You may be asking yourself why we are doing this.  The reason is the hosting cost.  Currently I host both domains through my provider at an expensive rate.  I pay extra because I like having the ability to run scripts, have xml databases, allow more traffic among other things.  Both of these domains are about to expire within a month of each other and I am unwilling to pay the extra costs for both pages.  I can move the Del City ARC page to a more budget plan with less functions and save some money.  Since my personal blog gets more traffic and I use it more, I am more willing to pay the extra rate for it.  As I said before, it will be virtually undetectable to the average user but it will save us more than 50% of the cost. If you have any questions, please post them via email to our members@delcityarc.org address.

Thanks,

Paul

We were left with either changing locations of the IRLP node and transmitting the signal to the repeater or getting another Internet account at the same address.  Transmitting the audio to the repeater from a remote location is not the desired method for various reasons.  For one thing the audio is not as clear by doing it this way.  We prefer to have the IRLP node connected directly to the repeater.  Secondly, having the node at a remote location makes moderating it more difficult.  By having it connected directly to the repeater we solve these issues and others.  We did some research and found it would not be that expensive to purchase another Internet Protocol (IP) address for the same Internet service.  This eliminates the problem of forwarding ports to more than one computer.  Now the 443.3 repeater’s node (8440) has its own IP address so that it does not require any ports to be forwarded.  For the purposes of security, we have to block all ports except the ones that are needed. 

As of last night, 11 Feb 10, both repeaters are back online with both nodes fully operational.  We remain an affiliate of the WIN System so once the audio levels are set on the 443.3 repeater, the WIN System will return 24 hours a day.  The antenna is currently not as high as it was before it was moved but we are evaluating our options to remedy this limitation.  Either my dad, W5QO, Larry, KD5MAF, or myself will keep you up to date on the operation of the systems.

Thank you,

Paul, K5GLH

This was a sad moment for me but it was a necessary move to be able to sell our home for the most we can.  I took 87 pictures of this removal and have them on Flickr.

In this picture you can see the top section coming down.

As you can see in the photo above the last section is being removed.

In this photo you can see the spot where the tower once was.  This is a very sad image to me although I know it was a necessary move.  I know many of you are wondering where this leaves the 443.3 MHz repeater.  Well the antenna that was on the top of this tower can be seen in the photo below.

This antenna has been installed on a side mount on the same tower that the 145.25 MHz repeater is installed.  As soon as weather permits, this will be connected to the 443.3 repeater in the new location.  This being a side mount installation on the Southwest leg of the tower will likely result a null to the Northeast.

In this photo you can see the UHF antenna being installed in its new configuration on the W5QO tower.  This will be the new home of the 443.3 MHz repeater.  At some point this antenna may be raised to the top on a candelabra type installation.  Keep an ear open for this repeater when the weather clears up.  This was a very busy weekend getting the tower taken down and the antenna being reinstalled at the new location.  I am hopeful that everything goes smooth on the new tower.  The IRLP will be a new challenge and may have to be moved as well to enable both nodes to work.  Each node requires its own unique external IP address to be able to operate.  This is because both nodes use the same ports and a router could not forward the same ports in two directions.  This is a small problem that will be resolved in the coming days.  The club officers were in agreement that we needed communication with the members as to the status of this move.  This post is being posted both on the club blog as well as my personal blog so that this information will be the most widely disseminated.

Thanks,

Paul, K5GLH

This week has been very busy with having to work overtime the last two weekends in a row and working two hours overtime each day.  Some point this week, my HF antenna fell from the tower and landed on my next door neighbor’s power line.  Both the antenna and her power line were insulated so it was not a big deal for it to lay there a couple days because I just have not had time to work on it.  As you can see below, it is the antenna on the top and to the left.  It is an Alpha Delta DX-LB Plus 6 through 80 meter dipole antenna that was quite expensive.

What happened was that I had the antenna suspended on a pole off the side of the tower at 50 feet by a pulley and a nylon rope.  Some time this week, the rope broke sending the antenna to the power line below.  Well I hoped the neighbor would not notice it until I would have time to fix it but she did.  The night before last she came to the door about 8:00 pm and told us how concerned she was.  Of course I had already showered for bed because I had to be up at 4:00 am.  Well the next morning I got up and I was on that tower about 40 feet up at 5:00 am trying to pull the antenna off the wire.  Because the antenna has large traps on it, the antenna did not want to cooperate.  I eventually got it down but not after getting every dog in the neighborhood wound up.  Man I have the most stupid dogs that live next door to me on three sides.  These dogs will bark non stop for hours on end.  If I did not sleep with a fan next to my head, I would never get any sleep.

For the life of me I cannot see what the attraction is to a loud barking dog.  They have all the appeal of a wasp in attack mode.  Oh well, I did manage to get the antenna down without destroying it though it is all tangled up.  I hope to be able to work on it within the next few weeks and get it back up.  I really am not up to climbing the tower any time soon because my feet have been hurting a lot lately.  So this means that I will not be on the radio in the near future.  Do you hear that lady next door?  When your television is not working right, it is not me.  Just kidding.  She is okay but she does think it is me sometimes when it is not.  That is part of the way of life when you are a ham rado operator.  People will see your antenna and just assume that it is you that is messing up their television.  I have been watching TV and not even have the radio turned on and people come to the front door and accuse me of coming in on their television.  It just comes with the territory as my dad can attest to.  He has had similar experiences at his house with false accusations

For the most part, things have been going fine around here except for all the overtime.  Some people love working overtime but not me.  I believe that time is the only resource that you cannot get more of.  You can work and get more money but you cannot get more time.  Fortunately my overtime is limited in scope and I work with some great people.  I am looking forward to not working next weekend.  Well I think that just about covers my week.  I thought I should post an update since I have not posted much lately.  I will try to keep this up to date more so you will know how things are going.

When I was a kid my dad was active on ham radio calling CQ CQ CQ from K5GLH.  I grew up hearing that call over and over as he would speak to people all over the country.  Later when he upgraded to his Amateur Extra Class license he changed his call sign.  When I was 17 years old I took the test and got my own license.  Back then my original call sign was KA5QNB.  When I came back to Oklahoma I changed my call sign to K5GLH in 2001 reviving my dad’s original call sign.  Over the last few years neither of us has been on the radio very much because of family issues.  the last couple of days I went to visit my dad and made some contacts on 40 meters and it was like old times.  It sure has been a lot of fun getting back on the radio again.  Hopefully after I graduate in a couple months I will be able to get on the radio more often.  It is really great doing this again with my dad.

To think my dad had not been stationed with our friend Jack, K5ESF at Holomon AFB, in New Mexico he would have never obtained a ham radio license.  Thanks to his influence on my dad, he influenced me to get a license.  Thanks to my influence on my wife, she has a license as well.  Yes we still have the Internet and love getting online but the radio is a hobby that I’ve had since I was a kid.  There is just something cool about speaking to someone hundreds of miles away when there is nothing connecting you but air.  It is a very cool hobby though it can be expensive.  Do not let that discourage you though because virtually every hobby is expensive.  I am just enjoying the time that I get to spend with my dad.  It is very fun.

It is hard to find anything more pleasing than a nice morning sunrise when you do not have to go to work.  The beauty of my situation this morning is that it is the end of the year and I have some use or lose vacation time that I have to burn so I took this beautiful Friday off.  Although it is a crisp 32 degrees at this early hour it still is a pretty morning.  This time last year we were sitting in the dark for a week.  You may remember the horrible ice storm that knocked out the electricity to more than 250,000 in Oklahoma City while more than a million state wide.  You can look at the photos I took here.  The weather forecast is showing another ice storm coming in next week though most believe it will not compare to the monster we had last year. Most people sleep in on their day off but not me.  I love mornings and I always have.  I went out to breakfast at the Waffle House at 5:30 this morning as she was going to work.  She could not take the day off because in her Wing they were having a General come to their office.  She had to be involved in the protocol activities so I had to do without my beautiful wife this morning.  As a second choice I thought I would spend my morning watching the sun rise over Oklahoma City.  I took this photo among others around 7:00 AM.

Below is another photo of downtown.  As you can see the Sandridge Energy and the Chase Bank both have crosses on the buildings representing the incredible sacrifice Jesus made for us as we celebrate his birth on Christmas.  Now I sit here listening to 40 meters on ham radio while typing a blog post.  I wanted to get some pictures of the full moon but there were some clouds in the western sky.  I only have two more classes before I can graduate the University of Oklahoma.  I will start those on January 20, 2009 and I am very happy to have this journey almost complete.

This morning I found San Francisco 49′ers football star Jerry Rice and the Phoenix Suns star Shaquille O’Neal on Twitter.  That was pretty cool as well.  Now that we have the Oklahoma City Thunder I will have to temper my love for the Phoenix Suns.  As many of you know we use to live in Phoenix, Arizona while I was stationed at Luke AFB.  I also lived in Tucson, Arizona while stationed at Davis-Monthan AFB.  Those were some wonderful times of my life that I will never forget.  I lived in Phoenix during the great run of the Suns in 1993.  That is when I really became a fan of the NBA.

I had a very nice visit with my dad last night.  Many of you ham radio people may know him as W5QO, the trustee for the Del City Amateur Radio Club (DCARC).  It is hard to believe that experiment has lasted for six years.  It is hard to believe that in 2002 I was trying to kill time while my wife was spending time in the hospital visiting her mother has turned out to be a full blown ham radio club with an FCC license (W5DEL).  Though I had an amateur radio license since 1983 I was not very active because I could not afford the gear until my dad gave me a dual band mobile radio.  Now it is a whole different world where I have my own ham shack, President of the DCARC and a 70 foot tower in the back yard and all this since 2002. 

This year just does not feel much like Christmas with my 16 year old son gone.  He ran away on 26 Sep 08.  He is safe and staying with friends.  I spoke to him briefly on Yahoo Instant Messenger the other day.  We have decided to let him go and put faith in God that he will overcome and have a successful future.  Many have told me to file charges against the people that he is staying with but I think that would just make things worse.  My goal is to retain a relationship with him for the future and hope that he remains well.  Thank you for those that have offered their prayers of support.  We have decided to keep faith in God and enjoy life.  My other son got his driver’s license a couple days ago and we added him to our insurance.  Once I came too and realized that we really could afford the extra $100 per month premiums I was fine. I am happy for him as he just got a job at a local restaurant a couple weeks ago.  Despite everything I am very proud of both of my kids.  Once I graduate, I will have more time to do some hobbies that I have neglected for the last couple years.  I love taking pictures and talking on the radio.  Of course let’s not forget my big hobby of playing on the computer.  Thankfully today with amateur radio and photography joining with computers I can do all of them at the same time.

Again, it is a beautiful morning and I am off work too.  With no homework this weekend I am sure to have a nice weekend.  I only wish my wife could have taken off work.  That would have made it perfect.

To date, there are only five reflector channels that are capable of handling the uncompressed audio.  These are 9200, 9003, 9739, and 9755.  Nothing has changed on the reflectors except that the owners of these listed have set up those channels to select UNCOMP as the default codec.  It is likely that not all reflector owners will opt to use this uncompressed audio because of the incredible demand for bandwidth.  Since most of these reflectors are operating on donated bandwidth, they may be reluctant to double the bandwidth required if there are many users like the WIN System which typically has 50+ nodes connected 24 hours a day.

Any individual node that calls another node will be able to experience the improved quality of audio.  Both of our repeaters have been updated to the new audio though our 443.3 repeater may not be noticeable because it is connected to the WIN Sytem 24 hours and they have not upgraded their channel yet on the 9453.  I have been amazed at the improved quality as it is virtually perfect.

Another improvement that came with this, most users will not notice because it happens behind the scene.  Before, when a node would connect to a node for the first time, it would automatically download two .wav files. These were the announcement files that you hear when connecting or disconnecting from the other node.  After you visit many nodes, the node hard drive begins to fill up with many audio files making it difficult to do a backup.  Also since many of the nodes are using older computers, they sometimes have smaller hard drives.  With this upgrade, the nodes now stream these connect and disconnect announcements from the IRLP servers so nodes owners are no longer concerned with filling up a hard drive.

Dave Cameron, VE7LTD, the creater of IRLP put out a beta test version of this upgrade last Wednesday and more than 250 nodes participated with zero errors.  On Thursday night, he decided to push the upgrade out on the nightly updates.  On Friday morning, all nodes should have received this upgrade.  We are thrilled with the performance on both of our repeaters.  Since both of them are on broadband Internet connections, this higher bandwidth requirement was not an issue with us.

Thank you for those of you that use our nodes/repeaters.

Paul

Today is a special day for amateur radio operators.  You may have heard them referred to as ham radio operators.  I have been a licensed ham radio operator since I was 17 years old in 1983.  Today being the last Saturday of the month of June makes this a day that many hams look forward to and it is called Field Day. Throughout the years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has justified allotting certain radio bands aside to the Amateur Radio Service for emergency communications.  The Amateur Radio Service is a group of frequencies that cover the entire radio frequency spectrum set aside so that ordinary citizens would be fully trained to perform radio communications in the event of an emergency.

Each year on the last Saturday in June, hams from all over the world set up tents with generators, solar cells, batteries, and all sorts of remote  radio gear with their log books in hand.  They do a contest to see how many contacts they can get all over the world on different bands using primitive radio power and antennas.  This is what they call Field Day.  Literally thousands of ham radio operators do this world wide exchanging call signs, signal reports and locations (QTH) logging them in.  Contesting has never appealed to me so I usually sit this out but many enjoy this immensely.  Every band is filled with thousands of calls CQ contest CQ contest, or CQ Field Day.  This event usually makes the news at least here in Oklahoma City.  Here it is 10:51 PM and the bands are still filled with people as I type this.

The above image is my ham radio station that was taken a while back.  It is not in that configuration anymore but still looks similar to this.  Below is the antenna that I use to transmit from.  I have superimposed the text on there with Photoshop so you can see what each antenna is for.  If you are interested in ham radio let me know and I will get you information that you can use.

One thing that I love about ham radio is that there are so many different methods of communicating using computers, AM, FM, single sideband.  Since I love computers so much I often like to use my computer as a tool on ham radio.  I really love high frequency (HF) communications using the shortwave bands.  This is where your signal hits the invisible ionosphere and the signal bends back to the earth where people can hear your signal for hundreds and even thousands of miles.  Another interesting phenomenon is the stratospheric ducting.  This is when the atmosphere has an inversion, or a layer of warm air above the surface of the ground.  Both UHF, and VHF communications can speak hundreds of miles when this happens.  It usually happens at after sunset or before sunrise in my part of the country.  I always use the old back up, Skype to coordinate an available frequency so that I am not transmitting on top of someone.    I am hearing a guy in Seattle, Washington right now and he is coming in very strong.  If you ever try ham radio, you will likely be hooked.

Technorati Tags: ham radio,field day,antenna,radio,amateur radio,K5GLH,Skype

Now as I type this, it is thundering outside and I love it.  As most of you know, I just love weather and particular severe weather.  Do not get me wrong, I do not want anyone hurt, or have their property damaged but I have always been fascinated with severe storms.  This year may be an active  year.  I turned on the television to the weather channel last night and they said that in January there had been 75 tornadoes in the United States and February has had 90 of them.  So far, we in Oklahoma have not had any yet but the fact that we have had a very bad ice storm with lightning and thunder, and now we are having another one, it looks as though it may be active.  I have several friends that likely will not want to hear this information as they have been victims of tornadoes in the past.  As many of you know here in Oklahoma City we have had many large tornadoes including a massive one in 1999 that destroyed thousands of homes.  Lets hope we do not have anything like that.

I am typing this message using the Flock browser and really enjoying all the cool features.  If you are into social networks, you will love this program.  It has a built in blogging program, as well as a Facebook interface.  It also has direct connection to Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter.  We cannot forget Twitter.  I must admit that I am addicted to Twitter.  It is so fun to use by text messaging on my cell phone.  I am amazed how hard it is to get people here in Oklahoma to try it while the rest of the world uses it daily.  I like the way Twitter automatically updates my Facebook status when ever I send a “Tweet”, or message using my cell phone.  I like being able to just read the messages when I am at work on my cell phone.  Okay, I will shut up and let it go.

Those of you that are ham radio operators that follow our Del City Amateur Radio page may be asking what happened to it and the repeaters.  Last Monday, February 5th, I got tired of listening to the hum coming out of the 443.3 repeater as the WIN System would transmit.  I turned it off and then my dad turned off the 145.25 repeater the following day.  I asked him if he would mind if I turned them off for good.  I am tired of the repeaters and we have had a good run.  He understood and said he does not mind.  He does want to hold off on getting rid of the repeaters out right and giving up the coordination.  I wanted to turn them off for good but he is not completely convinced yet.  One thing is for sure, the IRLP is gone for good.  In fact, I have already formatted the 8440 node that was the WIN System. I think that we have had a good run for six years but my dad has put literally thousands of dollars into it when he has not even been able to use the repeaters.  I am not saying the Del City Amateur Radio Club is gone but definitely on hold and possibly gone.  In my opinion it has outlived its time.  I plan on using that node 8440 computer as a media center computer for our music, and picture source for the XBox 360.  I did take the web site down.

I have noticed quite a while back that Oklahoma City’s ham radio culture is vehemently opposed to Internet linking.  I have found that every six months or so, you get a new group of new ham radio operators that come along and think it is really cool for short time, then they meet other hams that are opposed to it, and they dwindle away.  To be quite honest, I do not enjoy it that much myself.    I like to listen more than talk on it.  With my busy life with school, work, and family, I do not have time to be maintaining repeaters that I do not even use.  I think that a huge debt of gratitude is owed to my dad for all he has contributed to this experiment.  My dad, W5QO has forgotten more about electronics and radio than I will ever know.  It may have been my idea to try IRLP, but my dad is the one that financially and technically kept this system going for six years.  He is the true backbone and the trustee of our club.  I also owe a lot to my cousin, Larry, KD5MAF has also contributed a lot in terms of technical support and financial aid.  Again, the repeaters are not gauranteed to be gone forever, that will depend on my dad.

I think that just about covers the events of the day.  I will post more as it comes available.  I am really enjoying the thunderstorm moving through.

Paul, K5GLH

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Tags: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Flock, ham radio, Del City Amateur Radio Club, IRLP, WIN System, XBox 360, thunderstorm, ice storm, leaky roof, K5GLH, W5QO, KD5MAF