Field Day 2009

Today has been a very long day.  In 94+ degree heat we managed to get four of our antennas for Field Day up.  A 160 Windom, an 80 Windom, a 40 M dipole and a fan dipole.

Tomorrow we will work on getting our 3 element beam up, a 40 M vertical and two 6M beams up.

Hopefully, Mother Nature will smile on us with comfortable weather for Field Day.  We have various city officials as well as the mayor attending.  Which we usually have.  It’s nice that the new mayor attends our event.  We would invite the previous mayor every year and he’d never show.

I will be taking my Kenwood TS-850 for my station along with the 160M windom.  I know 160 is dead but I can use it for every other band.

Hopefully I will talk to some of you on the air.  We are going to be W4CAR.

Hope you all have a safe and enjoyable Field Day weekend!

IBCNU APRS iPhone App has updated.

The IBCNU APRS iPhone app has finally been released by the Appstore.  After field day weekend I hope to sit down and check out the new gui interface and features and finally put out that review I have been promising.

Right now the new update isn’t connecting to the APRS servers.  Got to figure out what’s wrong there to play with it.

Field Day

Will be operating Field Day with Chesapeake Amateur Radio (W4CAR.ORG) at Deep Creek Locks Park.  Hope to meet some of you folks on the air!

I will be twittering during field day under @W4CAR.  I will also be checking out @KG4ZXK on there from time to time. I hope to get a lot of radio time in.  Being Field Day Chairman has disadvantages at times (LOL).

Hope everyone has a great FIELD DAY weekend!

IRLP 4865 Down…

Due to power surge the IRLP node is down until further notice.  I have to figure out what is bad on the computer and replace those items.

Way to go Steve Jobs!

For people that do not own an iPhone you have to use iTunes to sync music, etc to your phone.  The one thing that always ticked me off is you cannot make a ring tone from a CD that you own that you have loaded into iTunes to play on your phone.  So I never purchased any ringtones.

However, I was in the mood to try something different and I searched iTunes for ring tones to purchase.

I found 3 or 4 tones that I liked and I downloaded them.  After the sync I noticed they were not listed under ringtones but were listed as song titles.  That wasn’t going to work because who wants to listen to a 15 to 30 second song?  I searched for information and didn’t see anything.

So I right clicked on the titles and selected to convert to ringtone.  I noticed the box popping up saying .99 cents.  No other information was provided to me.  I made the assumption that you must have to go through this step to convert to a ringtone and that Apple already knew you purchased the song and would not be charged twice.

WRONG!

Apple charges you to download the ringtone as a song, then they turn around and charge you again to make it a ringtone.  I read on a site that Apple says they must do this because the record companies consider this a second purchase.

I thought we had the ability from old court rulings to make copies of medium we purchased for our own personal use.  For instance you have a record and you wanted to make a cassette tape to play in your car or walkman, etc.

Doesn’t the same rule apply here?  When you download the item you are being charged a fee.  Why be charged another fee to make it work as a ringtone on your iPhone?

Needless to say I am not going to go through this again.  I do believe I will be contacting my state’s Attorney General’s office about this matter.  This seems so deceptive and I did not see anything on iTunes that said this is what they would do.  There are no boxes saying you are going to be charged again, etc.

Steve Job’s has been such a SOB to people throughout his life I guess his cancer is karma paying him back.

Testing the Iphone APRS App, IBCNU

Well… It appears that Apple’s App store has not posted the newest update to this software for downloading as of this morning.

So as soon as Apple does and I’m able to play with the software I will post a review. If you go to iTunes you will see new screen shots for the update but not the software.

IRLP Node #4865 – Frequency Change

Node used to be on 145.600 MHz and has been relocated to 146.460 simplex.  The band plan lists 145.600 for experimental communications which the node was in the beginning.  Felt it was better to follow the intent of the band plan and move it to the new frequency.

Hopefully it will not be too long before it’s permanently located on 146.82 or 146.61 repeaters.

Node also does Echolink.  Node #: 319803

APRS for iPhone

Been playing with the iBCNU software for the iPhone for APRS communications.  There are some good uses for this that I can see.  I am holding off on a review for a few days because the author of the software informed me that he is sending an update for features, etc to iTunes and it should be up soon.  As soon as I’ve downloaded and play I will be doing a full review of the app here.  Stay tuned!

The software at this time will only communiate with amatuers accessing the APRS-IS backbone servers online.  It will not allow you to send a txt msg to someone that is on RF.  It will receive packets from an RF station gated to the net.  Confusing?  Hang on.  I will explain in more details when I do the review this upcoming week after new features.

Practical Amateur Radio Podcast

If you are looking for a decent ham radio podcast to listen to on your iPod/Phone or MP3 player go to MyAmateurRadio.com  It’s operated by Jerry, KD0BIK, and he has a very nice amateur radio podcast.  Go to iTunes to find past issues.  Has good information for folks looking to get into the hobby,

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

I hope all of you have a safe Memorial Day weekend.