m, as well as five of the 10m mults. 15m showed signs of signals from Europe just after local sunrise, and they were able to hear me soon thereafter. Probably an hour or so earlier than that for the stations with good 15m antennas. But the lack of good antennas served to limit the volume of responses rather than shut the band to use. I was able to run stations on 15m after 1230z on the second day. Just a couple of hours later, and 20m became hospitable for a low power run above 14100. Being a fan of 15m, not much time was spent in the local evening hours. Its difficult for the DX to hear the 100w stations through their local QRM and QRN. With 15m and 20m open, that’s not the disaster it has been in the past couple of years. It will be interesting to see the scores and compare them to those of the past couple of years. The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
******** ******** Summary: Band QSOs Mults ------------------- 160: 5 5 80: 55 28 40: 191 46 20: 187 45 15: 131 45 10: 8 6 ------------------- Total: 577 175 Total Score = 302,925 amended 2010/2/26 Surfing over to the Dell Outlet last week resulted in a moment of weakness. There were several bargain buys on Inspiron 537’s, 545’s, and 546’s. I settled on a nice Inspiron 545s, boasting 4gig of ram, 64 bit install of Windows 7, and a Dual Core Intel CPU. No extra “flufware” was installed on the system by the folks in Austin. The 545s is a low profile slimline system, so there not much room to add junk into it later, but at the Outlet price it solved an itch that has been begging to be scratched for a couple of years. New Hotness. After almost 10 years, the old Dimension 4300 is really dragging on normal day-to-day usages. So it is well past time where it should be put to pasture. It runs Ubuntu Linux well enough, but I have a lot of windows applications I use frequently, so XP has been king. The 4300 has a 1.6Ghz P4, but it is memory constrained at 512Mb max. PC133 memory(its that old). XP runs a lot of things well enough despite the system constraints, but is hard pressed to run the modern antivirus/firewall packages and be able to run a modern internet browser with all of todays’ superfluous and gratuitous visual content. Bloated OS, bloated security, bloated browsers, bloated web content. Itty bitty memory. Not conducive to a good user experience. Old-n Busted. So the Dimension 4300 is going to be a great file server, Linux experimentation platform, and all around backup contest logging box. Just in case the really old and busted CPU in the shack croaks… It is hardly a shock to find that the New Hotness is pretty damn nice. Everything is relative. Windows 7 is taking some mental adjustments. Ten years of XP have worn big habitual ruts in the gray matter. But there are a few nice surprises under the hood of Win7. Anybody using/administrating Windows 7 should goog up “GodMode”, a nifty but undocumented control panel quick-list. The MS-geeks should have made it a documented feature. Also, the whole system is just blazing fast in comparison to the old. The on-board graphics are quite sharp, and seem fast enough for daily use. Probably not a video gamer’s box, but certainly fine for general usage. Ten years from now – who knows? One quirk that took a moment to adjust to was finding the directory being used for storing program data. Many XP applications defaulted to storing program data in the program’s directory. Under Win7, the application’s program directory is protected. To get around that, data files used by an older application are shunted into a directory under the current user. A bit of head scratching and cussing later, the location of that directory was found to be defined by the environment variable “appdata”. After a bit more head scratching it became clear the “appdata” folder was indeed under the user account, but it is a hidden directory. To get to it directly you can hit ‘Start’ and type %appdata% into the run/search box. Or you can just enable the file explorer to see hidden files. Grrrr. Not sure why it ever made sense to RedmondGeeks to hide the application data…… So far I’ve only run into a couple of minor problems installing software on the 64 bit OS. I decided to define a separate admin account, and set up user accounts for everybody as users without admin privileges. General applications can be installed by running the install as an administrator. This worked well for most applications. Two glaring exceptions to that generalization: Security software, and Google’s browser. The security software is understandable – that is best installed by the administrator directly. But there’s no legit reason Google’s browser should be such a pain in the ass. And pain in the ass it is. Running the install of Goggle’s browser as a user with “run as administrator” resulted in no visible installation. The install program runs, then ends without any messages/ warnings/ errors. Backing off on that, the install was run directly from the admin account. In that instance the install succeeds – almost. After that installation, the browser was available under the administrators log-in, but not to any users. The install did not offer an option to choose users. Somewhat less than satisfactory. So for the moment, Google has been kicked from the New Hotness. Banished. Shunned. Deposed. Rejected. What with IE/Firefox/Opera/Safari all working properly, its not like there are no options. On the browser front, it has been nice to be able to get back to using Firefox regularly. Firefox had become really bloated since I first used it – it is a real performance pig on the old-n-busted 4300. Having adopted Firefox early on, it was really disappointing to see it become fatter and slower than IE. Over the last 18 months Opera has been the preferred browser. Opera has been an off-and-on affair over the years, since it has in many cases been the most innovative of the browsers. In previous incarnations rendering of web pages was not always as reliable as the others, but it has always been the fastest of the group. Since the more recent editions of v9.xx and now v10, it is both fast and consistent. The Firefox performance issues on a low resource system seem to be a script related problem, although the sites with a ton of images are always slow too. All of that probably relates to the memory constraints, system paging, thrashing, and the intrusive nature of modern antivirus applications. Running without the AV software speeds it up in some cases, but the hardware limitation is a bigger problem. The 4300 box at idle uses almost half the available memory in that system. The New Hotness zips right along. Sweet. The New Hotness can support up to 8gig of ram. I expect to stuff it to the limit to allow room for tinkering with virtualization(VirtualPC, Sun’s VirtualBox, etc.), and maybe a bit of low end graphics card upgrade, if a decent low profile card is available at a bargain price. Set for another decade – maybe. The idea of a wireless headset that can be used for contesting is one that I have discussed with several folks over time. Kicking around ideas, none of the Bluetooth sets seemed suitable. Battery life and charging options with most Bluetooth headsets seem too limited for use in a contest setting. So, where might something more suitable be found? It would appear that the online gamerz have a similar need, and at least one vendor is going to scratch their itch. Creative Labs has a headset being marketed to the “WoW” crowd*. It is called the “Creative Sound Blaster Wireless WoW Headset”. The “Tom’s Hardware” computer site has a short review. The review indicates it is a comfortable headset, uses USB for computer interface/charging, and is 2.4Ghz wireless technology rather than Bluetooth. The Creative spec sheet shows a 112db SPL in the cans, and there is a volume control on the headset itself. It would probably make an ideal wireless set for the contest operator – except for the $160USD price tag(listed$159 @TigerDirect). But these gaming headsets have a tendency to drop in price over time, and if another vendor follows suit that price will likely drop. I’m assuming that many “WoW” gamers remain attached to their entertainment nearly as long as a contest operator keeps his Butt.In.Chair. The features description indicates the headset can operate while attached to the USB charger. It should be a trivial hack for a ham to rig an outboard battery pack to supply the same 5v that would be supplied by a USB dongle. Then it would also be simple to use with a logging program in a station set up to voice key via the computer. There is also a dongle for a PTT footkey, that can be mapped to the keyboard. It even has runes inscribed into the sides of the cans for that bit of supernatural DX’r mysticism, guaranteed to have that rare DX hear your 5w SSB signal when fed to the bedsprings. *NOTE: For all you old geezers, “WoW” is an acronym for World of Warcraft, an online video game played by millions of gamerz world wide. The Who Dats rejoice. Bag Heads no mo’. [at least until August] ….Billy Kilmer….Tom “Gut” Dempsey…Archie Manning….Danny Abramowicz….Ricky Jackson……Sam Mills….Bob-bey…..Fears-Stram-Phillips-Mora-Ditka-Haslett-Payton….vs.Rams_vs.49′rs_vs.Falcons……Campbell-Rogers-Hilliard-Gajan…,,Superfoot, Morten Anderson…..Lots of interesting players, and interesting moments. And all too many moments best forgotten. And after only 43 years, an entire year of highlights all in the same year. … After a few weeks of off-and-on dorking around with themes for the Cape Lookout Expeditions website, I think I finally found one I really like. So its going to turn up here soon too. Right now the hold-ups are desired customizations to the theme. Unless I find a widget closer to what I’d like to see, getting the sidebars to display links ordered the way I’d like them is problematic. I like the expedition photo banners, but there are a lot of shots I can add from around the KazShack. After building the 80m/160m splitter, it seemed like the signal levels from the K9AY were down a bit, probably from losses in the filters. So after looking around at pre-amps, and procrastinating on buying the Ar2 preamp, I again landed on the W7IUV site. W7IUV has updated his preamp schematic, and it looked easy enough. Building the project was simple after gathering some suitable parts. Trying the pre-amp out seemed to show that it was more or less filling the desired role quite well. With the preamp engaged, levels from the K9AY were now on par with signal levels from the transmit antennas on both 160m and 80m. The preamp is installed in the shack just ahead of the band splitter. Noise levels on the RX system were down about two to three S units from the TX antenna in these moderate noise conditions. During the 160m contest this weekend, the RX system got its chance to proove itself. Noise levels here were moderate – not as quiet as good winter conditions, but not S9+ summertime noise either. The RX antenna with the preamp turned on was always the best choice on weak signals in these conditions. It also necessary to switch the K9AY around a lot – signals were not always best in the expected direction because of higher noise to the north. The southeast direction was dead quiet, but from here in central NC there isn’t much to listen to on 160m to the SSE. The actual compass direction on the SE leg is about 10 degrees south of southeast. So the short version is that the preamp is an improvement when splitting the RX antenna for two radios. Future projects/curiosities:
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