Michael’s Blog

27 Whiting (1 already is filleted)

I’m recently been reading Charles Simonyi’s blogs. Charles is the original author of Microsoft Word and Excel who recently, through Space Adventures, Ltd., flew to and is living aboard the International Space Station for several days. Charles Simonyi is also know to us amateur radio operators as the voice behind the callsign of KE7KDP, and will be speaking to people back on the ground via amateur radio as part of the ARISS program.

Visit Charles’ well constructed media-rich website at http://www.charlesinspace.com. Where is Charles right now you might ask? Well, earlier today, while digging through some old code I re-discovered a little project of mine from a couple years back. Using predict, xplanet, and a slightly modified earthtrack client that comes with predict, I’m able to display the current position of the ISS over the earth.
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I found a Maxon 4150M commercial VHF radio at a local hamfest the other week for $40. At this price, I figured I had nothing to loose. It has 40 watts out, 16 channels, and PL/CTCSS tones.
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Last week I attended an advanced skywarn training (actually it was a combination of the 2 sessions) hosted by the South Texas Amateur Radio Club (STARC). (more…)

I’m running this entire site, including MySQL 4.1, PHP, Apache2, Word Press and everything else that comes with Cent OS 4.2 (RHEL clone) under a virtualized Linux machine. I’ve set up name-based vhosts for it for aggiegeeks.com, aggiegeeks.org, kc5cqm.org, and mswindustries.us. This concept is truly awesome! Finally, hosting the way I want it. The most amazing part is this whole virtual Linux machine is costing me a meager $8/month!!!

It looks like the hurricane traffic nets are in full swing. 3.873 MHz (night) / 7.285 MHz (day) are the frequencies for emergency/priority traffic, and 3.935 MHz (night) / 7.290 (day) MHz are the health and welfare traffic nets. I’m hearing net control in San Antonio well on 3.873 MHz. The main reason I’m listening is in case I can hear a caller and Net Control cannot. HF propagation is funky like that. If needed, I can relay messages to Net Control.

Net control is NS5D - Shane

I will transcribe what I hear as comments to this blog posting.