So, I tend to fail when it comes to having proper HF antennas. I’m always in a residential situation where it’s a problem, whether it be laws or landlords or housemates. I tend to throw up any old piece of wire and hope for the best. This doesn’t tend to work well, particularly on the low bands.

Recently, I picked up the Miracle Whip antenna from Miracle Antennas. There are two schools of thought about this antenna:

1. “It’s a miracle!”
2. “It’s a miracle you’ll be heard a mile away.”

The portable antenna is a nice match for a portable rig like the Yaesu FT857.

Amateur Station N2MCS

I wasn’t expecting much from this antenna, but a few weeks ago I checked into ECARS with 25W SSB from my backyard. But tonight, I was heard in Boston by a SWL with an indoor loop. I was running 10W CW, with the antenna indoors as well!
N2MCS calling CQ, recorded near Boston, MA

Now I have a real reason to improve my CW, it works wonders!

So a number of local Syracuse hackers, geeks, etc., are trying to start a hackerspace here in Syracuse. In short, “hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects”. (from HackerspaceWiki.)

We’ve had extensive discussions via our mailing list, and a couple informal meetings.

After reports of great success from Buffalo Lab and Interlock Rochester, we’ve sunk to a new low and hired the services of meetup.com to get the word out.

Tonight is our first “meetup“, at 6:00 pm EDT at Clark’s Ale House.

If you are interested in having a community-operated, collaborative space for hackers, makers, electronic artists and the like in Syracuse, we’d really like your participation. If you can’t make it, join the meetup.com group, or better subscribe to the mailing list and introduce yourself.

So far, we have a couple software people, a hardware person, one who exists in both spaces (that would be me, plus I’m an RF junkie), and others who are basically interested in anything technology.

I recently signed up with Evernote to manage to amount of information I deal with at work and at home, and I’m planning on moving my GTD system into it.

Ruud Hein seems to have a great primer on how to do this.

EDIT: I have since moved my GTD lists to The Todo.txt Command Line Interface (CLI).

Here’s a little Perl script I threw together to fetch the latest Bogon list from cymru.com and generate a Cisco IOS ACL blocking them as source. It’s a good ACL to have facing your upstream.

The script only depends on Socket, so you don’t need curl or wget Perl modules installed.

Also note, this is for Cisco IOS, not for PIX/ASA, which uses netmasks rather than wildcard masks.

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw

use strict;
use Socket qw(:DEFAULT :crlf);

my $iaddr = gethostbyname("www.cymru.com");
my $paddr   = sockaddr_in(80, $iaddr);
my $proto   = getprotobyname('tcp');

socket(SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto)  || &bye(1, "socket error: $!");

eval {
    local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { &bye(1, "connect failed: $!") };
    alarm 10;
    connect(SOCK, $paddr)    || &bye(1, "connect error: $!");
    alarm 0;
};

select(SOCK); $| = 1; select(STDOUT);

print SOCK "GET /Documents/bogon-bn-agg.txt HTTP/1.0" . $CRLF . $CRLF;
my $line;
my $flag = 0;
while (defined($line = )) {
    $line =~ s/\r|\n//g;
    if ($line =~ /^$/) { $flag++; next; }
    $flag || next;
    my ($netblock, $c) = split /\//, $line;
    my $wmask = &cidr2wildmask("/$c");
    print "access-list ACL deny ip $netblock $wmask any\n";
}
close (SOCK);

sub cidr2wildmask {
    my( $cidr ) = @_;
    my( $one32 ) = 0b11111111111111111111111111111111;
    my( @d, $n, $bits );

    if ( $cidr eq "/32" ) {
        return "0.0.0.0";
    }
    $cidr =~ /\/(\d+)/;
    $bits = $1;
    $n = $one32 >> $bits;
    $d[3] = $n % 256; $n = int( $n / 256);
    $d[2] = $n % 256; $n = int( $n / 256);
    $d[1] = $n % 256; $n = int( $n / 256);
    $d[0] = $n;
    return join '.', @d;
}

sub bye {
    my ($e, $msg) = @_;

    print STDOUT "$msg\n";
    exit $e;
}

Well, I never got around to building the RockMite before HAR, so I really didn’t operate PA/N2MCS much at all (just a little on VHF).

So now I’m finally building the RockMite. I got about half of it done tonight.

RockMite 40, 50% complete

Woot, got my RockMite 40 kit from Small Wonder Labs. This is possibly the only HF (shortwave) transmitter I’m bringing to Hacking at Random (HAR), unless I find some other really cheap kits within a week or two.

This shouldn’t take much to build, just depends on how many chores I have to do today! I’ll clearly have to run over to Radio Shite to get a little enclosure… or maybe I’ll get lucky and find an Altoids tin that isn’t stamped on the top.

Thanks to a misread tweet, the term Credit Unicorn was coined without purpose, but clearly anything as noble as a Credit Unicorn must be assigned a Great Task.

Nick Farr has done it, calling for The Credit Unicorn to buy an individual’s credit card debt at half the rate of what the credit card company would demand, in exchange for twice the minimum payment.

This allows for cheaper credit for the debtor, and quite a high savings rate for the creditor. Not to mention taking the evil banks out of the equation!

We recently installed an Avaya IP PBX here, which has a number of G450 media gateways. When we did the install, we had no problems using straight-through cables between the G450 gateways and our Cisco Catalyst 4507R switches.

After the install, the vendor claimed that this should not work, as the G450 gateways are ethernet switches, and therefore we should be using crossover cables. He also claimed that we must be using auto-negotiation on the Catalyst switch ports, otherwise this would be broken.

I confirmed that we had the switch ports forced as 100/full, and consulted the Cisco documentation with regard to the Auto-MDIX behavior of the line cards. The documentation suggested that the switch was not doing Auto-MDIX when forced to 100/full:

Auto-MDIX is enabled by default. When you enable auto-MDIX, you must also set the speed on the port to auto so that for the feature to operate correctly. auto-MDIX is supported on copper media ports. It is not supported on fiber media ports.

So, I setup a test… a known 10/100 PC (that does not do Auto-MDIX) into a similarly configured switchport worked when using a straight-through cable and did not work when using a crossover cable. This confirms the behavior is in line with the Cisco docs.

I then did the same test with the PC connecting to the Avaya G450. We got a good link using both the straight-through and the crossover cable.

Verdict: The Avaya G450 ethernet controller is doing Auto-MDIX.

I have now confirmed this behavior with the Avaya docs:

The G450 provides LAN services through the fixed LAN ports on the chassis front panel for the connection of external LAN switches or local data devices. The LAN ports are connected to the internal LAN switch and support HP auto-MDIX, which automatically detects and corrects the polarity of crossed cables. This results in simplified LAN installation and maintenance.

The moral of this story? In a dispute, confirm everything your vendor says with objective tests and hard documentation.

So, I (falsely) assumed that fldigi would be able to key a serial port for RTTY, so that I could use it for the RTTY mod for the Rock Mite.

Instead, there is a new feature on fldigi that outputs a 1000 Hz tone on the right audio channel to represent this keying. This “Pseudo FSK” requires a simple circuit to then extract the keying from the audio:

I’m going to try this method when my Rock Mite arrives.

So, after surfing the internet for awhile, I found someone was already doing what I had planned!

Bill N4QA is switching in resistance to the zener diode on Dave Benson K1SWL’s Rock Mite QRP CW transceiver.

Needless to say, I just ordered one up for 7040 kHz. I know I wanted to do less kits and more straight homebrew, but this is too easy to let slip by!

I’m not sure I understand the theory behind adding the variable resistor to the zener yet. The zener is giving a regulated voltage to the oscillator, so adding resistance will change that voltage, which would change the frequency, I assume. I need to look at the Rock Mite schematic some to see if I can make sense of it. It seems a lot more simple than switching in a varactor.