Contact me
My name is Kent, VE4KEH and I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba (EN19kw). I've been a Ham
since the Spring of 2002, first attaining my CW (5wpm) qualification, then
writing the exam for the Basic qualification, and finally writing the exam for
the Advanced qualification by the end of the Summer. I know that is partially
backwards, but I had just been made aware of the CW course offered by the Winnipeg Amateur Radio Club and didn't
want to miss the opportunity. I have since joined the Manitoba Repeater Society
and Winnipeg ARES®. Have a look at my
page in support of the ARES Manitoba Monthly
DIGITAL Readiness Net.
I am an Electronics Engineering Technologist, by training, and work for the Meteorological Service of Canada as a Data Acquisition Specialist. The work isn't that "high tech", but it has allowed me to visit (and operate from) some remote Northern locations.
You can see from my equipment list that I've got modest
equipment. The subsequent addition of the 100W option to the K2 was an
evolution of sorts. However, now that I've "grown up", I still don't have a
typical, well established station - no tri-band Yagi on a tower, no DC to
Daylight transceiver (although the K2 is nothing to sneeze at), no high-power
linear amp and no late model computer running Vista® Windows7®.
We are a camping family; having purchased a Palomino Pony 2100 pop-up trailer in the Spring of 2005. To free us from the grid, I've installed solar panels, almost completely rewired the trailer, installed a true deep cycle battery and a charge controller made specially for solar power systems. Why did I do this? Well, we've found that some of the prettier campsites are non-serviced.
At home, I have been running CrunchBang Linux (Stadler) on an older computer. This was our family computer back at the turn of the century. We have added to our little network; my wife having the newest, fastest Vista® machine, my daughter having the laptop (again, Vista®), my son getting the old family computer (Pentium 4) running XP® and me getting whatever falls out the bottom. Linux has given it new life again, but I think I'll be retiring it soon. I've gotten my hands on a GuruPlug, which has taken many of the server reponsibilities away from the power hungry Pentium 3. The variety of Ham software is more limited in Linux than in Windows, but I think the quality, stability and flexibility of the software is better.
I also have an Acer Aspire 2920. This little notebook came with a 160 MB hard drive seperated into two partitions, a Vista partition and a blank one. I initially dual-booted it, but it now completely sports Linux Mint Debian Edition. What a sweet, polished little distro Mint is! You'll not see this change soon. With the upcoming retirement of my Pentium 3, this will be my main computer.
As I assemble my unholy army of Linux computers, I run into the occasional configuration problem that requires some research on the Interweb to resolve. I'll be posting the solutions here, mostly as a service to myself, but feel free to refer to them if you find they address your problem as well.
Transverters
Antennas
Audio Interfaces
Software