We’re in need of a good and stable database server at the club station PI4RCG to facilitate central logging. In two weeks we’ve a balloonfoxhunting thing coming up and there must be 3 operators able to log their QSO’s (80m, 2m and 70cm). Last weekend I ran into a Sun Cobalt RaQ550 server. A nifty little 19-inch server with a Pentium III, 1.26GHz, 2x80GB harddisks in RAID1, 512MB memory onboard. No video/sound so you need to switch on a serial line to be able to see the terminal. You can connect to the terminal with for instance puTTY with speed 115200 and 8N1. The original OS was not reachable because the owner forgot the passwords. Not a big problem because I want to run Debian Linux on it anyway. Since Google is your friend I went surfing around to find how to install Debian Lenny on a Sun Cobalt Raq550. There are some articles but most of it is out dated.
If you’re interested, please read on how I made it work.
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Tag: software
Filter cluster spots on region
Ham Radio Deluxe has a pretty cool feature where you can logon to a DX-cluster and the spots from the cluster are presented on a band scale just beside your logbook. This way you can see in one glans what stations are on the band. If you click on the call in the scale, your radio automatically tunes to that frequency and if you have your add-screen open, the call will be polled from QRZ.com.
Very handy indeed! But I missed out on something. Before I became using the telnetcluster option in HRD I always had DXwatch open to look for good DX-stations (and sometimes I still have to see the overall activity on the HF-bands). A really neath feature of DXwatch is you can filter on spotters. For instance: it’s not really handy to be informed about a contact between a amateur in the US and an amateur in Japan when you’re located in Europe (like I am). Little change I’ll be able to hear both/one of these stations. On the other hand: I would really want to know about all the qso’s between amateurs in my region (region 14) and anyone outside that region. On DXwatch you simply make a filter to only show spotters from region 14 and voila! You’ve a pretty good change to hear all the stations who are spotted!
I really missed that feature in HRD so I went asking around. Nobody really had a clue how to do this. One colleague-amateur advised me to install VE7CC-1 CC Cluster software. This program connects to the telnetcluster and HRD connects to the program. I’ve tried it, incredible complicated, didn’t make any sense to me, couldn’t even get it running. I think it’s a little overblown for only filter spotters.
Then I started to read about telnetcluster software. I know little to nothing about these services but maybe it is possible to fix something there. And what turned out? It’s possible! Just hit the [Show] button in the DX Cluster window in HRD Logbook when you’re logged in a telnetcluster and hit [Console]. Now you can enter commands to the cluster. Just enter: “accept/spots by_zone 14” and hit enter. Now this filter will be saved on that particular telnetcluster for you. If you login next time, the filter still wil be active. If you want to know what filter is in use, just enter: “sh/filter’ and hit enter. The cluster will tell you what filters are active.
Another great link is this one.
I hope I helped more amateurs out there with this, don’t think I’m the only newbie with telnet clusters. At least I didn’t found a lot of hints and tricks on Google…
Ham Radio Deluxe issues
More and more I become a happy HRD-user. I’m using HRD v5.0 build 2494 at the moment. One thing I absolutely love is the logbook functionality. When I’m DX-ing I want to add the QSO’s to my log asap with as much additional information as possible. Of course HRD already adds all data from the radio to the log but I also want all available QRZ.com information added. HRD is able to grab all available info from QRZ.com with different methods. It’s possible true WWW and true XML. True WWW is slow but free of charge, to use XML you need a subscription for the feed at QRZ.com. In my case it so bad if I hear a station I want to work, but the link to QRZ.com doesn’t work, I won’t grab the mike. Last weeks QRZ.com seems to have some problems with the WWW connections of HRD. So in a blink of an eye I bought a XML-subscription for a year! I can report: works flawlessly!
But the other day some weird bug pops up in my HRD: I use the alarm functionality in Logbook. I wanted to have all unworked DX-countries put in my alarms so I got a mail when a unworked DX-station is spotted on the telnetcluster. I bumped into a limitation of HRD: there is a maximum number of alarms you can define. I think it’s around 60 alarms or so. Okay, no problem: I started whit the A-calls and I have to delete the entries when I worked the countries before I can add new ones. Acceptable workaround! Last weekend I worked Cuba and Argentina for the first time. So I wanted to delete those from my alarms to add two new DX-countries. And now something weird happens. I deleted both countries, they are gone from the list. When I close the alarm list with the [Ok]-button and I open the list again, both entries are back! Same thing for changing the properties for each entries. When I save the entry and open it up again, gone is my change! At first I thought maybe it’s because I’ve reached the maximum number of entries (like a full harddisk) but when I wanted to delete some to check, they also don’t disappear.
I’ve signed up for the HRD forum to add this bug (or is it a feature ;-)) but I’m still waiting for moderation of my account before I can post. Hopefully this thing can be fixed…