Tjilpi

The Man Said: Give This a Go

This morning I was reading an article called "The Ins and Outs of a Sound Card". The article originally appeared in a well known Ham Radio publication called QST, in October 2003. 

Computer sound cards are a very important part of my new hobby: learning about a digital code, which is sent by radio from computer to computer, using a technique called Phase Shift Keying, or PSK.

For the past week I have been listening to the high pitched warble of PSK transmissions, and I have been able to "see" the transmissions as vertical yellow lines falling, waterfall like, down the blue screen seen above. There are two vertical yellow "lines" visible.

At the very top left of the screen shot is my ham call sign: VK8KMD.  Below that are some gray control buttons and below that in the larger white area there is some text which looks quite garbled, but which makes a good deal of sense once you know how to read it! 

Tonight, I heard a strong signal and saw the callsign, BV100 arrive several times.  Now BV100 is an unusual call sign, but the signal was so strong that I decided it was time to follow the advice of the man who wrote the article on Sound Cards.

As yet I haven't wired the sound card in my computer to my ham radio transmitter; but I have hooked the ham radio receiver to the computer sound card so I have been able to see and hear incoming signals for some days, but I have not sent any.

The smaller white box, underneath the scrambled text, is where text to be transmitted is typed.  There is nothing in that box, as I managed to "clear" it by hitting the wrong control button before taking the screen shot. However, I did type my call sign several times before clicking my mouse on the small box labelled TX, for Transmit.

Imagine my surprise and the thrill I got when I saw my call sign appear in the upper white box.  It was acknowledgement from BV100 that I had been heard.  On the 6th and 7th lines you can see GREETING TO . STRALIA.

PSK is a like that. It requires the granting of a certain degree of latitude, combined with a fair helping of magnanimity of spirit!

The 4th line is my transmission saying NICE TO MEET YOU. SRI OM I HAVE NO INTERFACE. USING MIC ON TX HELD TO COMPUTER SPEAKER.

SRI OM is ham talk for "sorry old man"! "MIC" is the accepted way of spelling what I pronounce as "Mike".

After our short exchange I looked for BV100 on the Web and found out that I had been talking to Taiwan.  BV100 is a special station set up to celebrate Taiwan's Centennial! There is more information about that here: Taiwan Centennial

The person who was operating the BV100 station and sending me PSK messages was Yohn Wang whose personal call sign is BX5AF.  You can see that in the 5th line.

I am very glad I followed the advice of the man who writes about Sound Cards.

He said: Give this a go.

I did.

It worked.

Man on a Mission

A while back I bought a new baby computer as I thought I was going travelling.  The baby computer is only 26 cms wide or 10¼" in the old money.  At the same time I bought a prepaid wireless modem so that I could connect to the internet while travelling.  By travelling, I mean the kind of journey one has to make when one lives in the middle of a continent where most high-tech services are located on the coast. The picture I had in mind was of myself travelling to a hospital in the big smoke to have some kind of surgery on one of the few conditions this gray bearded tjilpi has acquired.  I wasn't sure which condition I was going to opt for being treated first but I thought something would had to be done. I envisioned myself painfully, but paradoxically comfortably ensconced in a hospital bed, in the big smoke, with my internet access intact, even if my dignity weren't.  Have you tried wearing a hospital gown lately? I mean one of those which do up at the back and inevitably leave a wide open gap?

So, with thoughts of gaps in the back of gowns hovering incessantly, I decided I didn't need to go travelling to faraway hospitals and instead I would stay at home, as I have a few missions to undertake right here.

Not going to hospital means that I can concentrate on the important things in life - such as getting my ham radio hooked up to a computer and my baby computer hooked to the internet via landline rather than via its prepaid modem.  I want to have a go at communicating with other hams using PSK31.  PSK31 is short for Phase Shift Keying at 31 Baud.  Don't worry - I didn't know that either, until the middle of last week.  PSK31 became my obsession last Wednesday night when  I stayed up all night after downloading some free software and got to watch typing inch its way across my computer screen after it had been sent through the ether by hams from all four corners of the globe.  PSK31 is a bit like radio teletype of yore.  Telegrams used to be sent that way when I was a kid. 

I can hear somebody saying: It's easy to download typing from the Internet - what's so exciting about PSK31? Well, a simple answer is that it's the kind of thing which allows one to understand a little more about how it is possible to download typing from the internet.  Using PSK31 is something like catching an email out of thin air, and then being able to reply to the person who sent it. So there!

In the photo [above, on the left] baby is sitting precariously atop a cassette radio CD player. I have written about that set before, and yes, I have yet to install the new rubber bands on its tape deck.  Hey, even if I am not working at present, there still isn't enough time in a single day to get everything done which needs doing.  That's why I have to pull all-nighters just to keep up with myself.

The immediate mission with baby was to stop using the credit on its prepaid modem and swap to using the excess internet capacity I have on the landline. My desktop/laptop connects to the internet via the phone line and Teltstra allows me 12 Gigs per month internet access on that. I only ever use about 6 Gigs of the 12 Gigs so I figured that baby should be using up the spare 6. They will only end up in the bit bucket at Telstra if I don't use them.  Imagine, I said to my self: "Self, imagine what it would be like if you got baby to stream music from the internet and put its output through the same amplifier you use to amplify signals from records on the turntable.  Now that you have the turntable firmly wired up to the amp, wouldn't it be nifty to add another source of music?  It wouldn't be a clash of technologies: just an apposition of the old and the new."

So I got my self to work, and after about 48 hours of fiddling with the mysteries of WiFi networking, I managed to get baby to talk to the desktop/laptop and the desktop/laptop to talk to the internet on baby's behalf. From baby's point of view, baby is talking directly to the internet and now brings me the latest technology in getting ones choice of music into the house.  I simply grab free stuff off the web from a place called Grooveshark. If I want to listen to Slim Dusty, I type 'Slim Dusty'. If I want to listen to Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor, op 85 played by Jacqueline Du Pre, I type that. Baby finds the music and streams it into the amp.

No longer do I need bits of musical "stuff" in the house - you know, the kinds of things which need sorting, cleaning and general molly-coddling.  Gone are the days of fussing with records, record sleeves and covers, tapes and breakages, CDs with their fiddly containers and scratchable surface. 

I learned a lot by setting up the WiFi network myself. And I saved a packet as well. Salesmen were pointing me in the direction of $600 worth of wireless adapters and wireless modem routers to do what I finally ended up doing without any add-ons. I was so happy when I got my wireless network going at 2 am I just had to turn up the volume on the amp.  Elgar at 2 am can be very striking.  I hope I didn't disturb the dog next door too much.

This morning I took things one step further.  Baby came to bed with me last night, and this morning I was able to watch Doc Martin streaming in on TV from the ABCs iView.  I like watching Doc Martin.  I think I need to adopt more of his attitude.  Although he doesn't give me the impression that he would have any interest in PSK31 or streaming music and TV into the bedroom.  Maybe he would be less grumpy if he were on a mission too!

It's only temporary

My father told me that Ernie, my maternal grandfather, was fond of building small structures or making alterations around the house and then saying: "It's only temporary."  And twenty years later it was still temporary.

So, with that in mind, I'll have to do something definitive about the temporary arrangement I made on Sunday morning. 

After my father died my daughter Julia put dibs on his Pioneer PL 335 turntable which eventually found its way from Maryborough in Queensland to my house here in Central Australia.  Some years ago Julia was involved in obtaining a 1982 model Sharp Optonica Stereo Amp, which came her way via the parents of one of her friends.  All the parents asked for in return for the Stereo Amp, was that I convert five of their vinyl records into CDs. 

That job has yet to be done.  There has been a temporary delay.

My father's turntable, with wires covering the lid,  is in the photo above.  The Stereo Amp is also partly seen on the left under the watchful eyes of Tin Tin and Snowy. [Click on the photo to enlarge it.]

Saturday night was the time for me to make an 'interconnect', as we audiophiles say, between the turntable and the Stereo Amp.  On the right is a photo of a German 8 Pin DIN plug of the type which came with the Stereo Amp. Its role is to plug into the rear of the Amp in order to connect a turntable. However, the cable attached to the DIN plug I have, has been cut and there is no connector at the cut end.  How the cable was connected to its original turntable I will never know, but I did open the outer covering of the cable to find that it contains 7 wires.  

Below on the left is a photo of two RCA plugs of the type coming from my father's turntable. Each RCA plug houses two wires and there is also a fifth wire to connect the earth of the turntable to the earth of the Stereo Amp.

My immediate problem was: How do I connect the 5 wires from the turntable to the 7 wires going into the Amp?

In search of information, I joined an audiophile forum on the Web, and by doing so gained immediate cachet as an Audiophile myself. That accounts for the way I am now able to speak so authoritatively on this subject. It was on the forum that I learned that the correct terminology for what I was doing was making an 'interconnect' and not simply making a connection.  However, I was not able to find anything to help me work out how to connect 5 wires to 7; but by 2 am, after a lot of Googling,  I had come up with what I thought were 'the goods' and decided to leave making the interconnect until Sunday morning.

For non-audiophiles, I think I should expand a little on the subject at hand.  The trouble with a turntable is that it will turn records, but it won't 'play' them.  Modern record players are nothing like the coiled-spring driven gramophones of my childhood. Those could be wound up by turning a crank handle. Pure mechanical motion generated the sound of music.  Not a single electronic component could be found in something like the Victrola shown on the right.  My grandparents had two such portable gramophones which I began playing with at the age of eight.  It was magic to sit on the front verandah of their house, playing old 78s, while pretending to imitate the dog who never tired of listening to "His Masters Voice".

Around a month ago I took my father's turntable from its storage spot and discovered that the rubber belt which drives the turntable had perished.  I found a source of replacement belts in the US. Two belts cost me less than the price of the postage to get them here! After fitting a new belt it was time to see what electronic trickery was needed to get the turntable to produce music.

By way of background information, I'll let you know that around the time I was courting Julia's mother I was building my first stereo amplifier from a kit.  It was a Playmaster 60/60.  One part of building that stereo amp involved constructing a Phono Pre Amp.  I never used the Phono Pre Amp on the now defunct Playmaster 60/60.  The reason for that was that I had eschewed all vinyl, and had transitioned my allegience to an all cassette music collection.  A Phono Pre Amp is only required to amplify the tiny electrical voltages generated by the diamond stylus vibrating in the grooves cut in the vinyl of a record on a phonograph.  A view of vinyl grooves, magnified 1,000 times is on the left. The stylus is attached to a thin piece of metal called a cantilever which in turns moves a tiny magnet inside a field of coils. The movement of the magnet within the coils only generates a few thousandths of a volt.

Consequently this tiny voltage needs to be amplified to be useful.  Amplification is a tricky business.  The aim is to go slowly, adding a little bit at a time. If there is too much amplification at the beginning of a cascade of amplifiers, distortion can set in and mess up ones listening pleasure. 

My father's last stereo amplifier didn't have a Phono Pre Amp.  He wanted something which would play CDs, casette tapes and the radio, and ended up with a space age looking 'ghetto blaster' sans Phono Pre Amp.  He bought a Pre Amp separately.  It came in a plastic box with the right connections to allow him to connect the turntable to the space age boom-box ghetto-blaster and so allow him to listen to his extensvie vinyl collection. That 'set up' worked quite well.  Fortunately for me the Stereo Amp I now have has a built in Phono Pre Amp, just as my Playmaster 60/60 did.  But unfortunately for me I had to work out how to make an interconnect between different breeds of connector. Saturday nights research gave me some hope. However, I still felt I was entering tiger country by trying to connect the 5 wires from the turntable to the 7 wires from the DIN cable.  On Saturday night I had studied as many schematics as I could find on theWeb. I've put one example on the right. 

Even after I thought I knew what was going on, I wasn't absolutely sure that I could make the 'interconnect' work. I took some comfort knowing that if I did get electrocuted, it would be with only a few thousandths of a volt. After a lot of fiddling, I found that a couple of wires from the end of the 7 wire cable seemed to be redundant and so I left them waving in the breeze. I found the correct 5 wires out of the 7 available purely by chance,  combined with a little knowledge. The interconnect works.

On the left is a close up of the temporary connections I made from the two RCA plugs to the bare wire ends of most of the wires from the DIN Plug cable.  [Click to see the exquisite detail.]

Last Christmas Julia gave me a vinyl copy of Chris Rea's On The Beach. I had listened to the cassette tape of the same albumn over and over when putting the Playmaster 60/60 together. Each channel of a stereo amp is usually physically and electrically separate from its mate, and apart from the fact that I liked Chris Rea's music, each channel of the Playmaster 60/60 needed to be aligned with the other so that each channel would emit the same volume when the single volume knob on the front of the amp case was rotated. For some reason that exercise seemed to take me forever, and On the Beach was played repeatedly as I tweaked variable resistors adjusting the current flow in the right and left channels.  On Sunday morning it was a great thrill to hear that same music coming from the vinyl record Julia had given me, as it rotated on my father's turntable.

But now I have to deal with the 'ownership' of the Stereo Amp. Now that I have a means of playing vinyl records I'll have to do something about the five records which came with the Stereo Amp.  They still need to be converted into CDs for the original owners, the parents of Julia's friend. 

And that means that I'll have to do something about my temporary arrangement.  The green, white, and red alligator clips are sitting on top of the lid of the the turntable.  If I open the lid to put on a new record, the interconnect falls apart, and needs to be put back together.

So a permanent interconnect is required, before the whole thing sits there for too long being temporary.

Tjilpi's Alter Ego

My friend Willie asked me why the photo you see on the far left, in the sidebar, isn't larger.

I told him that everything on a blog takes time and I hadn't had time to work out why it isn't larger, or how to make it larger. I think the TypePad blog software trims down photos which it considers to be too large for the sidebar.

However, I know that TypePad will let me put larger photos in a blog post, so I've put the photo in this post until I can work out how to make the sidebar image larger.  Tricky eh?

If you click on the photo it should get even larger. The photo was taken in my backyard and is a of a perentie -  Varanus giganteus. Do you see the resemblance to Varanus varanus - the Komodo dragon?

Vinyl, Tape and CD

Never sort your CD collection. 

I discussed this problem with the woman on the check-out at Coles Supermarket last night when I went there to buy 20 Jewel Cases. I had just finished sorting my CD collection and came up with about 20 CDs without cases, and 4 or 5 cases without CDs.  She said it happens all the time.

But, in the immortal words of Julius Sumner Miller, "Why is it so?"

I moved into my little house in November 2003. So, that must make it eight years since I've even thought of sorting my CD collection. Prior to moving here, my music collection had been in a storage shed for a number of years, although I did carry some of my favourite CDs around in one of those carry cases which seem to be designed to allow one to take ones whole collection, sans cases, to a party.

"Hey, listen to this!"

I reckon those carry-cases were designed to make one as popular as the host of a slide night showing 'our latest holiday snaps'.

Last Christmas my daughter Julia gave me the vinyl record of Chris Rea's On The Beach to go with the tape I bought more than 23 years ago, before she was born, and to match the CD I had bought later. There must be something left of the hunter and gatherer in this old tjilpi, for I was pleased to have a complete "set" of  vinyl, tape and CD.  It meant I could put the same music on three times in a row and pretend it was different.  It was something like the slide show host: "Here we are at the beach, and on this slide there is more of the beach, and here is some more looking in a different direction. You just wouldn't know how good it was to be there."

I like the way some people tell you how "you wouldn't know" or, even better, "you wouldn't understand" how good some things are, or were.

Last night I discovered that my "complete set" of vinyl, tape and CD has a serious flaw. The crystal case of the CD has gone AWOL. My collection is broken. I'm heartbroken. Of course you wouldn't understand what that means to me.  The check-out lady suggested I look in the car for the missing parts - she said that is where she finds a lot of her CDs. But, that's not going to work for me. In the car, I've only ever had 3 burned copies of music which isn't missing.

The CD case had the same cover as the tape and record covers, so I've got as consolation the two remaining beach umbrellas, blue skies and white clouds.

On a postive note I found I have two copies of Santana's Abraxas, and two copies of Tom Waits' The Heart of Saturday Night. One copy of each is, of course, without a case. I guess I'll never work out where the extra CDs came from. On the other hand I can explain the multiple double ups of the works of Beethoven and Mozart which are all neatly arranged in cases. I reckon I simply forgot what I already had in my collection, and snapped up what looked like bargains in the "Record Shop".

Isn't she lovely, Isn't she wonderful, Isn't she precious

She arrived by Registered Mail on Thursday - but I waited until Friday to open the bundle the Stork brought me. There was work to do making the usual changes to things. Her power supply needed new connectors fitted and the DC power cord had to be properly terminated with lugs to fit the new connectors. Then there was getting her gounded.  I had to buy a copper clad steel rod and drive that into the ground just outside the nursery so that an earth wire could be taken via yet another hole in the wall at the right hand end of the desk.

I'm not complaining.  My first contact was Joel on Guam, followed by a short contact with Huang in Guang Zhou, China. Then I spoke to two men in France, and a bloke on King Island off Tassie.  I got to use both antennas I have in place at the moment. I am very happy with the new addition to my little family. She is the fourth HF Transceiver I have - when I count the Barrett 550 in the Landy, the old Lunch Box Codan 6924 Flying Doctor Radio, along with the Kenwood Tango Sugar 140 Sugar rig I have had for years. It must be time for a lawn sale!

It's amazing how technology has reduced the size of almost everything.  When I was a lad my first Ham Radio contact was made using radio gear which took up a whole wall.  I still remember saying hello to a bloke called Fred in New Mexico - I vaguely knew where that was at the time - I was able to tell by Fred's accent. I am also vaguely aware of where Guang Zhou is.  It's the place where Chinese people can afford to buy Ham Radios and can speak more English than I can speak Chinese.

But just look a this baby. She's hardly noticeable on the desk. I'm sure people will ask me what model iPod she is!

The Urangan Jetty

I wrote this blog post in 2005.  I can't find the photo I published then and have cribbed a little with a photo of a pelican in the foreground and the Urangan Jetty mid-distance on the right. Mum was born 93 years ago today.

 

During my recent trip home to Maryborough to visit my parents, Mum and I decided to 'go down the bay'.

The bay in question is Hervey Bay - named by Captain James Cook in 1770 - when he moored the Endeavour in the shallow waters inside Fraser Island - and sent a boat ashore for fresh water. The bay was named after Cook's cabin boy - Hervey. In the old measure the Bay is about 25 miles from Maryborough.

I lived at Hervey's Bay from age two to eight. For four years we lived at Urangan n Elizabeth Street , before moving to Torquay, another part of Hervey Bay, to live in Freshwater Street.

Mum and I found a park bench, which gave us a view of the Urangan  Jetty, and which also served as our table for fish and chips. Our bench was under the casuarinas just to the left of the beginning of the Pier. The Urangan Jetty is sometimes called the Urangan Pier; but by either name it has been there a long time.

When I was a kid railway lines ran to the end of the jetty where there was a large galvanized iron shed. Sea going ships would berth there to discharge oil or take on sugar from freight trains which came down from Maryborough. Mum told me that when she was a girl she would often get on a passenger train in Maryborough which brought her directly to the Urangan Jetty. She would swim and play around the pylons where the water laps the sandy shore. The train passenger service had ceased when I was growing up, but freight trains continued to meet the ships coming in. I distinctly remember one ship in the early 1950s, which had a Japanese crew, who came onshore and played a game I had never seen before - baseball.

Mum favours whiting. It is about the only fish she will eat. At the Fish & Chip Shop I was able to pick out some fresh fillets to be crumbed and then deep fried. We also had potato chips and tartare sauce. Mum had a lemon squash and I managed a couple of light beers. We both agreed that our fish was probably the freshest and most delicate whiting that either of us had ever had from a Fish & Chip Shop. Of course, nothing compares to Mum's home cooked whiting and chips.

From our seat we were able to watch pelicans, gulls and terns fishing in a somewhat desultory manner. The best entertainment was provided by a lone gannet who performed dramatic stall-turns before plunging vertically into the sea, seeming to drown, but then reemerge after 5 or 10 seconds, alive and well.

Mum explained that, as a girl, she often came to the Urangan Jetty with the Demaine family. She was brought along as company for Joan, granddaughter of the atheistic socialist Mayor of Maryborough, William Demaine. He was universally known as Billy, and Mum told me that he would never stand while "God Save the King" was being played at the beginning of the movies. I knew that he had been part of the Paraguayan Experiment. After the 1892 Queensland shearers' strike, a socialist utopian movement called New Australia gained momentum, and some 500 members headed off for Paraguay with the intention of establishing a collective socialist settlement. New Australia, as the settlement was called, was riven by internal conflict and failed. I understand that descendents of some of the experimenters can be found in Paraguay to this day, but many settlers, including Billy Demaine, returned home. He became Mayor of a town whose thriving economy was based on timber and engineering and when he died his funeral was held at the Trades Hall.

Mum and I began to talk about what we had seen in earlier times when looking out over the calm waters of Hervey Bay which is protected by the breakwater of 90 mile long Fraser Island. At Inskip Point, which is at the lower end of Fraser Island and Hervey Bay, there is a small channel allowing access to the calm waters of Hervey Bay. Cook did not venture through that channel, but went to the north end of Fraser Island before taking the Endeavour south west into the waters of Wide Bay and then Hervey Bay to the south. The Inskip Point channel had been safely used by humpbacked whales for generations.

Mum and I agreed that some of the 'black' things we had both seen in Hervey Bay, in the past, in the distance, must have been whales. Today, the Bay is a centre for seaside tourism and whale watching. When our family lived there in the early 1950s we never talked of whales for we didn't understand that there were a few of them there. A whaling station at Byron Bay, a long way south of Hervey Bay, took care of most of the whales which had normally came into the waters of Hervey Bay to calve. Mum and I had both seen breeching whales, but we did not know what to make of the phenomenon at the time. It was only after the whaling station at Byron Bay was closed that whales became recognized once more in Hervey Bay.

Shared memories on a park bench with a fine view on a beautiful day, make some places, no matter how humble, very special.