WMPORN BLOG

From time to time I change the first paragraph on the website to reveal some details about projects that we are up to. Sometimes people find what I write amusing, so I have decided to start copying that information here for those who wish to somewhat follow the flow of how some projects go. Just like everyone else we have our problems too. Sometimes how we resolve those problems is amazing, sometimes it is just blind luck, and sometimes it is downright funny. So, below you will find paragraphs that have been removed from the main webpage and have been archived here to aide you in your sadistic pleasures.

Dayton Hamvention 2009 is now but a memory as summer moves on here in West Michigan. As always we had a good time, sold our junk, bought other peoples junk and came home tired, but with new ideas for the future. Though it is not a new idea, I purchased and ID1 DStar radio while in Dayton. For nearly two years our 1.2GHz equipment has remained idle sitting in the rack with the UHF and VHF repeaters that were put on the air when the system first went up. I also talked with the representative from Hustler about their antenna's, and it seemed that finally I had found an antenna that would work for 1.2GHz and would also meet the requirements for the tower site. Shortly after Hamvention I made some phone calls and oredered that antenna. The new antenna has arrived. This is a big step toward getting the 1.2GHz stuff on the air. Now we have to wait until someone is going to climb the tower so that we can share costs and get the antenna mounted on the tower. The feedline is already in place and runs to 490' on the 525' tower. This will allow us to start using the Digital Data module immediately when this antenna is in place. Funding has been appropriated and we expect to order the triplexer from TX-RX soon. The triplexer will allow us to operate both Digital Data and Digital Voice over the same antenna. Honestly, the cost of the triplexer is higher than the cost for the antenna, but not having a second run of 1.625" coax up the tower is a huge cost savings. Currently the DStar repeater gateway is running some experimental software. This software has some incompatabilites with the software that was used for repeater and reflector linking. The new software however allows us the ability to connect to experimental reflectors where we are now able to cross link with not only other DStar repeaters, but also those running IRLP and Allstar. We are also looking toward finishing the modifications to the 442.175 repeater and returning it to the air. We still need a few more pieces for everything to work and are looking forward to the day when we place it back on the air.

This month WMPORN gets a mention in Popular Communications Magazine. The article, found on page 20 of the November 2008 issue is about D-STAR and what it is all about.

How did WMPORN make it into Pop-Comm? Well, it all started when Jason Togyer, KB3CNM took notice of our novel ideas to make our booth stand out at the Dayton Hamvention. The approach that we took caught many looks during the event, but one of those lookers was Jason, who had been issued a directive to do a story about D-Star. There were lots of things at Dayton about D-Star, but those were the vendors booths, and we were not selling D-Star, just promoting it in a way that people would stop by our booth to talk to us about it. Jason, was one of those people and when he came up to talk I was at the booth.

Jason asked a few quesitons and then asked if he could contact me later in the summer as he worked on this article. Of course I replied "sure" and we exchanged contact information. Some time later Jason called me on the phone and asked a whole lot more questions and it seems he was armed with alot more knowledge than he was at Dayton. To shortcut to the end and try to keep this piece shorter than Jason's article I will just say "the rest is history" and you can find the first mention of WMPORN in a national magazine (that we know about) in the November 2008 issue of Popular Communications.

WMPORN has once again gone to Dayton to Hamvention 2009. Everyone had more fun than should be alowed and all returned back to West Michigan with treasures of all sorts. Some pictures and comentary can be viewed by looking at the Dayton 2009 web page.

It finally happened. On Sunday November 2 2008 a group of 6 people met at Spectrum Health to remove all of the WMPORN repeaters belonging to Sam K8SN. Both the 442.175 and 224.760 repeaters have lost their home of more than 15 years.

The 224.760 repeater was moved into the "new" radio room right after the building was constructed. That repeater along with another local club repeater had been located in the hospitals former radio room. The club repeater was moved to a different location, but the 224.760 repeater was moved into the new radio room followed shortly by the K8SN 442.175 repeater. Several years ago the 224.760 repeater was purchased by Sam and became the K8SN 220 MHz repeater.

The reason that the repeaters had to be removed is due to the helicopter crash that took place several months ago. In that crash the pilot managed to clip a webcamera belonging to TV13 (WZZM) with the tail-rotor of the bird, leading to a fiery crash that caused the necessity of an evacuation of the hospital. During this evacuation Hospital Communication Volunteers (HOSCOM) used the 442.175 repeater as a primary means of their communication. The news of this event can be found on this news blast"

Once again, the hospital is constructing a new radio room, and has offered to us a place to put the repeaters. Unfortunately that location is far too short to be able to use the repeater for many of the important things that it has been used for over the last 15 years including Skywarn, The Riverbank Run and Hoscomm as well as other various events. The repeaters location in proximity to downtown Grand Rapids along with it's excellent HT coverage is what made that repeater so useful for such events. The new location that was offered will not allow the type of coverage that we need to deal with those situations. While we would like to go there temporarily the hospitals offer did not include things like paying for new feedline, and the money to get the repeaters operating there and then pay for it all again when a better location is available is just not in the budget.

Rest assured that we have a backup plan available to get the 442.175 repeater back on the air at another location, but this would still not give us the coverage that we truly need. We are currently seeking other possibilities at this time and will welcome any offers that will allow us to return this repeater to the air and once again provide the services that it has provided for many years.

This special announcement is brought to you by the Food and Drink provisionment committee of WMPORN. Opening in the WMPORN Grand Rapids District on April 27th 2009 will be a new eatery that finds high favor among many of the WMPORN members, though there are a few holdouts who refuse to admit they love the place. Begining Monday April 27th at 6:00 am EDT, Sonics (located just South of 54th Street on Clyde Park Ave.) will be available for WMPORN social gatherings. We encourage all of our memebers to join in and welcome our new hosts to West Michigan.

I finally received confirmation that we have fleamarket spaces at Dayton. WMPORN will be setting up in spaces 2531, 2532 and 2533 where once again we plan to have a limited amount of our famous WMPORN hats available for sale. New this year we have made plans to bring along the WMPORN stripers. The strippers are sharp and cheap and should provide many hours of amusement and entertainment in the fleamarket this year. Don't forget to bring your singles along.

We are of course still working on the plan to bring the K8SN repeater back on the air bigger and better than ever, and are waiting for construction to be finished at the new tower site.

The VHF module module has been returned to the air as of 17:00 07/29/08. ICOM reports that the VCO voltage on the RX module was operating at near the limits and this was the reason the module would stop working.

Of course my immediate and still unanswered question, is why did it suddenly change. Well, we are all aware by now that the AC went out at the Moline site, but the temperature there never got outside of the claimed specifications for the repeater. This leads me to believe that inspector 109 was not doing a very good job on the day that our VHF module was built. Hopefully we will not have any additional problems with it. If you think that for some reason the module is not hearing you, keep in mind that sometimes it is caused by something trying to come through from one of the gateways or other users, especially with the new connections that just started from the Japanese. Be patient with them. They are working somewhat in the blind, and a few of them do not understand that we are trying to hold a conversation on the repeater. Unlike the US gateways, for them to hear you, you must use what we call gateway push.

Gateway pushing is done by placing the callsign of the foreign repeater with the module behind a slash "/". You can NOT one touch the Japenese stations, and you can not callsign route them. You can only do a push to their gateway using something like "/JP1YIQA" in the yourcall field. This is the only way that you can talk to them. If you hear them coming through from one of the reflectors do not try to talk back to them as they will never hear you. If you hear them through a reflector they are "pushing" their transmission to a gateway that is connected to the reflector.

The Japanese are still trying to learn about all the things that we have going over hear in the US and so far only a few countries have been able to join in with us completely, like Canada, Australia, Italy and Germany. Part of the problem is that the Japanese have their own trust server and their own entire network setup just like we do here in the US. Trying to join these two networks together is a nightmare to say the least, but finally the Japanses people who are producing DSTAR are seeing why a whole lot of networking professionals have been complaining about the way some things are being done. Just like anything else, this technology is still new and will take some time to become the every day normal.

For now the UHF module is working normally. I will at times link it to the reflector. For those of you that have UHF capability now is a good time to use that band. For those of you that only have 2m capability we are sorry for the inconveniance, we will have it operational as soon as possible.

The IRA Hamfest is now over, along with the DStar forum that WMPORN members presented. We had several comments as to the content being helpful, and we hope everyone who attended has a better understanding of DStar. Our only regret is that we did not have more time scheduled as there was much excitement about subject.

The hamfest was a good time and we are happy to announce that John Imeson, N8IJ won the 91AD portable radio that WMPORN provided as a prize for the hamfest. If you are reading this and are a part of a hamfest in the Michigan area and are interested in having a DSTar presentation please contact John, Sam, Mike or Dan about the details.

I do have some pictures from the forums and hamfest of WMPORN people, but I need to do a little work on them and get them ready for the website. The link will appear when I get them on the website.

G2 is up and running with all the bells and whistles possible at this time. If you hear a voice saying "user connected" this means that someone has connected to the repeater using a DVDongle, say hello and chat for awhile. In order to talk to DVDongle users or users on other repeaters you must be registered on the DStar system. If you are not registered on another gateway you will need to register. The link to the registration page can be found at the Gateway II announcement page or by clicking on the G2 Registration link in the menu on the left side of this page.

After some adjustments to the transmitter combiner, the UHF module that is now on 442.550 can be heard once again. The UHF deck is now on a coordinated frequency and this should be it's home permanantly.

WE MOVED!!
Ok, well the website didn't move, but we have moved the UHF module to a new frequency of 442.550+ (input on 447.550). This has many advantages for us. First off this is a full coordination, and is not a provisional DStar coordination, meaning that it meets all the current criteria so that as long as we are operational on this frequency we are within reason protected. Another advantage is that we will be able to improve the RX capabilities of the repeater as this is much closer to one of Sam's remote RX frequencies and we will be able to share the same multicoupler port through our recently installed bandpass filter.

At this time I have to make a plea to everyone. Please, please, please take a look at the DStar Quickstart guide in green letters in the left hand column. It seems that many people are making some mistakes probably brought on by old habits. When entering your callsign into the MyCall on your radio this is not a place for vanity personalizations! This is to be your callsign and only your callsign. No slashes, no numbers, no dits no dahs, only your callsign. Many people have assumed that they had to put an SSID on their callsign just like packet, not true. There is a method of doing that, but it is a letter and one letter only and it belongs in the eighth position of the MyCall no matter how long or short your callsign may be. Save the other personalizations for the message text, that is where they belong. MyCall is not for tactical callsigns, when you do this, technically you are falsely identifying your transmitter. To preserve our habit of doing so, we generally identify via voice just as we always have, but the legal ID for D-Star is the MyCall. We're all still learning here, but this is one pitfall that we can avoid.

If you see someone's call come accross incorrectly I would encourage you to help them to understand this. Be nice, (especially if you are using the WMPORN repeater) because some of us old codgers are harder to train than others. It is important to remember that we are connected to a very large network and things that seem small can get out of hand rapidly.

You may also want to take a look at The DStar Users website where you can see alot of information about DStar users all over the world. The list there can be sorted by using the small buttons at the top of the list. By clicking the button to the right of "Reporting Node" you will find that WX8GRR comes right to the top of the list, and the button to the left of that will sort in alphabetical order and put us at the very bottom of the list. Of course that will only be true as long as nobody with a call starting in X, Y, or Z puts a DStar repeater on to the network.

We have started working toward getting the Gateway 2 software and have already purchased the computer hardware to build up the new gateway without taking the current one down until we are ready to change it out. Right now there is no time estimate as to when this will happen as there are alot of pieces that have to fall in place that are in other peoples hands before the new network is fully functional. I will update this website with more information as it becomes available.

We are also looking forward to at least one if not two more D-Star repeaters to be put on the air this summer, along with the completion of the WMPORN repeater that has now been dubbed the Porn-Star repeater, by activating both the 1.2GHz Digital voice and Digital Data modules.

My latest toy arrived earlier this week. I have obtained one of the first DVDongles produced. The DVDongle is a codec module that attaches to a computer through the USB port and with Robin Cutshaw's (AA4RC) software allows me to create audio files that can be sent out through the D-Star repeater. It also allows me to connect from an Internet connected computer to a D-Star repeater and use a headset connected to the sound card to talk on the repeater. This is a great breakthrough and works better than any echo-link connection I have ever tried. Currently the DVDongle is only available from Ham Radio Outlet (specifically the Atlanta, GA store).

Things have been going fairly well and Icom just announced the availability of G2 (gateway 2) software. This software is much improved over the previous version that was designed more around the rules for amateurs in Japan than it was for hams in the US. The new software will offer a much easier way to add users to the network and most importantly it will allow mistakes to be cleared much easier. The G2 software will also allow linking of repeaters so that multiple repeaters can be connected together similar to the way that IRLP works, I suspect things will be much "cleaner" than IRLP. We do intend to install the G2 software and be one of the first kids on the block running the new software.

At last the gateway is up and running. The final connection to the trust server was made on Friday night. Oddly enough I was talking to the Icom DStar support guy tying up the last few details when my phone battery went dead on me. By the time I got out to my car to find some power for the phone, the Icom guy was on the repeater talking to Sam. For more information about talking to users on other bands or on other DStar repeaters please see the information below about callsign and routing information. There are several links to information about programming your radio for use with the gateway. Please take note that to use the gateway feature you will need to be registered and that information can also be found on the using the link in the callsign and routing information section below.

One more thing to take note of is that the UHF portion of the repeater will soon be changing frequencies (depending once again on things like our ability to reach the tower site). A new frequency coordination was applied for and is in it's final stages. At this time we anticipate the new frequency will be 442.550/447.550. This will move us away from the passband edge of the DCI filter improving performace. We are also considering a small amplifier for UHF to offset the losses that we see through the transmit combiner.

Some new pictures of the repeater along with some additional information have been posted, just click on N8EOD above to see it all.

Michigan weather or not, we keep on plugging along. I made all possible attempts to talk to the DStar controller remotely to tell it to use the new gateway, but it just wouldn't work. So, today I drove to the tower site... or at least to the end of the driveway where I grabbed my laptop out of my car and started walking the 1/4 mile uphill to the repeater site. Winded and sweating like a pig in 20 degree temperatures I pulled out my laptop, stabbed a network cable into the repeater controller and couldn't remember the password. Fortunately we have internet access at the repeater site and I was able to retrive information about the default password that we thankfully had not changed. Two minutes later I was walking out, and though it might make my story sound more stressfull walking out was not uphill.

A call or two later in the day and a little bit of testing, and (wait for it... wait for it...) Our DStar gateway is NOW CERTIFIED!!. Friday January 4th I (n8wkm) made the first contact through the gateway with wd5erd in Dallas Texas. This of course was the test server, but it worked flawlessly the first time. For those who are not familiar with the DStar gateway system, this is another first for WMPORN. Thanks to the software design everyone has been using old Fedora Core Linux distributions for their gateways, but we wanted something modern, so slowly but surely I managed to work with the software and make everything work on Slackware 12, the latest distro from Slackware. The most remarkable thing is that the test worked on the first try. Now we are just waiting for an invitation from the K5TIT group that operates the primary ICOM Trust server and we will be operating in style.

Once again it's WMPORN vs Michigan Weather... things are moving along nicely with the gateway, but as usual we have hit another snag. The issues that many expected because I chose to use Slackware as the distribution of Linux to create the gateway. Other than a few small battles, there were no real problems getting the software into the machine and getting it to run. All of the add-ons are in place and are all ready to go, now we just have one more small problem. When we set the repeater up originally it did not have a gateway to work with, so we inadverantly did not check the box in the programming software labled "use gateway". While that may seem like a small problem, it means that somehow I have to get my laptop back up to the WMPORN tower site to make that change. Until then we are on hold once again. The weather guy is claiming warmer weather ahead, but that might just mean more ice on the driveway, I guess we will wait it out and see. In the meantime we are showing up on the DStar users webpage and once I get the controller setup changed we can get our certification.

Well, we had a small break in the weather and it allowed us access to the repeater site so that we could make some of our continuing improvements to the D-Star repeater. We were able to install the new DCI filter that allowed us to place the receiver antenna for UHF on to the top stick on the tower. The DCI filter was needed because the existing multicoupler was designed in two segments from 450Mhz to 460Mhz and from 460Mhz to 470Mhz pretty much making our needs in the 444Mhz range impossible to use. The antenna however is a wideband antenna and will work for us. By using a T on the feedline with tuned feedlines to the existing multicoupler and the other to the amateur radio stuff we created our own multicouple port with a passband of 440Mhz to 449Mhz. This allows us to expand our receive needs by providing a power divider and pre-amp. Currently there are only two things on our side, the D-Star UHF repeater and Sam's South remote receive for the K8SN repeater. With limited time and resources available late that night the D-Star system does not have a pre-amp installed at this time but the coverage has greatly improved. I drove to Holland last night from home, and coverage was fairly good. I think we can improve it though, but that is what we always do, improve things.

Our next tough project will be to get the 8 pole DCI filter that was purchased to the hill and get that set into place. This filter is part of our redesign on the Multicoupler that is going to allow us to use the wideband UHF antenna near the top of the tower for the D-Star UHF receiver. The design work is finished and all we need to do is to get the filter up the hill and get it mounted. Of course we think that once that is done, all will be great, but you can wait right here for the news to see if that is the case or if we have to jump through hoops once again in order to get things the way we want them.

This news just in!! The replacement router is in place and operating. Bruce Sommer N8ODV got home a bit earlier than anticipated for the Christmas Holidays. He is an Over The Road (OTR) Truck Driver and got home a bit early for Christmas. What significance is this to WMPORN you ask? Well, Bruce is a good friend and happens to drive around in a Jeep Grand Cherokee when he is not driving the Frieghtliner, and he also is a night owl much like myself. If you have been reading along here you would already see the writing on the wall, or in the snow.. or whatever. Bruce packed me, a router, some tools and wires into his Jeep and drove it up that nasty hill and deposited me within 20 feet of the tower. The Cisco 4000 router that I grabbed to replace the failed 2600 is now in place. Dealing with the D-Star stuff is a first class pain though. For those that don't know me, I am a network and network services administrator. I find the poor practices that are currently used by the D-Star gateway network to be a real pain in the keister. I have to keep reminding myself that the software that is currently being use is in fact made by the Japanese Amateur Radio Relay League (JARRL) and was set up to follow the laws in Japan governing both ham radio and the use of the internet. That said, I continue to plug away.

The filters that we needed to complete the UHF system and get it operating at full potential has arrived. Now the concern is being able to get up the driveway to the tower site. This particular site is very trecherous during the winter months, and we hover like NASA over the Space Shuttle waiting for our window to launch. The night that I took the new rack and D-Star gateway computer up to the site I lost the engine in my van, partially due to that hill, partially due to the fact the van was old and tired. Unfortunately other things did not go well that night either. The Cisco router that I was intending to use for our network malfunctioned leaving us with just one functional port, unfortunately routers do not work well with only one port. Needless to say that with the weather we have been having the Grand Rapids area I have not yet been able (or willing) to try to go back up that hill. When the owner leaves his Jeep Grand Cherokee at the bottom of the hill and walks up, I don't figure I have a prayer of getting up that hill and going past his house with my car.