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…

What have I done since then? Let’s see. The robotics team has built another robot. I got my Director’s number on the Geratol Net. I’ve gotten a month older…

That’s about it.

The robot for 2012 is done and looking good. We had relatively few problems programming it, though not totally problem-free, less than last year. The kids doing our programming are doing a great job and what we have is truly a joint project with us all putting our heads together to come up with working code. We looked good at the Penfield scrimmage a couple of days before the end of the build season. Two days of practice and fine-tuning at the Kenan center after that got things really humming.

Our first competition is March 8, 9, 10 at RIT in Rochester. Anyone who can, should come watch and cheer the kids on. It’s as exciting as any sport and it means a lot to have fans rooting for us. It’s free too.

I am now the holder of Geeratol Directors Award #731. The award is for holders of a Geratol number (75-meter, two-letter, Worked All States Award) who then work and exchange Geratol numbers with 100 other Geratol number holders. Sounds hard, but it really wasn’t. I had at one time worked several hundred G numbers, but had not applied for the award. Then I had a hard drive failure and got discouraged. I took a few years off before I got back at it. This past January, I started listening to the net again and checking in. It didn’t take long and I had the 100. I’m well on the way to several other endorsements to the Geratol award, as well.

I’m the webmaster for the net’s web site, so I might as well be active with the group. I haven’t got the certificate yet. It may be sitting at my PO Box. But I received the number via email from the award manager. The first night I checked in with it, it was like being DX. Everyone wanted to work me. It was fun. I haven’t been back again, due to the robotics work, but will be shortly to work on those other awards.

It’s been a mild winter. I’m not sure if there is even any snow on the ground right now. We had a couple inches the other day, but it’s been rainy and windy, so it could all be gone again. I can’t remember so mild a winter ever, but I’ve been thinking of the bike a lot and will probably be riding again before I know it.

So there I am. See you in another month.

When one number called so often and for so long that I started to recognize it on the called ID, I starter to pay attention. I Googled the number and found dozens of web sites about these phone scams and that many people are receiving the same calls. What are they all about?

The consensus is that they are bottom-feeding scammers out to get your personal financial information for illicit purposes. At the very least they provide a worthless service that they charge either your credit card or phone bill for. Not one poster had any information that could be construed as a legitimate purpose for the calls. In fact, it is all but impossible to reach a real representative of any of these companies.

Here’s what I found out through repeated searches on many of these numbers that called me and sorting through the online complaints sites.

1. These often are the same people but they call from different numbers. In fact, you can’t believe your caller ID because they spoof the information. Calling them back is worthless because you are calling some innocent person whose number they have spoofed. One poor guy in California must have ticked someone off and they retaliated by using his number. The voice mail box is full and I’m sure he long ago changed his number. Mostly, though, they spoof 800 or 866 area code numbers.

2. If you listen long enough, they tell you to press 1 if you are interested and want to speak to their representative. You can cut through all the recorded crap and go straight to a live person if you press 1 right away. I did it several times with several of these callers and it works.

3. Don’t bother with the DO NOT CALL list. That is fine for legitimate businesses who follow the law. These scumbags don’t care. How can you report them? They hide their actual phone numbers. They know they are breaking a bunch of laws and don’t care.

4. I talked to a live person once by pressing 1. I told the guy who answered that I didn’t want their service and asked them to remove my number from their lists. The response I was given? “No way.” I repeated my request to have my number removed and started to tell him I would report them to the authorities. He interrupted me by saying “See you tomorrow. We’ll call you every hour” and hung up. Of course, I was bluffing about reporting him. There is nothing to report but a spoofed number. I wish there was a viable way to pursue these jerks legally, but there isn’t a practical way.

5. Call blocking works. After the jerk above threatened to call me, I added the number to my call blocker. This particular call was on my cell phone and I have an Android app – CallBlockerX – that takes care of the problem nicely. My home phone has a call block list built in as well and I use it. There is two problems with that one, though. It only holds 30 numbers (yes, I fill it up frequently) and it still has to ring once to work. Since the numbers are spoofed anyway, they change them frequently.

6. Another time, I received this kind of call on my cell phone. I was in a adventurous mood, so I again pressed 1 and decided to play along and see what I could learn about the scam. I gave vague answers and did not reveal any personal information. The woman on the line wanted to ‘sell’ me something in the worst way and I let her think she had a live one. She kept telling me they were going to help me get lower interest rates on my credit card. I told her I had more than one, which one did she mean? She couldn’t tell me what bank they worked with. She asked me what interest rate I was currently paying. I said don’t you already have that information, if you are working with the bank? She then said that they worked with Visa, MasterCard and Discover, not directly with the banks. I kept playing stupid, but interested and told her I thought one of the cards interest rates was 9.9% She asked what balance I had on the card I had the highest balance on. She said they could work with me if I had more than a $2000 balance. I told her I had $4000 on a card. She wanted the name of the card issuer. I said that she should already have that information, if they got my phone number from them.

This went on and on for at least 5 minutes. My wife heard me from the other room and was laughing. Finally, the woman realized she wasn’t going to get anywhere with me and was wasting her time (exactly my goal.) She said “Good day!” and hung up.

I hope they keep a list of numbers they don’t want to call and add me to it.

7. I received another call on my home phone no more than a couple hours later. I started to do the same thing. I pressed 1 and waited as the extension rang. They finally answered. I heard some background noise and about half a syllable then was hung up on. Was it a coincidence that I had just wasted the other womans’ time, or did they somehow figure out the connection between my cell number and home number and saw it flagged for being a time waster? I don’t know, but they didn’t want to talk to me and hung up. It was not the same number that called my cell phone, but the recording was very similar.

So what conclusion have I come to? There is not much you can actually prove about these calls. They cover their tracks so that they can’t be found and prosecuted, but I have reached some gut-instinct conclusions about them. They call from many numbers, but they are really only a couple boiler-room operations making a huge number of calls all over the country. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been pestered by them. They use technology to dial numbers and play a recording, hoping for a percentage who will respond to their bait. I don’t believe they are calling truly at random. I believe they know who they are calling and that there is a link from a cell phone to a landline number. I don’t believe they have any actual bank information, although they could be operating from stolen records from a business that has been hacked. They could have partial information that led them to you because they know you have a credit card. Or they could just be fishing. I know they don’t care about the do-not-call list, but I believe they have their own way of marking you as undesirable if you waste their time. I haven’t had a call from them in several days now. It used to be multiple times per day.

Some typical web posts about these calls…
Complaintwire.org
800notes.com
Honeypot.net