Steamy on Tuesday 5/10/11

85F and 65% humidity so far today according to my weather station.
(Just think, 8 days ago we had snow flakes in the morning.)

I just opened up the radar and spotter network only to notice that the spotters are starting to pick their spots to watch the horizon. (All of the red dots are spotters connected to the spotter network.)

Rain on Monday 5/9/11

We had about .75" in the rain gauge on Monday

Ubuntu 10.10 --> 11.04 Upgrade

I downloaded the alt install CD for Ubuntu 11.04 so that I could run the media around my network to upgrade several machines vs. having each of them download the updates repeatedly. (This is the first time that have I tried this approach for the upgrade for Ubuntu.)

I ran into a weird error...

Could not calculate the upgrade

An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade:
The package 'update-manager-kde' is marked for removal but it is in the removal blacklist.

This can be caused by:
* Upgrading to a pre-release version of Ubuntu
* Running the current pre-release version of Ubuntu
* Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu

After a bit of searching it appears that moving the KDE Manager should resolve the problem.

sudo apt-get remove update-manager-kde

I am running the upgrade on the machine that threw that error right now. At first glance it appears that the step abovet has resolved the problem.

AA0ZZ Si570 Sig Gen

I finished the second portion of my AA0ZZ project that I started a few weeks ago.

http://www.kangaus.com/
http://cbjohn.com/aa0zz/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRR-xMAg7Ow

It worked right away which is always a nice feeling after assembling a kit. I like the project. My only criticisms are I wish that went lower than 10mhz and that they offered it with a case.

--I plan on putting it into an enclosure as it will be another tool for the workbench.

73 de NG0R

Gun Class

Jacob's final night of gun training. A little wet at the range.

Archery Time

Ben at the range in St Cloud.

Spring has arrived

Ben (10) and I went out for a little storm spotter drive tonight. Actually we drove to a nearby hilltop and took a few photos of lightning one county to our south. The photo is nothing special but it was the first photo of the night and it had a bolt in it. (I only shot three images before it started raining, 2 of the 3 had lightning in them.)

It was kind of an interesting shake down trip.

• The GPS + D700 are configured for APRS
• The APRS configuration is now posting my info to Spotternetwork.org
• My iPad2 is wifi tethered to my DroidX phone
• Radarscope is setup on my iPad and it can talk to the spotter network
• Ben learned how to use my iPad
• We are able to get good radar info on the iPad in the field
  
• We found a nice location to shoot lightning photos that has a good view looking to the NW-W-SW about 12 minutes away from the house
  

Overall it was a pretty nice spring evening.

73 de NG0R

Sunday Projects (Si570+PicEL III)

Today was a busy day around the NG0R QTH.  We picked up groceries, then put on the second coat of paint in the new office/shack. (It is looking pretty nice!)  Late this afternoon I finally got a chance to go visit the workbench. I had a box from KangaUS sitting there looking for some quality time.



Craig AA0ZZ released the latest module for his PicEL board. It is a Si570 daughter card. I had the good luck of seeing a prototype at Craig's home about a year ago. I ordered two daughter cards and one control board. (They were here 3-4 days after placing the order.) My plan is to have one daughter card on the PicEL III board and then to have one standalone control board+daughter card for use over at the workbench.

For this afternoon I decided to focus on assembling one of daughter cards before the dinner bell.



There are three surface mount parts: 2 voltage regulators and the Si570.



It takes about 30-45 minutes to put it together the first time as you read through the directions. The parts count is pretty low and there is plenty of space for the soldering iron.



I removed my 16F628 and dropped in the supplied 16F88 and programmed it without an issue. (On my Ubuntu workstation I have Windows XP running in a Virtualbox session and used the Pickit 2 loader with the PicEL III)

I took the PicEL III and Si570 daughter card back to the workbench and plugged it into my ancient oscilloscope and everything looked good. I then plugged the system into my spectrum analyzer. I noticed that the Si570 + FETs are harmonic rich but nothing that a simple lowpass or bandpass filter would not solve in a real world application.

I did notice that power level changes slightly over frequency. There is about 12dB difference at the low frequencies vs at the highest frequencies. (10MHz --> 157MHz)



Based upon my initial testing I am pretty impressed with the Si570 daughter card. I am looking forward to assembling the standalone control board and the additional daughter card in the up coming days.

I have three Si570 chips sitting on the shelf waiting for me to find some time to be able to figure out to write some code to make them do their thing. Craig's PicEL III + daughter card provides an excellent development platform to start working up some code prior to need to build my own standalone board for debugging some future projects.

http://cbjohn.com/aa0zz/index.html

http://www.kangaus.com/si570_project.htm

This was an enjoyable Sunday afternoon project.

73 de NG0R

Linux Backups

I have been looking for a good offsite backup tool/service that works with Linux. I see that a lot of people use Mozy or Carbonite. The challenge is that those tools do not support Linux.

While I have been hunting for service that does support Linux I have been using rsync and external USB drives. I was even planning to get a safety deposit box at a bank to store the extra drives and rotate them. (ummm... good plan but I have yet to make that visit to the bank.)

To make this even more complex I have a LOT of data and I have a relatively slow connection to the internet. (That is part of the joy of living in rural America.)

I read an interesting blog post today. There is a service called "CrashPlan" that provides your standard online/offsite backup. The interesting part is that they support Windows+Mac+Linux+Solaris.




I setup a free 30 day account today so that I can try out the service. If it works ok I will end up buying the family plan... aka: 2-10 computers and unlimited storage.

I downloaded the Linux client and installed it on my workstation running Ubuntu 10.10 64bit. You run the install script, answer a few questions, then you will need to reboot the computer, and after the couple of minutes that took to do the install you are in business.

It will backup local disk, external drives, and NAS.

I setup a subset of my home directory for a backup and excluded the crazy large portion of my NAS mount. It is running right now and will take a day or so to complete.

At first glance it looks like an ok service. It will run attended or unattended, it covers a several OS types, and they have a family plan. So far... I am interested and hope that this work out. I would like set this up on all of the PCs and laptops in the house.

Stay tuned!

To HDR or not

I am experimenting with HDR images. There is probably fine line in the middle and I have yet to find it.


The image above is standard image

The image below is the HDR image


The HDR image looks surreal and almost dream-like.  The challenge in this image is the fact the sky is completely blown out and creates a massive backlight.  From an artistic point of view I enjoy working with the HDR version of the image but from a journalistic point of view I prefer the raw image.

I have an old bias, having been a photojournalist much earlier in my professional life I believe that photos should largely be untouched other than maybe adjusting the brightness and contrast similar to what we used to do in our dark rooms.

If I can learn to dial in the HDR tools a bit more I would lean towards using an HDR version of this image.