RSGB Awards

Spending a few days up in M-land, during which time I have been proud to receive a brace of awards at the RSGB Annual General Meeting.

The first was the Wortley-Talbot Trophy...

which, I'm told, was given for 'outstanding experimental work in amateur radio', specifically for my 'Parallel IF' article in RadCom back in January 2015. There was an FA Cup semi-final fixture played on Saturday and the trophy rather put me in mind of the Soccer prize!

The second award was the Don Cameron G4SST Memorial Trophy...

awarded (according to the RSGB's nice letter) for "outstanding contribution to low power amateur radio communication" and specifically for "actively passing on (my) knowledge to others in the field, including Digital QRP".

The Don Cameron award shuns the traditional trophy format and takes instead the more sensible shape of a CW rig with integrated paddle, all mounted on a plinth. It was nice to see my name on a new engraved plate on the plinth, along with the great and the good of British QRP - many of whom I am honoured to count as friends. The big 'cup' had been engraved too.

I couldn't help but massage my vanity by taking a picture of my two awards...

Whilst here in Glasgow, the XYL and I have taken the opportunity to steal a pleasant 'city break' weekend away from the pressures of work, visiting the many museums and architectural delights of this great city.

One of the real highlights is the Necropolis, where the great and the good were buried in earlier years...

From this 'City of the Dead', high on a hill over St Mungo's Cathedral, you get good views over today's living, vibrant city.

Come to Glasgow - to get an award or just to enjoy an interesting visit to a fantastic, welcoming city.

...-.- de m(m)0xpd

A Beacon on the Internet of Things

Well - I just got my new beacon closer to where I want it: responding to remote "on / off" commands delivered from anywhere in the world via the internet.

I used the tutorial on openhomeautomation.net as the basis for my solution, which now allows me to send an enabling command to the beacon of the form:

As you see, this is just a http command issued from a browser address line - but it can easily be issued by any web application. The red x's conceal my beacon's 'i-d' - I don't want you to hack into it and turn it off! The beacon 'wakes up' from power on or reset in disabled mode and will not start transmitting until I have issued an enabling command of the form above.

Although Open Home Automation's tutorial is about remote switching a physical, hardware relay, my beacon enablement is all achieved in software. I have made no hardware modification to add the remote enable / disable feature. 

When the beacon receives the enable command, it responds with a simple message in JSON format:

The name is a nice, human-readable confirmation that it really is my beacon responding.

If I want to shut down operations, I just send a similar command to disable transmission:

which stops the action and prompts an acknowledging message:

 
Obviously, this is only the first step to what will one day be a nice, custom interface but it works, so heck - it's time to test it... 

I checked that I really can 'Man' the 'Manned Experimental Propagation Transmitter' even when I'm not actually 'in the building' this weekend. In the inset on the map below, you can see your humble servant enabling and disabling the beacon remotely from Flamborough Head Lighthouse, some 120 miles from the shack and the beacon...

All worked f/b.

The beacon is still getting all its timing information from an NTP server on the 'net as well as responding to my remote 'commands'. It feels like it is now at the qualifying level where it really is out there on the Internet of Things (as opposed to just some little micro with a WiFi connection).

In the meantime, the beacon has been putting in a good performance, reaching out to the antipodes and South Africa...

and to Greenland...

and doing its ordinary QRSS stuff in between WSPR transmissions.

As I have said before - big thanks to all those who receive and report WSPR and other beacon modes: all these Tx experiments would be worth nothing without the continuing efforts of receiving stations.

...-.- de m0xpd

No Rest for Fools

Well - fools day is gone, but I'm still Rappin'...

I've used some more wire wrapping wire to move the DDS module onto a more permanent home on what is now revealed as 'The Connected Beacon'...

Nice one SolderSmoke - even better than spaghetti trees!

...-.- de m0xpd

The Connected Beacon

I've put my new esp8266 module to use - in a multi-mode beacon which is connected to the internet...

Here you see the module on its programming board (as previously described), hooked up to an old faithful AD9850 DDS module, the output of which is running through a prototype of the Kanga / m0xpd Tx Shield (and through a 30m filter, which is out-of-shot).

Some simple code, derived from the Occam's Beacon software, previously published, is running a multi-mode beacon on 30m, putting out WSPR, QRSS and vanilla CW on a 10 minute cycle. The novelty (for today, at least) is the fact that the system derives accurate timing information (critically important for WSPR) from the internet, which it accesses through my home WiFi.

No more messing around with pressing a reset button just at the right moment. No messing with those chocolate teapots called 'real time clocks'. No messing with GPS modules (which are fine - but not so easy to use from the north-facing window of my shack).

Just power up and go - the system looks up the time from the NIST Time Servers, using code hacked from this example. Then the system checks every once in a while to ensure it is still on track with 'internet time'. Works a treat!

Whenever you play with a new beacon, there's always a childish thrill as the very first spots are returned...

and - as I said - this is a multi-mode system, so there was also a first QRSS sighting. In this case, a partial grab (of just the '0xpd' part of my call) by Mikael, SA6BSS, over in Slutarp...

followed, ten minutes later (and when the crystal module in the AD9850 had reached better thermal equilibrium) by a complete grab...

The spots and grabs keep coming - even as I write, I see I've just crossed the pond to Gérard, VE3GF...

Now - of course - the ability to get the time from the internet isn't my motive for setting up this beacon. It is just the first step in a development process. But I've made that first step and done something new and useful.

Talking of new things, I see that Bill and Pete have big plans for SolderSmoke, making a 'major change in direction'. It all has something to do with Wire Wrapping (remember that??!??). Well - ironically, and quite by chance, my little programming board for the esp8266 was made with some old wire wrapping materials I found in the junk box...

Here you see the back side of the board and a couple of the reels of wire wrap cable I used to wire the whole shooting match up - along with the old wire-wrap tool I used to strip the insulation off the end of the scraps of wire before SOLDERING (no actual wire was wrapped in the making of this blog post).

Hopefully, the heavy involvement of wire wrapping materials (not to mention the 'on trend' nature of hooking radio beacons up to the internet) will make this material acceptable to my good friends at the WireWrapRap...

Good Luck with the new venture, guys!

...-.- de m0xpd

Update:

I left things running overnight and had a pretty good bag at 09:00 UTC...

Special thanks to John, vk5ev and Andrew, vk5mr, for copying the new connected beacon down under. Now it's time for some engineering work...