I meant Amateur Radio Operators that are Astronauts. Ever since Owen Garriot, W5LFL, flew aboard STS-9 in 1983, there have been a series of Ham Operators aboard the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. There were also Russian Hams aboard the MIR space station and Hams from a number of countries have been up in space on the various flights.

You may have been aware of this fact, or this might be the first time you have heard of it. It was a publicity coup for Ham Radio and NASA was fully in support of it. In fact, it couldn’t have happened without their support.

Having Ham Radio represented and operated from space is a great publicity tool for NASA. It also could be used as a backup communications system in the event of serious malfunction aboard the spacecraft. I’d hate to see things go that wrong – I’m sure they have other backup systems, so it would have to be the third or fourth or fifth resort – but it really could be used in that capacity.

So this is a good thing, right? A win-win for Hams and NASA alike, right? Well, maybe.

At the time Owen flew in space (STS-9 was his second flight, but the first for Ham Radio) there were only a few Astronauts who held Ham Radio licenses. But suddenly, lots of new Astronauts were getting their licenses, often just before their scheduled flight.

Now, a Ham license is not the hardest thing in the world to get. A reasonably intelligent and motivated person can do it with a few weeks study. Intelligent and motivated are certainly attributes that apply to every Astronaut, so it seems they would have no problem.

So what’s wrong with that? Well, nothing, but there is a big difference between an Astronaut who also happens to be passionately involved in Ham Radio and an Astronaut who adds getting a license to the (long) list of skills he has to master in order to fly. Clearly, there was some pressure from NASA to get Astronauts licensed.

No doubt, some of them found it to be a hobby that they embraced. But I’ll bet the majority of them, once they made their token number of contacts from the ISS, probably never touched a Ham Radio again. Parading Ham Radio alongside NASA was strictly publicity, and really had little truth behind it.

I was involved with one such operation from space. In 1995, William Gregory, a native of Lockport, flew STS-67. Naturally, there was a huge buzz about this in Lockport and people wanted to do something with it. People contacted people and someone came up with the idea that “wouldn’t it be great if the Astronaut in space could talk to a student back home in Lockport?”

Well, that’s what happened and someone at the Board of Education contacted someone they knew who was a Ham, who contacted other Hams in Lockport and finally, it got back to the local Ham club. It was decided to offer to teach a Technician class license course at the High School and help out with setting up a QSO (conversation) with the Shuttle.

So, a bunch of us who were involved with license classes and Volunteer Examiners, set up a class and taught it at the school. Students were recruited and a nice class was held. We managed to get a handful of them licensed in time for the flight.

Well, it was a media darling. Everyone wanted to get a piece of it. Somehow the cable company got to be a sponsor as well as NYNEX (now Verizon) along with, I believe Pepsi. Why Pepsi? No idea, but they donated a bunch of banners.

Now, you can imagine how complex a problem it must be to talk with the Space Shuttle using Ham Radio. Frequencies have to be pre-arranged. Orbits have to be plotted, and antennas aimed accordingly. They have to track the shuttle as it moves across the sky. We checked and, on the day of the planned demonstration, there was a good pass overhead that could provide a window of opportunity of 15-20 minutes to talk with the shuttle. All we had to do was to be allowed to set up the equipment.

So what happened? Well, it was broadcast over the cable company’s local access channel. The actual radio link from the ground to the shuttle was done somewhere in New Zealand or Australia and fed into a telebridge and piped into the school – to the PA system in the auditorium, and to the cable feed – by the phone company. There wasn’t a radio in sight. Sure the kids were trotted up to the microphone to ask their pre-prepared questions, but there was no need for a license.

What did this do for Ham Radio? Other than a general feel-good publicity event on a most general level, nothing for it in Lockport. The kids who studied and worked hard to learn the material for their licenses didn’t get to use them. One or two may have stuck with it on their own, but most of them lost interest. It got some play in the paper for a few days, but mostly was forgotten quickly.

Bill Gregory? He retired from NASA and is a VP for a company in Arizona. I am unable to find a current Ham license for him today. The callsign I believe was assigned to him, KC5MGA, expired in 2005, ten years after it’s initial grant in January 1995, just a few months before his flight. He never renewed it.

So why bring this up now? I don’t know. Every now and then someone trots out the fact that there have been Hams up in space as if it’s some great thing. I probably saw something watching Hamnation, an online video show about Ham Radio.

I get frustrated by some of the people on that show. They feel like they must do everything in their power to show Hams and Ham Radio in the best light, so all they do is talk in glowing terms about the most positive things and anything else is ignored. They have such a case of rose-colored glasses, it’s sickening. You’ll never hear them say anything bad about anyone or anything connected with Ham Radio, even if it is deserved. And they regularly bring up Hams in Space as if it was the greatest thing ever for Ham Radio.

To be fair, it’s not a bad thing, but it’s probably done more for NASA than it has for Amateur Radio. Allowing Hams who were aboard the Shuttle or Space Station to operate there as a publicity event as well as a recreational outlet for them would be good. Manufacturing Hams out of Astronauts in order to get some extra publicity, is not.

This week I took a trip to St. Louis and back for the FIRST Robotics World Championships. I went to support our team, The Warlocks Team 1507 and to volunteer my services as a robot inspector. Yes, I am a certified FIRST Robotics Robot Inspector, but that’s a story for another post.

I used my phone as my GPS navigation device on this trip as well. My Magellan would have done the job fine, but after a couple of years, the data could be out of date. Google Maps usually doesn’t have that problem.

So I stuck the arm and holder to the windshield with the suction cup and after a couple tries got it to stick. It stayed the entire trip once it stayed up. It’s still there…

The cigarette lighter cord supplying power, I ran it non-stop. It actually worked very well. There were times I dropped out of the NAV part to use some other part of the phone (Don’t tell anyone, I tweeted to the team’s Twitter hashtag a couple of times and even checked in on Foursquare at a couple of interesting places. I don’t know if anyone followed my Glympse post, or if it worked, I can’t seem to figure if there is a way to replay it after the fact.)

I had two Bluetooth headsets – earpieces, actually. I found my missing BlueAnt T1 in a jacket pocket. It’s the first one I had and really like it. I’m glad I found it. I also had a Jawbone model. They don’t make it anymore and I can’t find the information on their website, but it was called the Prime. It’s bigger than the Icon, which I also have.

Here’s the deal on the bluetooth earpieces.

I really like the BlueAnt T1. The battery life is great and lasts all day. It charges with the same connector the phone uses, a micro-USB. It is noise-cancelling, something I haven’t tested or have a strong opinion on. The only downside is it just isn’t secure. I am afraid to wear it without the little ear-hook because it spontaneously pops out for my ear and would go flying if not for the hook.

None of the ear cushions that come with bluetooth earpieces are any good. I don’t know why they can’t engineer a simple thing like that, but they all come with multiple sizes and shapes of interchangeable rubbery things that just don’t work.

Well, it’s not easy to come up with something that fits everyone and is secure in a greasy, slippery place like your ear canal, you might say. But someone has done just that. The Umbo Earbud is exactly that. It’s a one-size-fits-all solution that sticks in your ear comfortably and securrely and is cheap. Less than a pack of replacement from the manufacturer of the earpiece, in fact. I love them.

Unfortunately, the Umbo doesn’t fit the T1, so I have to stick with the ear hook and the one size pad I still have left.

The Jawbone models do work with the Umbo Earbud. I can wear the Prime, which is a larger unit with the Umbo and it stays in my ear and I can forget about it. It worked great with the Icon, which is smaller, even better. Unfortunately, the Icon went through the wash and no longer functions…

The Jawbone Prime is a simple earpiece. Stupid, in fact. It was a chore to get to connect up with the phone, requiring several attempts. (The BlueAnt would be about the same procedure, but they have a little smartphone app that does it for you in a jiffy.) Once linked up – paired is the official term – it works fine. In fact, it just works, and works and works. No worries. But where the BlueAnt talked to you and took voice commands (“Call from Joe. Accept or Decline”) the Jawbone has only one button, a smooth surface that you have to feel for a crease in the plastic and press to operate. It is used for everything, from power on/off to answer/hang up, etc. Everything else is done on the phone. The is, technically a second button, similarily hard-to-find that supposedly turns on/off the noise cancelling feature. Why would you want it off?

Battery life is similarly good, lasting longer than I never needed. The Prime has an odd charging connection, though. It uses a little cup-shaped piece of plastic that the end of the earpiece fits snugly into assisted by two little magnets. It works, but if I ever lost the cable, I’d be screwed. The other end is the standard USB A connector and can plug into your laptop, or one of those cigarette lighter-to-USB things. Or the AC adapter that comes with it.

The Icon was similar, but used the standard micro-USB end for charging. It was also noise cancelling and if I recall, was a little smarter in it’s communication with the phone. But it’s dead now, so I can’t remember for sure. I liked it, though. It was right-sized and with the Umbo earbud, a nice package. So nice, I stuck it in the fifth pocket on a pair of jeans and washed them…

Another odd thing I found out. The BlueAnt played the voice from the Navigation through itself. The Prime didn’t. That was kind of odd to me. Why wouldn’t the Prime do the same thing? I know, it’s different parts of the Bluetooth standards, but why on earth would they not incorporate that into the Prime? Sure, it’s a crappy way to listen to music, but for the nav, why not?

Voice navigation in the car annoys the hell out of me, and I always turn it off, but oddly, when it’s private, in my ear only, I don’t find it so. I actually like it.

My phone itself, a Verizon HTC Incredible that’s a few years old now, also gave me it’s share of annoyance. For some time now, it’s been showing an error message that claims it is low on memory. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you how to fix the problem. Or even what type of memory it is low on. I switched to a larger memory stick thinking I could move things out of the phone. It didn’t matter. I cleared caches on programs I wasn’t using. I uninstalled programs. I looked at what programs used the most memory. Nothing helped and nothing online told me a thing other than lots of other people were having the same problem. Eventually, it started crashing and shutting down in the middle of some programs.

It also kept advising me there was a system update. (Great, maybe it will fix the mystery memory problem.) It would pop up a message saying it would install it and I’d have let the phone reboot. I has three choices, Yes, install it, Install it later, or More information. No way to decline it.

I installed it and waited for the reboot. It promised one, but nothing happened. I rebooted manually myself. It came back and told me there was a update available. (Another one, or the same one?) If I declined to install it, (Later option) it nagged every hour or so.

This endless cycle of promising an update that never rebooted to finish it’s installation was also unacceptable. More online inquiries also turned up nothing but lots of other complaints about it.

Since plenty of people were unhappy with the support from Verizon on this matter and the lack of any fix for it, I turned to my Android expert, my son. He advised the way to go was to “root” the phone, get out from under Verizon’s shadow and use the open source Android software. After this trip I handed him the phone and in a couple hours he handed me back a new phone. Well, that’s what it felt like. He got it all fixed up and updated with some magic that I don’t want to spend the time to learn. It involved downgrading the firmware to an older version before rooting it, then installing the latest Android version over that. There is probably much more to it, but he’s the expert and did it like it was nothing.

As I said, it’s like a new phone. It’s a clean slate and I have to go through it and reinstall everything I want on it, re-set-up a lot of those programs with accounts. I have to find the backup of my address book and import that. Right now I have about six people. But it’s working great so far and no nagging messages.

It’s a long story, so I’ll write it here. Too long for Facebook, which seems to get all my blogging attention these days. (Damn you FB!)

One the one hand it’s free. Free as in gonna cost you a lot of money, free. It’s an Acer Aspire 7736Z and it’s a beautiful laptop. Big screen in the desktop-replacement class. Too heavy to lug around, but nice to look at. It was given to me. It was also a basket case.

It was my wife’s laptop. She had it for about 2 years. Never took it anywhere, just used it on the kitchen table with the occasional trip to the living room. One day it started complaining about a low battery, but it was plugged in. Okay, bad charger, or cord. We’ve seen that before.

I looked the power supply over. It gave every appearance that it was working. Power measured at the plug was what it should be and the jack on the laptop looked and felt okay. Yet the battery would not charge and eventually, the laptop shut down and would not run.

Somewhere here, WordPress ate about 20 paragraphs of the story that I’m not going to rewrite. I don’t know where it went and can’t find a revision to revert to that has them. It’s just the kind of luck I’ve been having on this computer.

The short version of the story is: a local repair shop couldn’t fix it. Said the motherboard was bad. Did some research and found it was a common problem with this model. Opened it up to see if I could fix it. Decided against it. Found a guy in Brooklyn on eBay that fixes them and took a $120 chance and sent it off to him. Got it back. Put hard drive back in and found out hard drive was bad. $100 later new hard drive arrives and the restore discs refuse to work. The optical drive refuses to read any DVD-R discs, even though it made them. Hook up external drive, restore the computer and install software. Clean off crapware. Get ready to enjoy the large screen with a certain program I need all the screen space I can get – LabView, and that won’t install.

So the long story shortened is, I’m still using my old laptop…

Cell phones have become a fact of life, though. A necessity that we can’t live without. So we pile on features to make us think we like them. My phone is a camera, a web browser, an email client, a personal assistant, a toy and lastly, a phone.

The funny thing is, it’s not very good at any of those things…

I just ordered a bluetooth earpiece. You’ve got to have one or risk a ticket in your car if the phone rings. I don’t talk much while I drive, but it is safer than even the corded earpieces on the rare occasion that I do.

The problem is, it’s the third earpiece I’ve bought. I haven’t found one yet that I really liked. Every one has been a problem. They are uncomfortable. About as comfortable as if you put a clothespin on your ear. And less secure. Even with the hook around your ear, I’ve had them fall out. None of them are loud enough, especially while driving. The last on I had was so smart I couldn’t use it. It was supposed to have voice commands so that all I needed to do was talk to it. All I ever got out of it was “Say a command.” My phone has voice recognition as well. I never knew which one I was talking to and never did get the commands memorized. You shouldn’t need to learn a set of voice commands to make a phone call.

So did I get rid of them because I didn’t like them? No. I just ignored the voice commands and dialed all calls on the phone. That kind of defeats the purpose of having the headset while driving, but I just pulled over to dial. Answering was okay, when I could find the button to press by feel…

No the reason I just bought a new one – I lost the last one. I can’t walk around like a Borg with it on my ear all the time, so I take it off when I get out of the car. I end up sticking them in my pocket. Usually along with my keys. The hook that goes around your ear is like a grappling hook to keys and I guess I lost it pulling the keys out of the pocket later. It’s twice now that his has happened and I’m getting tired of it.

My last one was fancy – voice commands and noise cancelling etc. – a mistake I won’t make again. From now on, since I’m going to lose them anyway, I’m getting the cheapest I can find.

I’ve found that the cheap way to buy cellphone accessories is online. The stores, even the kiosks in malls, really live off the markup on the accessories. $30 for a car charger? Or a new battery? Not in my budget. Battery life is an issue with my new smart phone, so I looked for another one. The result? Another battery and a charger to charge it without putting it in the phone for $12. Sure, it came from China, but so do the ones sold in the shops. I just cut out the middlemen.

I don’t know what inspired me to do it, but I have undertaken the construction of a portable antenna for my Ham Radio operations. Probably just for something to do, or curiosity to see if such a small antenna can really be effective.

I usually use some method of shooting a wire up into tall trees for this type of operation, camping or just operating “Field Style” for fun. I’ve been pretty happy with the fishing-reel-on-a-slingshot method and I built a Pneumatic Launcher that can be very effective at putting a line over even the tallest of trees. I’ve also acquired some telescopic fiberglass masts (fishing poles) that work quite well as supports for vertical wires. But this design caught my eye and I decided to try it and see.

The idea come from a web page that I saw mentioned on the QRP-L email list: VE3GAM. There are commercially-made antennas that are similar, but this looked easy to make. It might be fun to try.

The idea consists of a shortened dipole on a portable mast and tripod that can be disassembled when not in use. The central portion of the antenna is built using a plastic electrical box and some aluminum tubing. Loading coils are made out of plastic PVC conduit and tapped for the various bands. Further tuning from band-to-band is done by varying the length of the ends of the dipole, which are made out of long telescopic whip antennas. Think of rabbit ears or a transistor radio antenna, but longer.

The materials were an eclectic collection. I wasn’t going to find them all in one place, that was for sure. I started researching where I could acquire them online and once I was certain I could get them, began ordering the parts. My first assumption about what would be hard to find and what would be easy was pretty much 180 degrees out of whack, as usual.

I was concerned about finding a small quantity of the aluminum tubing. I envisioned having to buy 20 foot lengths and paying an outrageous amount for shipping such a large item. It turned out to be no problem. I found an outlet online that would not only sell me exactly what I needed, but would cut it to length and ship it to me. When I got to the shipping part, they had an option to pick it up at the nearest store. Even four-foot lengths were going to cost me $24 to ship, so I checked out where the closest store might be. It turned out to be in Buffalo. I can drive to Buffalo for a lot less than $24, even at current gas prices, so I did and combined the trip with a stop at Harbor Freight for a tool I would need, a pipe threader to groove the PVC for the coils.

7 Band Portable Dipole Antenna from Bob Rice on Vimeo.

Some things I thought would be easy weren’t, of course. The PVC plastic electrical box for the center of the antenna was something I thought I could just walk into Home Depot and pick up. Of course, it wasn’t. I ordered one online from Grainger, along with a few minor hardware things, nuts and bolts mostly. They were delivered very quickly. The box turned out to be useable, but just fit. The video warned about boxes where the conduit openings were too low to clear the bottom of the box. This one was useable after I ground out a few bumps in the plastic. I got lucky. The video showed one that was totally unuseable.

A source for the telescopic whips was given in the video, but no longer carried them. I found I could order some slightly longer (Longer is good. Shorter would be a problem.) ones from the Ham Radio standby, MFJ. They had a larger base (3/8-24) and had a male end, rather than the female end on the ones in the example, so I adjusted the purchase of bolts to fasten them to the ends of the coil. I would use some coupling nuts to joint the bolt to the threaded end of the whip. Another item I could pick up at Home Depot. Not! They didn’t carry the fine thread, only 3/8-16. I had a online source and resigned myself to waiting for them to arrive. On a hunch, I went to Sears Hardware and I found two of them in their nut & bolts department. They were charging over $3 each, but I had them in my hand now. So I was ready for the whips. Of course, I got an email from MFJ telling me they were on backorder and might take two weeks to arrive….

It seems like every step of the way there is some problem that challenges the completion of this project. Of course, this is not unexpected. In fact, it’s kind of the challenge that makes these projects interesting. The change to the 3/8 bolts to attach the whips meant that the plugs that fit inside the end of the coil forms won’t be large enough. No problem, I’ll use a PVC cap that fits over the end instead of inside. As soon as I can find some. All I can find are threaded, no press and glue caps in Home Depot. I may just use the threaded ones, now that I have a pipe threader. I’ll just thread the 3/4 PVC. I already threaded the entire length of it to form grooves for the wire coil, but with a 1-inch die shimmed down a bit. It just made shallow grooves for the wire, but the full pipe threads should line right up.

The article called for some 10-24×15/16 standoff spacers in the box to attach the aluminum pipes. The closest I could find was 10-32×1. Not a big difference and I should be able to make them work, but that changed all the small hardware from 10-24 to 10-32. There was so much to get right before I ordered anything at all. Even wire had to be ordered as it required 33 feet of 20ga. wire for each coil. More than I had around, but less than a full spool by a lot. I found a place that sold a 160 ft. roll. Perfect, but I’m still waiting for it to arrive from a small place that looks like a CB repair shop.

But progress has been made and as the rest of the parts arrive, it will all go together. I’ll let you know how it works when it is done.

The commercial equivalent product (seen here) costs $400. I’m well below that, but already more than I expected to spend. We’ll see how badly I do in that department later as well. But the fun is priceless!