Week of 9th August, 2010

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Monday, 9th August

New fortnight starts today - another noon-to-midnight shift, this one swapped from an early.

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Tuesday, 10th August

Quiet days... Short-form work was thin on the ground, but programmes were there to be done - including lots of audio uploads. The slowness of import to and export from Final Cut has been speeded up by moving the routes from the most congested node on the Central Content Server (CCS) to a less busy one. And such moves are, indeed, quicker. But we still need a fix for slow audio uploads - the 20-odd each day seem to take just as long as before. Admittedly, this does require a recover-from-archive, a copy, merge in the audios (up to 5 of them) and another copy, before we can check the result. And hurling 10GB packages around is slow - especially when world+dog is fighting for the same node on the CCS. But then, nearly every file transfer goes through that CCS. Different parts of it, maybe - it's segmented by function - but every transfer goes through it at least once.

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Wednesday, 11th August

Start of Ramadan

Now that the UK airshow season is well-established, and the Vulcan has been appearing regularly, I'm planning another trip to watch XH558 display. Venues of choice are Bournemouth the weekend after next - which is free (sweet!) or Dunsfold (for pay) the following weekend. The latter is a Bank Holiday, so the display is Sunday and Monday.

It would be a bonus to see the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight as well, which would be Bournemouth on the Saturday, or Dunsfold on the Monday. And I won't make the same mistake as I did at Cosford last year - I'll take a hat, and copious sunblock.

All this presupposes good weather, and that's a bit iffy at the moment. Heavy rain yesterday, and more forecast for Friday, it seems.

I've looked up the comms frequencies, so now comes a programming job - gotta get those frequencies memorised on at least 3 rigs. That would be the Uniden UBC3500, the Yaesu VX8R and the Icom IC-R5, at least. Plus I'll need the Eton E5 for show commentary - which is on a medium wave (Merkin: Broadcast) frequency: 1359 kHz AM. I say Medium wave, because in ITU Region 1 (Europe, North Africa and the Middle East) we have a broadcast allocation at 148.5 to 283.5kHz. We call this "Long wave".

Later: And the Bournemouth common day is Saturday. But I can't do that - Katy flies out to Egypt then. Drat! And double drat! Although XH558 and the BBMF both plan to appear nearby, at Shoreham, on the Sunday. But that's another for-pay venue. Planning ahead, that's 3 sets of frequencies to load into the 3 radios.

Katy has a weekend in Spain with a friend, starting this coming Saturday, returning next Tuesday. I'll drop them at Brent Cross, where a shuttle bus to Luton airport has a pickup point, before I go to work. Luton (LTN) is another soi-disant "London" airport, it's 40 miles outside the city, as is Stansted (STN) Gatwick (LGW) is almost as far south of London as LTN and STN are north. Strictly, only London Heathrow (LHR) and London City (LCY) are sufficiently close to London to count as "London" airports, as far as I'm concerned. But if you're flying no-frills or charter, the best you'll get is LGW - mostly it'll be LTN or STN. Katy's flying RyanAir - definitely no-frills. Pickup on Tuesday will be from Luton, in the afternoon.

And then she flies to Egypt on the 21st - British Airways from LHR, if you please. Her heavy luggage has already gone, courtesy the laid-on freight flight from "oop North". And someone did collect the boxes from us, so that's good.

Simon and family return tomorrow from Sardinia, flying in to LGW in the afternoon. So I will be there to collect - Hopalong willing.

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Thursday, 12th August

So, today I started on programming the Uniden 3500. And after spending an hour or more adding the 8 frequencies listed for Gatwick (ahead of Simon's return) I'm not doing any more on the rig - it's way too much work. But this is what computers are for. There are several applications that will programme a Uniden rig, among which are the official for-pay Uniden app, by BuTel (which is allegedly user-unfriendly and unstable) and BCTool by Rob Parker, which is freeware. The current release stands at V1.4r1, and is perfectly functional. It needs WIN95 or higher, although the upcoming complete rewrite will probably not run on anything less than WIN2000.

Of course, UBC3500 programming requires a working serial port - USB or native, either will work. The programming cable has a D9E female on one end, to mate with the standard PC serial port. I could use stinker for this, but I'd prefer to have a dedicated machine for all the radio programming work The Itronix GoBook would be ideal - he's a WIN2000 machine, and has a hardware serial port. So let's see if he still works - not having been fired up since I bought him.

And he does. Windows automatic update works - WIN2000SP4 seems still to be supported. Nothing earlier though. But even though the Windows Update site says IE5.5 is still supported, I can't get any updates - error 0x800C0002. And I cannot find any explanation of that error code, although I suspect that I need IE6 or higher. Not that it matters - the Itronix pulled down 90+ updates automatically, and installed them.

Meanwhile I tried to add antivirus. And AVG9 doesn't install - WIN2000 not supported, please upgrade. So I need free antivirus, that will install on WIN2K. Any ideas? Then I downoaded, and installed BCTool. Plug in the cable, invoke BCTool, and there's the scanner. Upload the programming from the radio, save it, and I'm done, for the moment. I'll add in the other places I need later. Not too much later, but later.

Between the two sessions described above, I drove down to Gatwick to collect Simon and family. I had the UBC3500 with me, and I could hear Gatwick Approach and Tower, but I missed hearing Simon's plane. Possibly because I'd made the mistake of loading Gatwick ATIS into the scanner.

ATIS (Air Traffic Information Service) is a continuously-repeated broadcast of airport-local weather and operational matters, such as the landing runway. And when I say continuous, I mean continuous. It's a 24/7 transmission, regularly updated. And if a scanner hits that, it'll stay there, and never move off it. So I've left the frequency programmed, but locked it out of the scan pattern. I can select it manually, but the scan will never hit it.

And all that works.

But when I try to get the USB drivers for the G4ZLP MultiFace, so that I can programme the FT8900 in the car from the Itronix, I end up staring at a blank page - after a brief flash of the actual page, it redirects to a blank - and when I try that in Firefox from stinker, AVG warns me of a possible exploit. This is Ungood. But it's too late to do anything about it now. I'll send e-mail tomorrow - I have Neil, G4ZLP's, e-mail address in Turnpike.

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Friday, 13th August

But now I come to think of it, the Itronix doesn't have externally accessible USB. So the 'ZLP Multiface will not be usable. But I do have a Tigertronics interface that has a serial port connector, and plugs into the 6 pin miniDIN that seems to be a defacto standard for data ports on Japanese rigs. If I can put my hand on it... Or there's G4ZLP's CT-29B RS232 cable. That'll be the FT8900 sorted. I have the pukka Yaesu lead for the FT817, and Ham Radio Deluxe will control, but not programme, that, so again I'm good to go.

And G4ZLP has fixed the redirect to a blank page bug on his website.

The only thing left is the Uniden UBC785 base/mobile scanner. This is programmable via a D9 serial port, but again the pukka software is by Butel. There is freeware for control - Uniden Commander - but not programming.

At work tonight, while rendering programmes in Final Cut, I typed a bunch of radio channels into BC Tool on the Itronix - all the airband frequencies for any airport or airshow I'm likely to need to visit in the foreseeable future - except Dunsfold. Couldn't find any data for that.

Turning from the sublime to the merely mundane... All shortform work, and that not much, completed - barring 6 promos with aspect ratio errors, and a few more with text caption errors. They're on the shelf for fixing on Monday. So for the rest of the weekend it'll be FCP work all the way.

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Saturday, 14th August

Got Katy and her friend Andrea to Brent Cross to catch the shuttle bus to Luton for their flight to Spain - Reus, Barcelona (REU) if you please. Return flight departs REU 22:30-ish Tuesday. And I have the pickup from LTN - midnight or later, plus the best part of a 1 hour drive each way. The handheld scanner is programmed for LTN, so that's a start.

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Sunday, 15th August

And so it proved. Sufficient jobs completed, but I make no doubt that the powers-that-be will want more... 'Twas ever thus.

Since the failure to start problem with Nicole, an annoying intermittent fault seems to have gone away. This manifested as a flash of the temperature warning light on the dash, with no associated twitch of the temperature gauge, and a brief stumble from the engine, as of loss of power. It didn't seem to cause any problems, but was annoying. It seemed to be made worse by driving over bumps and potholes (of which there are an increasing number, both intentional and not - but don't get me started on that rant)

It would now seem that the problem was associated with the ECU plug. After the re-cable-tieing all seems to be well... No, GO AWAY, Mr. Murphy...

The Windows Update error on the Itronix may well be due to an expired security certificate from Microsoft - after all IE5.5 is antediluvian. Search for the error code on Google, and the third hit has a recipe for the fix. I've not done it yet - the Itronix seems to be up-to-date - RSN.
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