What I discovered when I revisited the Survivor build was that my TX audio was terrible–static-y and unreadable. With the help of others on the Hendricks SSB Yahoo Group, I ultimately traced the problem to a voltage that was too low on the base of the microphone buffer transistor Q10. A few others experience this problem, too. I was able to fix it by changing the value of resistor R25 from 22K to 15K. Once I did that, everything was ship-shape. All I need to do now is make a portable antenna for 75 meters, put it up, and see if I can work somebody.

This, too, means that my series of installments on building the Survivor is complete. If you’re interested, you can see the series here. Let me know if it’s helpful (or if you see any mistakes).

Building the Survivor

I’ll be adding to the content as I get farther along on the build. Comments and corrections are always welcome!

Truthfully, there’s not much to installing and running Palm Desktop. The latest version is 6.2 and can be downloaded from here. I’ve installed it on two computers here–a Windows 7 32-bit netbook and my Windows 7 64-bit desktop. The installer for Palm Desktop should run without a hitch.

Palm’s help files for using Palm Desktop and HotSync Manager are pretty complete, and I’m not going to describe in detail how to use either of those applications, so consult those help files if you need additional information on using those applications.

The main issues begin to arise when you try to HotSync one of your devices. Palm Desktop allows you to HotSync using a serial connection, a USB connection, and over the network. In addition, you can configure Bluetooth-enabled Palms to HotSync via Bluetooth. By far, though, the easiest to set up are serial and USB HotSync’ing. None of my computers has an actual serial port these days, but a decent USB-serial converter cable will work with HotSync Manager–just plug in the cable, figure out its port number (COM1, COM2, etc.), and tell HotSync Manager to do a serial HotSync through that port. In this configuration, if HotSync Manager starts up when the USB-serial cable isn’t plugged in, HotSync Manager will display a warning message that the port is not available. This is harmless–just make sure you plug in the cable before you try to HotSync (obviously–how would you HotSync otherwise?).

HotSync’ing via a USB port is a little more challenging. It works fine on Windows 7 32-bit machines–in my case, when I first plugged in my Palm to a USB port and powered it on, Windows automatically ran Windows Update to located a suitable driver and installed it–no intervention on my part. After that, USB HotSync worked fine.

USB HotSync’ing on Windows 7 64-bit proved problematic initially. Palm states specifically that this will not work, but I learned that 64-bit USB drivers for Palm OS devices were available From Aceeca here. I downloaded and followed their instructions to install the drivers, and they worked perfectly!

The only other “gotcha” I experienced was that when I first attempted to HotSync with my old Handspring Visor, a fatal exception would occur during the HotSync process and it would fail. I finally tracked this down to the Package Installer application that HotSync Manager was trying to sync with my Visor. Once I disabled sync’ing of that application, everything else sync’ed smoothly.

Once I worked through the issues mentioned above, I’ve been able to HotSync all of my Palm OS devices (a Palm m100, a Palm T|X, and a Handspring Visor) without any issues.

And an additional note to you southern hemisphere users: if you’re looking for the star Achernar, it’s actually with the constellation Phoenix in my alignment star constellations. Sorry for the confusion.

The digital edition of QST does allow you to print (although it appears to now be adding a “Single Print Only” watermark to each page–yuck). And there are a number of utilities available to “print” to a PDF file. I’ve been using Primo PDF for several years–it’s free and does a great job. Primo PDF installs itself like a printer, so when you want to save something to a PDF file, you can select “Print” in whatever application you’re viewing it in, and then specify Primo PDF as the printer. I’ll walk you through the process with QST (since there are a few “gotchas” specific to printing QST to a PDF). This walkthrough assumes you’ve already installed Primo PDF. All bets are off if you’re using some other PDF printer utility–it may not work the same was as Primo PDF.

Here’s the web page with the QST digital edition:

Along the top of the window there’s a Print icon (to the left of the question mark icon). Click that, and the window will be overlaid with a print menu:

Here’s “gotcha” number 1. If I try to print all 175 pages of the magazine at once, Adobe Flash Player (the software displaying the magazine) crashes. So, I print about 1/4 of the magazine at a time by setting the page range to start at “Intro” and end at page 40. After that, I click the Print button. You’re going to wait a minute or so after that until you see the printer selector:

Make sure “Primo PDF” is selected as your printer, and then click the OK button. Now you’re going to wait again for a minute or so until the Primo PDF window pops up:

Here you can choose the quality of printing and specify a few other options. The defaults work pretty well. Go ahead and click the “Create PDF” button, and you’ll be prompted for a file name:

Now you’ll wait again for a minute or so until the Primo PDF window disappears, indicating that it’s done printing to the PDF.

At this point you’ve printed about 1/4 of QST to the PDF file. You can open the PDF now to verify that it printed correctly if you’d like, but next you’re going to repeat the process for the remaining fourths of the magazine. Go back and click the Print button again, this time specifying pages 41 through 80, and follow the same steps. When you reach the point where Primo PDF asks you for a file name again, use the same name as before. Primo PDF will then ask whether to append the new content to the existing file or to overwrite the existing file:

The obvious choice here is to append. Primo PDF will then add the new content to the end of the previous content.

Repeat for the remaining half of the magazine and you’re finished.

A few things to note: the digital editions take up quite a bit of disk space (the December 2012 issue took up 85 MB). Despite that, the print quality isn’t great. You might want to experiment with the Primo PDF settings in order to obtain higher quality, but the higher quality will come at the price of larger files.

Obviously, this isn’t the only use for Primo PDF. As I mentioned before, anything that you can print, from any Windows application, can be saved as a PDF by Primo PDF–documents, pictures, web pages, you name it. It’s a really handy tool.

]]> http://eksfiles.net/2012/11/saving-qst-magazines-digital-edition-to-pdf/feed/ 1 http://eksfiles.net/2012/11/recording-audio-from-the-web/ http://eksfiles.net/2012/11/recording-audio-from-the-web/#comments Sat, 17 Nov 2012 14:26:37 +0000 Dave http://eksfiles.net/?p=1215 Continue reading →]]> This is a tip that I’ve been meaning to share with you for a while. I consider myself pretty computer-savvy, but I didn’t even know about it until my guitar teacher showed me a few years ago.

Every so often I decide to hunt down a new song to learn to play on my guitar. Yesterday it was “Make You Feel My Love” by Bob Dylan–I heard it on the radio and thought to myself that it might be a good one to learn to play. Since I’m a sheet-music kinda guy, I found an arrangement on SheetMusicDirect. I always like to have a recording, too, but it wasn’t in my collection.

It turns out that you can find a recording of almost any song on YouTube, and it wasn’t long before I found this Dylan song (and a version by Adele, too). Although there are plenty of ways to save YouTube videos to your computer, all I really wanted was the audio. Turns out that it’s easy to record and save pretty-much any audio that you can play through your computer speakers. All you need are recording software and a tip from my old guitar teacher Charlie Hall.

First, recording software: Audacity is a free, open source package for Windows, Mac, and Linux that is very powerful but easy to use. It’s capable of recording from any source input and allows you to mix, add effects and, most importantly, save to a variety of formats, including MP3 if you install the optional free LAME MP3 encoder.

Once Audacity is installed (along with the MP3 encoder), start the application. Here’s the opening screen:

The row of round buttons at the top are your recording/playback buttons. Click the round red button the right to begin recording. The square yellow button stops, and the green arrow button is playback.

The first thing you need to do before you record is specify the source for the recording. To do that, go to the “Edit” menu and select “Preferences.” You’ll be shown the Preferences screen:

If it isn’t already selected, click “Devices” in the list on the left, and then drop down the Recording Device list and look for something that says “Stereo Mix” (this is the tip from Charlie–I never knew about Stereo Mix until he told me). The Stereo Mix is whatever’s being played over your sound card’s speakers, and that’s what you want to record, so select it in the list and click the OK button.

Now you’re ready to record. Get your recording source (YouTube or whatever) ready to go, click Audacity’s Record button, and then click the Play button for whatever you want to record. Audacity will show you a visual depiction of what it’s recording:

You might need to adjust the volume on your computer (using the little speaker icon in the system tray) and also the playback volume in YouTube (or whatever your source is). I generally have the best results if all the volume controls are turned up to their highest settings.

When the playback’s done, click the Stop button in Audacity. Now you can click Audacity’s Play button to hear what it recorded if you’d like. When you’re ready to save, go to the “File” menu and click “Export…”. You’ll see a screen like this for you to specify a file name and format:

Enter a file name and make sure the “Save as type” is set to what you want. If you choose “MP3 Files” and click Save, you’ll see this screen next:

You can enter the song title, performer, etc. if you like. Click the OK button to finish the export process. Audacity will then show you a progress window while it’s exporting to MP3 format. When that window goes away, you’re done!

Audacity can do so much more than just record and save, so don’t be afraid to explore a bit if you’re so incline.

]]> http://eksfiles.net/2012/11/recording-audio-from-the-web/feed/ 0 http://eksfiles.net/2012/05/skysafari-for-android/ http://eksfiles.net/2012/05/skysafari-for-android/#comments Mon, 28 May 2012 03:01:14 +0000 Dave http://eksfiles.net/?p=1197 Continue reading →]]> I’d been hearing lately about some astronomy software for the iPhone/iPad called SkySafari (made by Southern Stars), but not owning either one of those devices myself, I hadn’t really bothered to look into it at all. That all changed when I came across an ad for SkySafari in Sky and Telescope magazine that showed that an Android version was available. Now I became much more interested to see what the fuss was about, so I dropped $14.99 in the Google Play store for the Plus version so I could try it out on my HTC Incredible phone as well as my rooted Barnes and Noble Nook Color. Mostly, I wanted to see if SkySafari would connect to my digital setting circles box via bluetooth. Initial impressions are very good.

SkySafari comes in three different versions. The basic version is $2.99 and contains a catalog of 46,000 stars and does not include telescope control. The Plus version ($14.99) includes 2.5 million stars and thousands of deep-sky objects and adds telescope control. The Pro version ($59.99) includes many millions of objects in its catalog plus additional features. I chose the Plus version to get the telescope control functionality, figuring that its catalog would be sufficient for my needs.

My test setup was my Barnes and Noble Nook Color tablet that I’ve rooted and converted into an Android tablet running CyanogenMod 7.1.0. CyanogenMod thankfully includes support for the built-in bluetooth radio in the Nook Color. On the telescope side, I’m using a U.S. Converters serial-to-bluetooth converter plugged into my encoder box.

Someone recently told me that SkySafari doesn’t send the command to the encoder box to initialize the encoder resolutions, so before I began testing I connected my box to my PC and used my EkBoxTester software to make sure the encoders were initialized with the correct resolutions. The resolutions are saved in EEPROM, so they’ll be remembered even when the power’s off.

Once I was confident that the resolutions were set correctly, I fired up my Nook Color, turned on the bluetooth radio, and paired it with my serial-bluetooth adapter (Settings -> Wireless & Networks -> Bluetooth Settings). You need to do this step before running SkySafari and attempting to connect with the telescope. Once it paired, I fired up SkySafari.

I have to say that I was immediately impressed with the look of SkySafari–they sky display is very nicely done (there are plenty of screenshots on the Southern Stars website–go check them out for yourself). The first thing I did was to go to the Settings menu to set my location (SkySafari will use your GPS to do this if it can, but the Nook Color doesn’t have a GPS).

Next, I needed to specify the type of telescope I have. The Southern Stars website mentioned my encoder system specifically under supported telescope types, so I thought maybe I’d find it listed in the available scope types, but it wasn’t there. I chose “Basic Encoder System” as my telescope type. SkySafari also needed to know the type of mount I have as well as the encoder resolutions. My mount is a German Equatorial–that part was easy enough. It turns out that I had to experiment a bit with the encoder resolution entries before I found something that actually worked.

SkySafari allows you to specify the resolution of an encoder as either a positive or negative number. The sign indicates the directionality of the encoder. Since there two encoders and two possible values for each encoder (positive and negative), there are four possible unique combinations to be tried in order to find the right one that results in good alignments. I had to play around a bit here in order to find the right combination. It took me several tries before I got an accurate alignment, but that could be partly due to the fact that I was doing this testing in the middle of the day using my mount’s regular setting circles to approximate accurate pointing at alignment objects.

The alignment process is pretty straightforward. Tapping the Scope menu item will display the telescope controls. Hit the Connect button to connect with the telescope, tap on an object in the sky display to select it, point your telescope at the object, and hit the Align button. For a brand new alignment, that’ll be your first alignment star. Repeat the process with another star and tell SkySafari to use that as a second alignment star, and you’re in business. SkySafari will warn you if your alignment stars are too close together, or if it appears that your telescope isn’t really pointed at the second alignment star. Once complete, SkySafari will display a cross-hair of sorts to show where your telescope is pointed. There’s even a Lock button that will cause the sky display to follow your telescope as you move it about the sky. You can continue to update your alignment by repeating the process of choosing and aligning on a second alignment star if your original alignment isn’t so great in some parts of the sky.

Manipulating the sky display in SkySafari is simple: drag your finger across the screen to scroll the display, and pinch/unpinch to zoom in and out. Tap to select an object and then choose Info from the menu to learn more about the object. I haven’t even begun to explore all the features and functions that are available.

I’m hoping to get SkySafari and my telescope outside one evening soon to give it an actual run under the stars, but my initial impression is that this is quite the package for $14.99. If you have any experience with SkySafari, share it with me by leaving a comment below.

Not having enough time to order something and have it delivered in time, I needed to find the welding lens locally. I was pleased to discover that both Home Depot and Lowe’s carried a 4.5″ x 5.25″ lens that would work perfectly (Lincoln Electric model KH618). This is a shade #10 lens, which my book said would be okay for up to 2″ aperture. I bought two of them since they were fairly cheap, thinking that one could be used to view the sun directly (which worked quite well) in case the solar filter didn’t work out so well.

Now all I needed was to figure out how to construct the solar filter. I noticed that the lens itself was about as thick as a piece of corrugated cardboard, and I quickly devised a plan to sandwich the lens between two layers of cardboard. I used a science fair board like what you can buy at any hobby craft store. Here’s the outer layer (the part that will face the sun). The diameter of this layer is large enough to completely cover the end of my telescope, so that no light can reach the telescope’s main mirror. The four tabs were left in place to aid in attaching the filter to the telescope. You can also see the 2″-diameter aperture cutout, off axis in order to avoid being obstructed by the telescope’s diagonal mirror.

The next layer holds the welding lens. You can see the cutout for the lens. This layer was sized so that it would fit snugly inside the telescope tube.

Here’s the first two layers with the welding lens in place.

The final layer is the same diameter as the previous layer and has another 2″ cutout. This layer holds the welding lens in the cardboard sandwich. It’s obviously important to make sure that the 2″ cutout in this layer is aligned with the 2″ cutout in the outer layer.

The layers were glued together using Elmer’s Wood Glue, taking care not to get glue on the welding lens (so it can be removed and reused at some point if needed). Here’s the whole sandwich.

Here’s the solar filter installed on the front of the telescope:

The filter worked reasonably well. I elected to use a moon filter at the eyepiece to further cut down on the brightness, but I could have gotten by without it. With a 25-mm eyepiece, the sun filled most of the field of view. The edges of the image weren’t totally sharp, which I attributed to some diffusing of the light by the welding lens, but it was sharp enough to observe the eclipse without any trouble.

Watching the eclipse was a hoot! Clouds to the west were threatening to hide the sun from us, but the sun emerged just in time to see the start of the eclipse, and we were able to watch for about 45 minutes before the clouds wiped us out for good. Several neighbors stopped by to take a look, and a lady from up the street brought her kids over for a look. The second welding lens that I had bought was passed around from person to person and used to observe the eclipse directly, and that was as popular as watching through the telescope. Luckily, I had managed to get my equatorial mount pointing close enough to north that my mount’s clock drive tracked the sun quite well–I never once had to touch the telescope tube to re-aim.

I’m planning to use my homebrew solar filter again to observe the transit of Venus on June 5th. With any luck, I’ll have some pictures to show, as well.

The biggest issue with do-it-yourself maps is being able to print a map that’s larger than 8.5″ x 11″. Not many of us have a printer that’ll handle paper much bigger than that, so if you’re printing your own maps, you’ll likely need several sheets to cover the entirety of your trip. Also, some printers are better than others, and the quality of your self-printed maps may not be as good as you’d like. It’s true that you can still buy the original USGS 7.5-minute quads on paper, but chances are good that you’ll need more than one to cover your trip–the map boundaries are never located where you need them, it seems.

Enter MyTopo.com.

MyTopo.com covers the best of both worlds. You can browse the topo maps online for free (several scales, actually–not just the 7.5-minute quads), select exactly the region you want (spanning multiple quads, if needed), and then order a custom printed map of exactly what you want. Maps can be printed in sizes from 18″ x 24″ (for $9.95) all the way up to 5′ x 8′ (for big bucks). Maps are printed on waterproof paper with your choice of markings like titles and lat/long/MGRS grids, and they’ll deliver them to you either folded or rolled. If you prefer your map printed on glossy paper, or even laminated, you can have that, too. Shipping costs are reasonable–as little as $2.25 for a folded map via first-class mail. Rolled maps more expensive to ship (but still reasonable). There are plenty of shipping options, too, depending on how quickly you need the map to arrive.

Here’s a preview of what you’d receive:

I ordered a map from them last week, covering a section of the Collegiate Peaks wilderness here in Colorado. My map was a 24″ x 36″ folded map for $14.95 that they delivered via USPS priority mail for $5.95 (regular first-class was only $2.25!). I ordered it on Saturday and it arrived on Wednesday–pretty speedy service. The map itself looks great–excellent quality paper and printing with professionally-done legends, folded just like a map you’d buy at your favorite map store. If the weather had been decent this weekend, I’d actually be out in the wilderness using my new map instead of sitting here at my computer telling you about it.

To me, it’s definitely worth spending fifteen or twenty bucks to get the right map for a wilderness expedition, and MyTopo.com definitely did not disappoint. I’ll be using them again for my future map needs.