On Sunday the 18th, I celebrated my 16th anniversary at Northwest Physicians Network. I started there as a Network Technician, moved up to Network Admin a couple of years later when the then-current Admin moved on. My responsibilities covered servers, virtualization, networking, phones, and desktop support, pretty much a one-man show. As time progressed, I’ve moved up to the fourth-longest tenure of NPN employees.

About three years ago NPN was acquired by Davita Healthcare, which was itself acquired by Optum Healthcare a mere six weeks later. With regional consolidation my job responsibilities were spread out among four or five different departments and I was assigned to the Desktop Support department. I had been hoping to move into systems engineering working on the server and virtualization, but my familiarity with the NPN desktop and phone environment necessitated my assignment. I was supporting NPN under the direction of The Everett Clinic (a part of Optum).

After about 18 months in the Desktop Support area (and being the primary NPN person in-office during the pandemic) an opportunity came up to interview for a Systems Engineering position with the Polyclinic, another Optum organization in the region. I decided to apply, did the interview, and got selected for the position.

I’ve spent the last week getting set up and starting to get up to speed as a Systems Engineer for the Polyclinic. My manager is at The Everett Clinic, and because it is a transfer within the Organization I don’t have to worry about losing my years-of-service, my PTO balance, retirement, etc. I will be working from home most of the time, going into the office (on Seattle’s “Pill Hill”/Capitol Hill) once a week or as needed.

I will miss the day-to-day interaction with the friends I’ve made over the years at NPN, but it isn’t like I’m moving to Mars…we’re all still part of the same larger organization. I am looking forward to renewing and expanding my skills on the server side.

As you might guess from some of my posts, I’m starting to get more into building radio-related electronics. One of the tools that is quite useful for testing these circuits is an oscilloscope. A couple of years ago a friend found a couple of used scopes being disposed of and passed one on to me. It was a B&K Precision 2160, which weighed in at about 17 pounds and approximately 5″x13″x16″ in size. It was good for measuring signals up to about 60 MHz, and free is a good price, but I found that adjusting it was a finnicky process and it took up a lot of space on my workbench.

My birthday was this week, and my wife and sons decided to go in together on a replacement for it. I’d had a Siglent SDS-1102CML+ on my wish-list, and so they went with that. It is very similar to the scopes my younger son used in his Computer Engineering courses at university. It is about the same width and height as the B&K, but is nearly a foot shallower, freeing up a lot of space on the bench. Using an LCD screen rather than a CRT, it is more than nine pounds lighter as well. (My elder son says it passes the “pinky test.” He can pick it up by the handle using only his pinky finger.) It is good up to 100 MHz, and many of the settings are automatically ranging or easier to adjust.

After the initial probe calibration (one adjustment on one of the two included probes, the other was already calibrated) I was able to get readings from a signal generator I built over the winter (keep an eye out for a post about that project as well.) A pure sine wave looked beautiful, and I am looking forward to using this new tool (OK, kind of a toy for a geek like me as well) as I work on enhancements to my Mighty Mite and a radio receiver for which I’m working on plans.

That’s the “Back to Blogging” part, but what, you are probably saying to yourself, is “the Joy of Oscillation?” The oscillation in this case refers to a radio signal being generated by an oscillator circuit, and the joy is the satisfaction of building something yourself, and seeing it work. The term was coined by Bill, N2CQR, in his Soldersmoke blog and podcast.

The build in this case was the Michigan Mighty Mite design, a crystal controlled transmitter, making use of a television colorburst crystal at a frequency of 3.57954 MHz, which just happens to be in the Ham Radio 80 Meter Band. Thank you goes to the folks at Soldersmoke for providing that crystal.

There is no one right way to assemble the Michigan Mighty Mite. I decided to base my assembly on a method described by George Dobbs, G3RJV (SK) in a series of books for youth that I enjoyed back when I was in 8th or 9th grade, using a board, and making connections using screws and fender washers rather than solder.

The base board was one my wife picked up at the local hobby store. The transformer was wound with magnet wire around an empty pill bottle. The variable capacitor is held in place with a 3-D printed bracket thanks to my son.

I hooked the antenna port (white cable, upper right corner) to a dummy load for testing, tuned my main rig across the room to the colorburst frequency, turned on my workbench power supply, and tapped the key. Much to my satisfaction, I heard a tone from my receiver. Adjusting the variable capacitor (the only control on this transmitter) caused the signal to strengthen and the tone to be clearer. I was experiencing “the joy of oscillation!” I was now, as Pete, N6QW would say, a member of the “Colorburst Liberation Army.”

I’m looking forward to trying this transmitter on the air. Two things need to happen before that takes place: first, I will need to build a low-pass filter in order to clean up spurious additional signals from this Mighty Mite. Secondly, I need to get my antenna replaced, as it decided to self-disassemble over the winter, and I need to do some tree trimming before the replacement goes up.

This project was a lot of fun. I had started to build this several years ago, and then life intervened. It was satisfying to dust off the parts and start up again, and all the more so that it worked on the first try.

This weekend I finally collected on one of my Fathers’ Day gifts: a steam-train excursion on the Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad with Diana.  Leaving from Elbe, Washington, we crossed the Nisqually River and Mineral Creek on a four-car train pulled by 1-4-1 oil-fired steam locomotive, formerly in the employ of the Hammond Lumber Company.

Once we got to Mineral, WA, we enjoyed time wandering through a logging museum, seeing a number of other steam engines in various stages of restoration, as well as several logging cabins and other logging equipment.  Then it was back on the train and back down to Elbe.

After finding a geocache near the train depot, we drove up through Ashford and on up to (but not through) the gates of Mount Rainier National Park.  We then started back down the hill and stopped at the Copper Creek Inn for lunch (the chowder is fantastic…) and then geocached our way back down the road.  We stopped in Eatonville to visit Diana’s dad, and then meandered our way over some back roads into Tacoma.

Our geocaching near the mountain had put me at 1,999 caches.  I wanted to find a fun one for my 2,000th.  We saw that The Drive Through cache, which had been broken when we looked for it previously, had been repaired.  It was fun to figure it out, and cool to reach this milestone.

Well…I can cross that off my never-done list.  This afternoon at 14:32 local time, using an antenna I built myself, I made an amateur radio contact (QSO) via satellite.

The antenna: a couple of summers ago I put together a tape measure Yagi antenna similar to this that uses PVC for the framework and lengths of a retractable tape measure for the elements.

The radio: my Wouxun KG-UV3D dual band hand-held, programmed with seven adjacent memory channels to deal with the Doppler effect as the satellite passes overhead.

The satellite: SO-50 (Saudi-OSCAR 50), one of the Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio (OSCAR) satellites put up by amateur radio operators for amateur radio operators.

The QSO: The satellite came over the northwest horizon at 14:25 PDT, in an arc that took it almost straight overhead on the way to the southeast horizon.  I finally started hearing the carrier signal from the satellite about 30 degrees above the horizon.  WD9EWK was working stations from Montezuma Castle National Monument as part of the National Parks on the Air (NPOTA) operating event.  at 14:32 he finished working another station, and I transmitted my call and my grid-square (CN-87), only to hear him return my call with his grid square and the identifier for the NPOTA unit he was activating.  I was so stoked that I jerked the antenna out of alignment, quickly got it re-aimed and finished the contact.

I tweeted a thanks to WD9EWK, and he responded that he had the contact recorded, and would be sending me an MP3 of the contact.  As soon as I have it, I’ll post it here…

After playing around with a number of different ideas for my Raspberry Pi, I decided to try making it into an APRS I-Gate, which will listen to APRS data packet transmissions on the 2-Meter ham band, and then forward that data on to the internet so it can show up on such sites as aprs.fi.

I was originally looking to pick up a cheap HT and a USB Soundcard to use on the project, but then I started reading about the RTL USB dongles which were designed as TV receivers for the European market, but are now being used to receive many other types of signals.  I ended up spending less than $12 on a generic RTL dongle that was reported to be usable with the RPi.

For software, other than the RTL drivers, I opted for the DireWolf software TNC to decode the audio data-stream being ported from the RTL dongle.  A bit of config file tweaking later, the results of that decoding were being sent out to the interwebs.  My I-Gate was in business.  The first packets I decoded were from a weather station up on Mount Baldy in the Cascade foothills.

Much of what I did was based on the work of WB2OSZ in this Git-Hub article, but I also used a lot of information on setting up the RTL-SDR dongle from this blogpost.  The only thing left is to find a permanent home for the Pi and associated paraphernalia, and possibly put a better antenna on this contraption than the 6″ mag-mount that came with it.

Well…I’ve done it again. Multiple projects going at once, and none are actually getting to completion.

Project: Raspberry Pi APRS gateway. I got a RPi for Christmas, and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it. I’ve settled on turning it into an i-gate for the Automatic Position Reporting System (APRS), so amateur position reports can be forwarded to the internet.  I got started on this idea after one of the California Near Space Project balloons crossed almost directly overhead as it completed a circumnavigation of the globe.  These balloons use APRS to report their locations, altitudes, etc. and I thought it would be cool to be able to relay information such as this from the aether to the interwebs.

Project: Michigan Mighty Mite 80 Meter transmitter.  I feel kinda obligated to finish this one sooner rather than later, as I got the crystal from the good folks at the SolderSmoke blog and podcast, with the idea that it would be used to build this 7-part transmitter.  I did make some progress recently, when I found the appropriate tuning capacitor.  I’m having David create a bracket with his 3D printer to hold said cap to my breadboard.  I’m also using a breadboarding technique I read about in high-school involving a wooden bread-board, and screws and cup washers to make the electrical connections.

Project: Buddipole Portable Antenna. When we head out to lighthouses for ARLHS events, or do other traveling, I want an antenna that is easy to transport. (Actually, easily transportable batteries and a smaller/lighter rig would be nice too, but they’re a ways off at this point…)  There is a commercial version of this antenna that starts at about $200, but the homebuilt version (the design of which predates the commercial one) is very doable for a quarter of that, plus I’ll be able to say “I built it myself!”  I’m in the parts gathering phase at the moment.

Project:  Function Generator.  I’m looking at modifying the plans from this Instructable (I don’t need to build my own case with a laser cutter, for instance) using an Arduino Pro Mini instead of the Arduino Uno in the plans.  I have an Uno that I could use, but I have several Minis (actually Chinese clones…legal since it is open-source hardware) that I’ll use the Uno to program.  Programming was actually one of the biggest hurdles ahead of me on this…the FTDI programmer I bought to program the Minis wouldn’t talk to them.  I finally found (thanks to the Googles) instructions for using an Uno to act as a programmer for them.

New Toy:  As you may have noticed, these projects are almost all electronic in nature.  I’ve been eyeing an L/C meter for a while to take measurements of coils and capacitors.  I recently stumbled across a bunch of inexpensive component testers that will do L/C measurements as well as testing resistors, diodes, and several flavors of transistors.  I found one I liked on Amazon, and ordered it.  First (useful) thing I did with it was to test a bunch of variable capacitors from my junque box to find one suitable for the MMM project mentioned above.

I really need to finish at least one of these projects before the end of summer, but this weekend I’ll be busy with the final Geocaching Block Party and a couple weekends later we’ll be taking Drew back down to George Fox University to start his Junior year.  We’ll just have to wait and see what transpires…

On the 1st, we picked Drew up from his dorm at George Fox.  Doubling up on his engineering classes caused his GPA to slip all the way down to 3.9 for the semester (from the 4.0 he pulled in the Fall term…)  He’ll be in an on-campus apartment next year with three other engineering students.

On the 6th we flew to St. Louis.  That night we stayed at the Fellowship Ranch retreat center outside of Waynesville, MO.  Diana and I stayed in the house I lived in my last two years of high school.  In the morning we toured around the property, which was in the process of being sold, one last time.  Many thanks to Frank & RuthAnn Branham (whom I’ve known since I was in junior high) for their hospitality.

From Waynesville we headed to the Branson area (with a detour to see the Laura Ingalls Wilder farm in Mansfield) to meet up with David and prep for his graduation from College of the Ozarks.  We got checked into our hotel, ran some errands, and then met my parents who had flown into Kansas City.

Friday and Saturday were filled with a combination of playing tourist, David’s graduation rehearsals, and getting together with old friends in the area.  We discovered that David’s roommate’s father and I knew each other from our time at the college…small world, eh?

Sunday brought the Baccalaureate service in the morning, lunch on the lawn (which was interrupted by a midwest gully-washer of a thunderstorm) and then graduation.  That evening we got together with my Aunt and Uncle who had driven over from Kansas.  I hadn’t seen them since my Grandmother’s funeral.

Monday was spent getting David’s dorm room packed out and shipped home.

Tuesday we headed back to St. Louis, but took a round-about way which allowed us to find geocaches in five states in one day: AR, OK, KS, MO and IL.  In the process, we ended up finding regular, virtual, multi, letterbox hybrid and earthcaches, and walking partway across the Mississippi River on the old Chain-of-Rocks bridge.

Wednesday had us flying back to Seattle, and back into the swing of things…only now our empty nest included two young men, and two dorm-rooms worth of stuff.

When Drew headed off to college with his shiny new laptop, he left behind a decent Dell small-form-factor Ubuntu machine with a nearly-new 20″ monitor.  I just couldn’t let it sit and gather dust now, could I?While Ubuntu was great for the boys to do their school-work on, I’m not a huge fan of the UI that was installed on their box. There was a fair bit of free space on the drive, so I decided install Linux Mint in a dual-boot configuration.  Once i got that going, I moved it into the shack to replace the Vaio which was getting a bit long-in-the-tooth.

Items of note:  a) Laptops and desktop machines have different footprints; and b) A 20″ widescreen monitor is a lot wider than a 14″ laptop screen

These items led to the inevitable re-working of my entire operating position.  Before, the rig was to the left and the laptop was to the right.  Now, the monitor is to the left, the rig is to the right, and the computer itself is on the next shelf over.  Of course these changes also required the re-routing of a number of cables.  Which in turn caused me to pull a bunch of stuff out and re-arrange other parts of the shack.  You know how these things are…

I got the physical setup the way I wanted it, and then needed to get the software working to my specifications.  I’ve had CQRLog working pretty much all along, but it wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I got FLDigi talking to my rig.  This afternoon I got FLDigi and CQRLog talking to each other, and TQSL installed, so I think I’m ready to roll.

The one thing I’d like to do before the weekend is get the N1MM contest logger working under WINE, as the ARRL DX Contest is next weekend.