OZ9AEC

 
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OZ9AEC

First Miracle Whip QSOs

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When I got up this morning I turned on the FT-817 with the Miracle Whip mounted on its back. There were a lot of strong stations calling CQ TEST. I didn't quite know what kind of contest it was but a quick check on the net revealed that it was nothing less than CQ WW DX 2005.

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High Definition Broadcasting Experiments

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As you may know I have been flirting with live broadcasting on Ustream for a while now. While it is a great free service I was not particularly happy about the default webcam stream, which appears to be very low resolution, not much higher than 320x240. Ustream offers high quality streaming using their browser plugin and even high definition-like using the Flash Media Live Encoder from Adobe. Unfortunately, neither of these is available for anything else than Windows.

I wanted to try so much that I even tried the Flash Media Live Encoder under Vista. Well, it was a total fail... My computer froze after broadcasting a few seconds even at VGA-like resolutions. I think I spent a whole Sunday trying various configurations and setting but no luck. Slow computer? Buggy software? Probably both.

Few days ago I learned that Adobe is now in the process of making a Mac version of Flash Media Live Encoder. Hurray! In fact, it is already available for selected beta testers but no timeline for public release. Fortunately, I was able to find a kind soul who has shared the beta package for Mac with the rest of the world (thanks Google search for finding me this) and so I got the opportunity to become an unofficial beta tester.

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GB0MPA commemorating the ship RMS Carpathia

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I caught the special event station GB0MPA on the air yesterday. GB0MPA commemorates the ship RMS Carpathia (callsign: MPA) which saved 705 people from the Titanic in April 1912. GB0MPA is active for 28 days starting on Apr 4. On this video GB0MPA has contact with two stations from Romania - one of them west of the Carpathian mountains :-)

As you can see and hear, my IC-765 is still going strong!

 
 

Improvised Shoulder Strap Holder

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When I bought my FT-817 (second hand) it came with a shoulder strap but the shoulder strap holders were missing. I talked to the seller and he promised to send them to me. Few days later I have received another shoulder strap so that now I had two shoulder straps but still no holder!

Now that I've got the Arrow II antenna and I will be attempting to work satellites with the FT-817 I really needed to mount a shoulder strap. So I came up with this solution using 1 mm copper wire to hold a shoulder strap from a cheap laptop bag that I had laying around. This shoulder strap is actually much more comfortable and easy to take off when the FT-817 is in the shack. Yeah, so I still have two original FT-817 shoulder straps if anyone needs them...

From YAESU FT-817
 

Adobe Flashplayer for Galeon on 64 bit Ubuntu 9.04

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I was excited about the new Ubuntu 9.04 released just a few days ago. In fact, so excited that I installed the release candidate instead of waiting for the final release, knowing that it will be impossible to download during the first few days. Anyway, it's cool, it's slick and it boots in less than 15 seconds! Of course, one problem that you run into on 64 bit is the lack of Adobe Flash player – at least if you want to avoid installing 32 bit compatibility libraries. Here is how the problem is solved.

First, you need to download the Adobe Flashplayer 10 browser plugin from Adobe. You can get it here. It's a .tar.gz file containing a single shared object (so file). Since my primary browser is firefox, I installed it into /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/

That makes flash work all right in firefox, but it still didn't work in Galeon – another lightweight web browser that I like to use a lot. As it turns out, Galeon looks for plugins in the /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins directory, so the problem was solved by simply creating a symbolic link to the libflashplayer.so I just installed in /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/ – that's it!

 

 
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