Hi.
I don't use either product but a friend of mine does, and suggest this:
http://www.pixelmill.com/support/support_article.aspx?ArticleID=kb101770


Web site design these days has lots to do with good css template design. The html
is trivial. That can be done with anything but a text editor and a web browser.
The most difficult thing to do is the site template and the css. Once you have them,
adding or modifying  content ("pages") is only a matter of writing the text and
inserting the images, tables and similar objects.
Presentation and content should be well apart.

I'll be glad to help you in your site,  contact me at lu2dfm gmail if you want me to prototype
over the existing content as an example.

73 de Fer

My fault..., sorry. Thanks for the clarification.
Well, that would be ~ 15 * 15 meters, so my own backyard ground system is growing to similar dimensions, and I'm getting good results so far for such a minuscule ground for a vertical.

73 de Fer

Sorry Dan, 50 sq. foot or 50 square yards? Aren't 50 sq. foot ~ 5 m2 (sq. meters)?
73 de Fer

Congratulations.


You didn't specified that. Anyway, if you could not detect the change in velocity/direction from the GPS NEMEA sentences, then there's no point in transmitting them over because they will be essentially the same positions. If they are different, then the tracker's firmware could do the math AND filter the dups, which IMHO is more economic, portable and not relies in a mechanical interface.


About every little tracker out there have a test push-button or auxiliary input. It's not difficult for you to wire it to the brake switch.

Sorry, I didn't though that to drill a 3 or 5mm hole for a LED needed such mess.

73 de Fer

Check mods.uk. There was a mod to free tx/rx frequencies in those 5100/5200. If your's have the mods, then check them or undone them.

Now, whenever you reset the radio (I think it was a 3 key combo + power up) you have to set the limits. In this order (from the top of my head, check a manual):
- UHF lower rx freq.
- UHF upper rx freq.
- UHF lower tx freq.
- UHF upper tx freq.
- VHF lower rx freq.
- VHF upper rx freq.
- VHF lower tx freq.
- VHF upper tx freq.
Move the encoder (you can press MHz to speed up) to set the freq. and press D/MR. Repeat until all done.

I think the inital values after reset are 200 or 300 MHz for UHF, and 20 MHz for VHF, so at least that last is a coincidence. The receiver is not great far away up or down the band (indeed, the UHF receiver is not great even in band) and check that the tx limits are in-band.

73 de Fer

Pretty much the same could be achieved by setting the tracker to transmit whenever acceleration is detected (that's a change in velocity, or in direction). This is trivial to implement in code and several AVL trackers has a  setting for controlling that feature. And you need not to touch your car's electrical system.

As for the LED, well, you can remove or lever up one leg of the internal one and install a remote led outside.

73 de Fer

Then you missed the very first result in Google for "pic beacon controller":
http://www.dxzone.com/cgi-bin/dir/jump2.cgi?ID=12231

The VA3GRR code is very easy to customize:
http://planetstephanie.net/radio-stuff/beacon/

73 de Fer

Peter, thanks a lot for your help.
Ian kindly sent me the manuals over the mail, I'm expecting to get them next week.
I will get the receiver next week finally, as I was unable to spare time off work during the past weeks to go for it.

The receiver was traded for a VHF base. It's hard to know what would worth around here, but since it's non-functional the actual value would be somewhat down. A good VHF used radio is about us$300 here, so perhaps I've ended taking it a little high. However the receiver is in good shape, and will provide fun for some time (until it works fine then I'll be bored again).

Anyway, it came with the additional pleasure of contacting very nice fellow amateurs, which prove that there are friendly and kind people ready to help a complete strange, risking be fooled. For this alone it's worth putting it bottom up on the bench.

73 de Fer

Well, thank you very much for your time and effort.
I will contact Ian about the manual.  Hope this week I'll take the time to go see the receiver.

73 de Fer

Then I will assume that the R408 meets them...

Fabulous, this will guarantee lots of fun!

Did you remember anything else? Double or triple conversion (lots of birdies, I would think triple), IF bandwidths in CW/SSB, how did they sounded? Did you remember if they had custom made semiconductors or other unobtainum?

Thanks for your comment.
73 de Fer

Hi.
I've been offered a R408 receiver with some unknown problem to restore. The receiver is in good general condition, and reportedly complete.

Some early transistorized receivers where not so very good, however I'm told that this Redifone was an standard ship receiver around late '60s and early '70s, almost ubiquitous in the sea with the Marconi ones. Frankly speaking, it's difficult to reconcile that statement with the complete lack of information about them in the Internet.
The receiver may be of interest anyway because of it's non-conventional mechanical design and it's aesthetics.

Well, I'm looking for the service manual (I've suppose that there was some service manual), the schematic diagram, and informed opinions about performance of this receiver.

Many thanks in advance,
73 de Fer

... you're generalizing again: there are no ArgentinianS, it's just me.

If you're trying to install Xastir for windows, you don't need any tar.gz tarball: you need the windows binary installer, and a short document conveniently titled "Installation notes", both of which can be obtained by pointing your browser to:
http://www.xastir.org/wiki/Downloads#WINDOWS

Also, the Xastir community provides a very good bootable-media only distribution, essentially in the form of an image that you put in a CD and boot your machine from there directly to Xastir, so no installation is required.

Of course, the windows installer or the LiveCD address the installation process, but not the configuration one. To be able to correctly configure the software you need to understand APRS.
Read the APRS specification, then go read the complete Xastir wiki, and at the end you will get an idea of what your configuration should do and how to set it up.

What you evidently don't get is the fact that whatever "user friendly" the software is, you need to know what are you doing.

I'm not an UIView user, but judging for the number of stations that run it and are visible in aprs.fi, I would say that it must work.

Exactly. Your "suggestion" contains a degrading statement over people who code for a life. This phrase alone made your post irrelevant. It's like entering the mechanic shop asking for help starting your car and calling the guy "grease monkey".

Besides that, because your post lack any piece of specific or useful information to help us work out your problem, I'm almost sure you have encountered *one* problem in *one* platform (or perhaps one *computer*) and generalized it over the APRS system and all related software. Five posts later, we're as uninformed as were after your first post because you're incapable of writing a problem description or even an informed or educated statement of the potential areas where improvement is needed or possible.

Agree. For example, hams who don't have a clue about APRS and enter a forum asking "code monkeys" to write code to simplify complex settings to get an APRS station up so lazy people who don't want to take the time and effort to learn how to configure the system can do it in five minutes hitting ENTER over each dialog.

For you there in the US is exactly the same thing as for every other person in the rest of the world: it's called the Internet. You can download and install the same software as any other ham in the planet. And as I've proved in my previous post that this statement is NOT true. Perhaps *some* software that yon didn't specified is cumbersome but this is simply not the case for all software. For example, Xastir has a very active community, good documentation and even an step-by-step guide in the wiki for setting up it. People here who's native language is NOT English and that is not particularly savvy in computers have installed and configured Xastir in half and hour including the radio interface.

The problem you apparently cannot understand is that APRS is a somewhat complex system, and you have to *know* what you want before putting your fingers over the keyboard. It's very clear that you don't want to take the time to learn and to make the effort to understand the system. Instead you've preferred to complain about an unspecified software for lack of "modern" characteristics you failed to provide because you don't really used any part of your brain to conceptualize what your freaking problem is. As you did not provided any useful information, I'm free to infer that a PEBKAC. And this is  the most reasonable hypothesis based on the information available up to this point.

Whatever your friends like to call themselves, that's *not* a polite way to treat people you're *not* friend with, particularly if you want to criticize they work in a general and uninformed manner, asking them to work for you for *free*. Of course this  kind of subtlety is beyond your intelligence and education.

LU2DFM

I'm a programmer so thank you very much for this denigrating reference.

Lots of us are programmers and are interested in APRS.

I will work out any issues you have for $40/hour in any source tree you give me or is freely available on the 'net.

Besides that, Xastir, aprsd and the ax25 subsystem works very good in my *up to date* Debian systems. Since these systems are newer than yours, your statement is basically wrong.

http://aprs.fi works very reliably in every browser I've used (which includes almost every modern browser out there in five or six different platforms, including some mobile ones).

Yes, a very stupid and not an useful one.

If you had issues with _some_ software in _one_ computer, please contact the developers/vendors of *that* package instead of generalizing your problem to APRS, or all APRS related software.
If you had problems with win7, please contact your computer OEM vendor or Microsoft.

If you had tested every APRS related program out there on win7 and concluded that no one of them really works for you, please post a list with version numbers and a detailed description of the problem you've encountered in each case, so we can test ourselves and try to reproduce the problems you've found, an perhaps provide some help.

LU2DFM

Hi. Glad to hear that partially your problem is now resolved.

There are several methods to control the rig from fldigi. In my experience, both rigcat and hamlib have several issues with the Omni VII but at the very least the hamlib Omni VII TT-588 should be compiled in if you're using windows, or available (linked) from you system if you're on Unix/Linux. With that version I'm able to control the VFO through the serial (RS-232) port.

However, as I indicated, the best way to control the TT-588 is through flrig:
http://www.w1hkj.com/flrig-help/index.html
Go there and download flrig and make it work with the rig. Once you can control the radio with flrig, fire up fldigi, deactivate every other option in the rig control configuration, and activate xmlrpc.

You'll need both programs running for full interaction,  for me it's useful to have the full set provided by flrig at hand. You can hide/minimize it an use the limited (freq, mode, BW) subset on fldigi.

Hope that helps.
73 de Fer