Author: Eugene

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Field Day 2012

What do you get when ham radio operators all over the country get on the air to contact as many people as they can in 24 hours? A madness filled event called Field Day.

Yesterday I participated in my very first amateur radio ARRL Field Day, and it was in a word, madness.

The Charleston Area Radio Society (CARS) held their Field Day event on board the USS Yorktown, where they had a few radio rigs set up for phone (voice), digital, satellite tracking and CW (Morse code) from the trailer.

WA4USN phone station
WA4USN digital/CW and satellite stations

The CARS Field Day activities were well organized. The madness was happening on the air, with everybody trying to contact everybody and making for just a chaotic jumble of overlapping voices on top of the static (at least to my noob ears). Most stations came in pretty loud and clear on the phone (voice) station, although a bunch more we were struggling to pick up out of the static.

I spent a most of my time at the phone station logging contacts and helping to decipher the contact info from the static so I didn’t get on the air. It’s a little bit intimidating at first with all the activity happening. It was pretty cool making contacts with other operators though. Managed to get people from Ontario and Saskatchewan, across the country in Los Angeles and even heard someone from Croatia. We spent a while trying to pick out his call sign from the static and trying to establish a contact, but I don’t think he was receiving us. Would have been a cool contact to make.

Operating at the phone station
Operating at the phone station

Had a really good time helping out with the Field Day events (I only smacked my head on a bulkhead once) and am looking forward to getting back to it today until it wraps up at 2PM this afternoon. I’ll probably even try operate the station and get on the air for a few hours.

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I can haz radio?

Now that I have my amateur radio license, I needed a radio to play with. After browsing a few catalogs, checking out some reviews and some websites, I settled on a Yaesu VX-8DR which arrived today.

It’s got a lot of buttons, a lot of capabilities and will take me a while to figure it out. It seems like a pretty decent radio that I’ll be able to grow into as I learn more about amateur radio. I’m looking forward to playing with it.

So far I’ve managed to catch some activity on one of the local repeaters. Just lurking for now learning how radio people talk and announce themselves.

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Galaxy S II + ICS

Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) on the Galaxy S II is nice, but I’m experiencing a few problems with lag, apps and phone hanging for no apparent reason. Wifi performance seems worse too. Since the ICS update, the wifi keeps dropping out on me in my office, which didn’t happen before. My office doesn’t get great wifi signal to begin with, but it’s like ICS isn’t as tolerant of low signal strength anymore.

I’ve already done a hard reset thinking maybe that would help. It’s also possible that the problem is with the apps that maybe haven’t quite caught up with code changes in ICS. Who knows.

Also, a somewhat subjective thing, but it seems like the graphics look better in ICS.

Will probably have more comments later as I use ICS more.

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Transformer Prime update

This seems to be a week for updates. A new firmware just rolled out for my Transformer Prime yesterday, that I just installed. Haven’t seen a changelog or anything, but most of the discussion in the XDA forum has been about improved (or not) wifi/BT and better (or not) performance. Face unlock has also made it to this version too. There’s also a new indicator for when the GPS extension is attached.

Will see how things are over the next few days.

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Hello Ice Cream Sandwich

The much awaited firmware update to Android 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich) made it to my phone today. Took about 30 minutes for the download, verifying, flashing and rebooting to get it installed and then another hour or so messing around redoing the screens that got reset to the default setup.

Phone seems to be running pretty well so far with out any issues. It was a bit glitchy at first, but a post-install reboot seems to have fixe most of the lagginess problems.

Even though I’ve mostly gotten used to ICS from using it on my Transformer Prime, it still took a little while to get used to it on my phone.

Was finally able to give wifi calling a try. Although I’ve had the phone for a few months now, it hardly ever gets used as a phone but I had a chance to try it out and use it with my BT handset. Worked out pretty well, although with the limited bandwidth of my slow DSL connection, there were a few times where voice got garbled. The sound quality seemed kind of more digitized, almost synthesized with wifi calling than it did when I switched off of wifi calling.

So far the only problem I’ve run into is that I seem to have lost the ability to get screenshots. The normal method of hitting the power + home buttons doesn’t seem to work anymore, although I’ve seen forum posts where people have said it should still work. Not sure what the problem is yet, but I hope it doesn’t require a hard reset to fix. I may do it anyway, just to give ICS a fresh start.

Update: Discovered that a short delay has been introduced to screenshots. Just need to hold the power + home buttons down for about a second before the screenshot is taken. Also learned that power + volume-down works for screenshots too, with a similar delay.