• Category Archives Life in the USA

  • Weeknotes 4

    Posted on by beno Comment

    * Azimuth tracking
    It’s kicking my butt.
    More to come, but I am struggling with a few too many variables at once.
    Woke up one morning and found it had not moved for a few hours, then started working on its own latter in the day.
    Happened on the same thing on the weekend (trouble is, I have to be awake when it happens, and it seems to happen after midnight) so was able to look at a few things by torch light and my guess seems sound.
    I suspected that when its cold, the 4 volts I am pushing the motor with are just not enough to get things moving. Once things warm up, they start working.
    So, upping the voltage sounds easy right?
    Yeah, nah. Because I was working over such a short stroke, the extra volts results in a lot of hunting back and forth as my (crummy) code tries to hit the set-point with a 50 ohm dead-band.
    To fix this, I put an arm on the top platter.

    This half solved the problem and added 2 more.
    The tracking is now way off and seems to have pulled it lopsided.
    Since the sat takes 24 hours to do its thing, and since I have to be looking at the signal from the satellite to see where it is (I am simply tuning the dish movement for max signal), I can not think of a way to find each end at sane working hours and just set it up then.
    So, I have been getting up at 2:30am to set the bottom and 8pm to set the top.
    Its a slow work in progress.

    * United Airlines flight UA2781
    Showing how all this is oh so worth it, UA2781 made an ’emergency’ landing on Midway Atoll (we believe it was fumes (ie smoke), but reserve the right to change that assumption).
    Since our satcom ground station in Cairns that covers that part of the ocean is up and running with both L-Band (ground to aircraft) and C-Band (aircraft to ground) we were able to sit in our armchairs and follow along.
    It was a great adventure.
    I plan to take a few hours and write up a blog as it was the most powerful yet of how having ACARS and ADSC working together pays off.

    * Node-RED and aircraft data
    I have had 1-2 people ask about my Node-RED code for the aircraft tracking.
    Its been on my mind the best way to share my code, but since its a mess, I have held off.
    But this request on Sunday got me thinking, rather than just share the code, the person was asking for guidance – teaching – on how to go about it.
    They did not want to be handed a fish, they wanted me to teach them to fish. This appealed greatly to me.
    I don’t want to shove my code on someone, I want them to take the ideas and build their own custom aircraft dashboard for their needs and use.
    I have no idea what platform I should use for this idea.

    * Antenna shootout
    Did a quick test of 4 antennas on Sunday.

    It was really just about the patch antennas in the front vs the 3D printed helix antennas in the back.
    I need to do a blog, but the helix won by a pretty solid margin.


    I put a Tweet about it on Twitter and got requests for 3 of them. That makes about 5 I have requests to buy one over the past few weeks I have been testing them.
    Might have to get Terry to print me some more….


    Life in the USA

  • Weeknotes 3

    Posted on by beno Comment
  • Cant or wont follow instructions.

    I have a user adjustable search function on my site, you need to put a semicolon between search words and at the end.
    I have clear instructions stating as much. (Or so I think).
    Its astonishing just how many people don’t read or follow them.
    I wonder how many people leave the site disappointed because they don’t find what they want or they think the site is broken just because they cant be bothered to read?
    I am finding that a lot of late, people just can’t be bothered to read or try. If the answer does not fall into their brains with zero effort, then they just move on and remain clueless (or convinced they are right).
    All of which leads me to….

  • Meet don’t Google. aka, do it for me.

    This has been a week from horror land.
    I have had this experience more and more the past many years, but this week it came to a crescendo.
    People just cant (wont?) solve problems on their own…. aka, figure stuff out. They want others to do it for them. The old saying, they want the fish, they don’t want to learn how to fish.
    Case in point…..
    Installing a Linux package from the command line.
    sudo apt-get install openssl results in package not found.
    The solution? Type out 4 email addresses, open Google calendar, make a meeting. Send email. (Only give vague information about the meeting in the email)
    Scheduling conflict, re do the meeting, send email.
    Scheduling conflict, re do the meeting, send email.
    4 people now on the meeting.
    I suggest did you try sudo apt-cache search openssl?
    It returns openssl-dev as the package name… that seems to install correctly.
    We good now? Sweet.

    If this had been a one off, I would have just shook my head and moved on, but I have had a week of it from several directions.
    Just cant put my finger on it, but as soon as the going gets rough, the people just give up.

  • Twitter.
    Getting more and more into it.
    Found a really cool dashboard for it called TwitGrid.
    Just had to muck about a little and built one of my own. Looks best on a wide screen computer monitor.
    You can make your own by using that template and just changing the Twitter usernames.
  • Radiosonde.
    I bought one off eBay.
    Been wanting one for long time, but did not really have a reason to spend the 20 bucks to buy one.
    Some guy in Las Vegas had the exact model I wanted so I pulled the trigger.

    I brought it just to hack off that beautiful L-Band helix to test on aircraft tracking data from Inmarsat 98w.
    Will report back how it goes.
  • Dual axis satellite dish tracking.
    Big day Sunday.
    Lots more to come on this one, but here is the photo album.
    https://imgur.com/a/Qwdtygh
    Its very much a work in progress. Not the least of which is learning more about the TLE aka how satellite orbits are described mathematically.

    • Life in the USA

  • Weeknotes 2

    Posted on by beno Comment

    * Aussie Movies.
    Don’t get enough of them over here. I mean, you probably can really dig in and search them out, but they don’t pop into our Roku streaming box all that often.
    This past week, one did. Penguin Bloom. It was awsome. Really well shot. North coast just up from Sydney, great cast. Just good Aussie stuff.

    * Geostationary satellites.
    Whom ever named these suckers is probably closely related to the guy that made the analogy that electricity is like water.
    I cant even come close to wrapping my head around the math, and I am not sure I really need to, but I do need to figure out a friendly (aka Node-RED) way to program stuff to track them.

    Red is elevation, up and down. I am currently moving the dish in this axis with a linear actuator.
    Green is the problem child. This is azimuth. Side to side.
    My mate in Australia is more centered under the satellite so is not bothered so much with this axis. I am more offset so need to chase it.

    Got a 24 inch lazy Susan bearing.

    Going to jam it between two bits of wood and sit the dish on it.

    Then I have to figure out how to make it track this….

    Note the drift over 10 days in azimuth. Bleh.

    * L-Band
    Got a new patch antenna from SDR-Blog.
    Its not great on marginal satellites. I am trying to get consistent data from 54w.
    I’m right on the edge of its coverage so am being a bit cheeky getting data from it, but when it comes to aircraft data from satellites, I want it all.
    Ran the new antenna on the ground for a few days. As I said, unimpressed, so I put it on the roof on Sunday.

    At this point I have nothing to lose (Other than the ability to tweak its pointing easily).

    * Dead rat.
    Found (and removed) a very dead rat under the fake rock that houses the seismograph.

    It stank.
    They come and steal food from the bird feeders. We love the birds, so just have to put up with the odd rat.
    I’m tempted to get an air gun and take care of them like that, but we just end up feeding them till they get fat and old and get stuck in places they cant get out of. Bleh.


    Life in the USA

  • Weeknotes 1

    Posted on by beno Comment

    Let’s try this.
    Every week, once a week (specific topic brain dumps exempt) I blog about what I have been thinking / doing the past week.
    Credit due… I totally stole this idea from Nick O’Leary, the author and maintainer of my beloved Node-RED.
    You can check out his weeklynotes (yes, I even stole his title) here: https://knolleary.net/

  • Dish tracking.
    I an idiot. Years ago when I started all this, I attached the linear actuator to a hinge on the dish, its been flopping around all this time.
    As a result of remounting it, I have found the tracking to less than satisfactory. Working on that.
  • You cant control what you don’t measure.
    Wanting to view the dish data in more detail I put together a trend that shows elevation, azimuth and message rate. (And yes, I did the trend in groov View because Node-RED trending is basically broken – It’s not Nicks code)

    Its pretty clear that I have a periodic fade. Who knew.
    Made me wonder about what other data I used to trend in my life and have let slip. If you don’t measure it, you cant control it.
  • Aircraft database.
    I have been struggling with this one since year dot.
    People will openly brag that they have the only accurate aircraft database on the planet, and because its the only accurate one, they wont share it.
    So we are all left to our own devices and scratch around to try and put something together.
    I hand built mine from two, Mitronics and BaseStation.idb. Yesterday I found a third.
    Problem is, some have ICAO as the primary key, some have the Registration as the primary key. The two I have been using have ICAO, the new one, Rego.
    Now I have to modify the MySQL select statement to include an ‘OR’. ICAO or Rego. Bleh.
  • MQTT.
    Oh so handy for pushing data around between different points on the planet.
    Just last night I used it without even thinking about it. Just the way technology should be.
    At the moment my V1 broker is on a Raspberry Pi sitting on a broken fridge in my lounge room. I am mulling over the idea of installing Mosquitto V2 on my Windows PC and using that as the broker.
  • PC-HFDL
    Another avgeek in San Francisco joined the Node-RED clan and helped me with some code to get the data out of PC-HFDL log file and DDE feed.
    We are so happy with the improved decode rate and stability of it vs Sorcerer (that we have been struggling with).
    Its really given HFDL a massive boost in usefulness.
    Now we can really stop and consider the autoswitch code to track the HF propagation and aircraft.
  • Radiosonde.
    I have added a docker container to the system and am now tracking Radiosonde launches and any high altitude balloons.
    https://tracker.sondehub.org/?sondehub=1#!mt=osm&mz=8&qm=6_hours&mc=33.37971,-116.30494&q=K6TBG
    Its pretty good fun.
  • SatNOGS.
    Their software continues to be very unstable/unreliable and I am getting a little sick of the constant crashing.
    I have a bunch of money and time invested in the stations and love the crowd sourced data concept, but its getting tiring keeping it going.

    • Life in the USA 📎and tagged

  • Adding SSL (https) to VRS and Node-RED.

    Posted on by beno 2 Comments

    https everywhere is gaining momentum.
    In my world, that means my website and aircraft tracking apps need to be tweaked so that they work with my SSL certificate.
    The problem is that a few of the apps are either old, abandoned or never really had/have any way to add a certificate or both.
    For no reason, I started with VRS, Virtual Radar Server and Node-RED.
    VRS forums were no use at all. The author simply said it was on his to-do list back in 2015-2017. No updates on SSL that I can find since then.
    Node-RED forums are usually very helpful, this time however, the search results were very sinister, they said that if you are asking about security for Node-RED then you have no business putting it on the web.
    So I was left to stumble around in the dark a good while.
    Here is how I solved it, and rest assured, based on the Node-RED forums, what I have done is wrong, very wrong and you should close this blog and turn off your Internet.

    Stunnel.
    Since Node-RED and VRS (in my case) run on Windows, I needed something that would support that OS. Stunnel checks that box.
    I have a certificate for thebaldgeek.net, so we are ready to go.
    Add a port forward rule on your router (you might already have these in place) for VRS and Node-RED to point each of them to your Windows PC that will be running Stunnel.
    Download Stunnel. Right click on the .exe and run as admin.
    It will walk through the install, part of which is making a cert, just mash enter and get it done, we are not going to use the self signed cert they are making.
    Once you are done, launch the app either from the check box on the installer, or from programfiles(x86)/stunnel.
    Now the fun part.
    I have not found a way to edit the conf file while its running, so I opened Windows services and right click ‘stop’ and then you can edit the stunnel conf file. Right click, ‘start’ the service to apply the settings.
    Remove everything in the text file, its all example stuff that is not helpful.
    Here are the contents of my .conf file.

    cert = TheBaldGeek.pem

    [VRS]
    debug = crit
    accept = 2288
    connect = 2277

    [node-red]
    debug = crit
    accept = 2880
    connect = 1880

    What is happening here?
    VRS port forward rule on my router is incoming on 2288. That’s the port that people from the WWW will find my VRS on.
    Internally, my VRS has its webserver on port 2277.

    Node-RED will accept people from the WWW on 2880 and internally it is listening on 1880 (as per its settings.js file).
    In both cases SSL will be applied to the connection from the global setting of the cert.
    I should add here that you MUST set up your adminAuth in the Node-RED settings.js file. You MUST not allow the public to access your Node-RED editor.
    I need my dashboard to be public, but you can also put it behind a user/pass as well if you like, but yeah, bad things WILL happen if you expose your editor.
    Lastly, the debug = crit is to chill the stunnel log file out. It was logging every mouse click and I could not really see what was going on.

    According to the stunnel readme, I should be able to protect a linux webserver on another PC in my network, but after some 5-7 hours of trying, I cant make it work which is a real shame as I’d love to use the one install / cert to protect all my web stuff.


    Life in the USA