July was an interesting month. I was able to do some work, but traveled to SSF for work the last week of the month. I took two HT’s along with me giving me Analog, P25 and DMR UHF capabilities. It was a good trip, but not a lot of time for playing around.
I was contacted by another ham preparing for a Boy Scout’s Radio Merit Badge session. He’d found me online and I was able to share the material that I had. Hopefully this will mean some new future hams joining the ranks down the road!
Finished what I hope is the final tweak to the IRC email server. It’s been challenging to find functional free solutions. We’ve done extensive testing on the latest server software, Axigen for those interested, and it seems to be able to meet the needs of the organization.
Updated the IRC’s website with a new repeater directory and make some corrections in the web page coding to correct a display anomaly.
Received a donated XPR8300 DMR repeater with a blown PA for a project. This repeater was put into place to front-end my EchoIRLP <-> DMR interface. With the implementation of this machine, the talk group can now be fully policed by the c-Bridge instead of it having the ability to stomp on TS1 of my Indy DMR repeater. Additionally, I still have one time slot for experimentation.
Speaking of the EchoIRLP <-> DMR interface, I received an email from a Washington State Ham regarding the now and how the interface was setup. I was able to share some information with him as well as some advice on how he can access my existing node.
I also finally figured out my cron issue with the EchoIRLP node…. I know have a cron job setup to connect the node to the Good Morning Net. The issue was I’d failed to establish required environment variables before my bash script was executed by cron. With help, I was able to identify the need for the environment and a little tweaking to the crontab and I was golden! Very nice to have this thing running!
Attended both days of the Indianapolis Hamfest. This was the first time it was two days for as long as I can remember. Ed, K3HTK and I, setup two vendor tables and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I’m not real sure if I came home with more stuff that I went with or not, but I did sell a few items.
While at the ham fest, I was contacted by a member of the Ham Fest Association to help them with an online web form for their online orders. I through together a simple example and plan to continue to work with them to get things functioning the way they need.
Experienced a power supply failure on the amp of my Indy DMR repeater. I expected this as the PS I was using was one of those small JetStream switching units. It’s since been swapped out with an Astron 35A continuous duty unit. The good news is that Ed (K3HTK) discovered a fried cap in the unit he pulled while I was out in SSF. After hearing his report, I checked another unit that I had and sure enough, a fried cap. So hopefully the unit I have can be repaired. Ed has already fixed the unit he pulled for me.
That’s it for July….. 73!
