Here’s a picture of the first shack. Coax cables from the antenna weren’t long enough to reach my intended destination, so the gear wound up on a table that just barely reached.

This next photo is my favorite. This was when I was in full swing, getting antennas working, figuring out connectors, working on all the interconnections between things. See why I draw those drawings? No way I could figure out what’s going on without them.

I took this last picture this morning. Tidy. Boring. Yawn…

I don’t ever actually touch the radio, since I’m an Internet-controlled radio type guy.  So here’s a picture of the “real” shack — a screenshot of my laptop running TRX-Manager and talking to the radio over the ‘net.

And here’s a detail shot of what’s actually on the screen…

And finally, here’s a screenshot of the power-strip that can be controlled over the Internet — this is a shot of the little web-page that is used to control two outlets.  One can power-cycle the PC that’s hosting the TRX-Manager session and the other can power-cycle the radio’s power supply.

So there you have it.  The meat-space shack, and the cyber-space shack.

Here’s the recipe;

I used PC Anywhere to get to my farm PC, but that’s only because of stupidly having built the PC with XP Home Edition rather than Pro (which would have allowed me to use the built-in Remote Desktop Protocol, MUCH newer/faster/better). I always start that “layer” first.

Once I’ve connected to the farm-PC desktop, I use a web browser to turn on the radio’s power supply by hitting the little web-site in front of the remote-controlled power strip at the farm. I can do this from either the farm-PC or the remote PC.

Then I launch TRX-Manager and turn on the radio. Now I have control over the radio — tuning, filters, logbook, push-to-talk on the mic, etc.

Finally, I initiate a Skype call from one PC and answer the call with other (doesn’t matter which way you start). Now I have 2-way sound. Most of the time, I’m using this link to listen the radio, but when I hit the push-to-talk button on TRX-Manager I can transmit whatever I say into the mic that’s attached to my local PC.

The Rigblaster is in the mix primarily to scale the line-level audio from the PC down to the mic-level audio that the transceiver is expecting. The Rigblaster can take care of the push-to-talk function as well, but it was simpler for me to just use it in VOX mode and do the push-to-talk stuff with TRX-Manager.

The web-controlled power switch is there to intervene if a couple things go wrong. Problem 1 – what if the farm-PC crashes while transmitting? That could leave the radio in an uncontrolled transmit state, something the FCC would complain about. With this gizmo, I can reboot the computer and turn off the radio. Both good things. Problem 2 – what if Internet connectivity is lost while transmitting? Similarly bad, and now I can’t get to the power switch. But this power switch is smart — it looks at the Internet every 15 seconds and if the Internet goes away for 30 seconds it will power off the radio.

I’m heading to the ICANN meetings in LA tomorrow morning, so I’ll have a perfect opportunity to try it out. I’ve already tested the sound quality on transmit and I think it sounds pretty good. I made a couple of contacts with it, and the folks on the other end thought so too.

Not quite the whole whizbang on-top-of-the-hill gizmo, but a huge step in the right direction.

Boy, it’s really hard to take a picture of a skinny wire against the sky. Sorry about that.

Here’s a picture of my really-ugly balen at the base of the vertical ladder line. I like the limestone-based anchoring system too.

Here are the unassembled bits, collected in my driveway workshop.

Here’s Marcie, getting ready to be lift co-pilot.

Dang! Put the rotor bracket a little too high!

This’ll work better — rotor and mast are all set.

One of the big pluses of tower work is that you get interesting views. Here’s a view of the antenna, all assembled now, lying in the garage workshop ready to be lifted up and attached to the mast.

And, just because I can, here’s a view toward the road from the tower.

Don’t look down!

Ok. Time to get down to business. Here’s the antenna, perched on the lift-bucket.

After that, we got pretty busy and I stopped taking pictures for a while. But a couple hours later we were all set.

And I took a picture of the whole house the next morning.

There ya go. Another big milestone. I’d sure hate to do all that without the lift.

Here are pictures of the tower going up…

This is the beginning of the hole I dug for the foundation. I wound up going about 4 feet deep.

This next one is the “backing boards” I had the lads put on the side of the house. There’s a long story in why I had to redo the house-wrap and siding on a 5-year old house. You don’t want to know. But one of the good things was that it gave me a chance to add these boards to the side of the house, which give me something nice and sturdy to screw the tower-brackets into.

The big day! Here are a couple of the lads taking a break from assembling the tower. We got really good at drilling out the holes in the tower to make them big enough for the bolts to fit.

Another shot — getting pretty close to assembled here.

Putting up the house brackets. This is way easier when you have a lift. I love that lift!

Now it’s time to lift the tower up. We just wrapped a chain around the tower and the lift-bucket and used the lift as a crane. No, you’re not supposed to do this. There are warning stickers all over the lift complaining about this kind of thing. But the tower is only 40 feet tall and really light, so we did it anyway. Nobody died.

Here’s another view…

Truing up the tower and bolting it to the house brackets.

Lookin’ gooood!

Doesn’t look like much here, but there’s a LOT of concrete in that hole now. We kinda lost count, but at least 25 bags. That tower is going nowhere.

A great day. A few weeks to let the concrete set up and it’ll be time to go up and mount the rotor and the antenna.

link to the post

here instead. It’s a pretty long rant (complete with pictures and diagrams) about the security on the TenTec Omni VII — which I consider pretty weak, given that the device is likely to be put on the public Internet pretty frequently. Consider this the ranting of a deranged mind if you like.

Getting call letters for radio stations is what led me into domain-names, which have been a really interesting ride over the years. So this vanity-call nonsense sorta fits into a long-term thread in my life. I was assigned a set of call letters when I got my license a few weeks ago (AC0GY) but I never told anybody about that call because I knew I was going to go for a vanity call as soon as I could and didn’t want to confuse people. Now I can go public! Yippee.

Of course I’ve run out and gotten the domain — www.kz0c.com points at www.haven.com right now, but I’ll probably split the ham radio stuff off to the KZ0C site over time.

I’ve found some sites that will charge a little fee to do the vanity call-sign application for you, but I thought I’d just list the steps here in case you want to do it yourself. I didn’t think it was too bad.

Step 1 — go hunting for a good call-sign

There are two places I looked when I was hunting for my vanity call sign. The first one I found was Amateur-Radio.org vanity call letter page where they list all the active 4 and 5 letter calls. They don’t list 6-letter calls ’cause there are way too many. They also have a lot of useful tips and tricks on that page that I found really helpful in completing the application. Since I wanted a call with “0C” in it, I used the search-text function in my web browser to find calls with “0b” (just before) and “0d” (just after) to see if there were any gaps in the list that implied my “0C” call might be available. Found me a bunch that way.

Next I came across the RadioQTH vanity call-letter page . This one is really handy because it lists all the 4 and 5-letter calls that are available. See that grid on the left side of the page called “Available Calls Sorted By”? That’s the place to click — each of the choices will show a different set of available calls. Again, a little browser-based page-searching for the “0C” string got me a refined list. This page is also helpful in that it alerted me to a few calls that I couldn’t get even though they showed up as available on the Amateur-Radio list — mostly because they are in a two-year wait period.

The last place I stopped, to verify my choices, was the FCC callsign lookup page. This is a part of the FCC Universal Licensing System (which you’re gonna have to use to finish this project). I like the fact that the FCC has put this stuff online. The system’s a little clunky, but it gets the job done and it sure beats the huge paper-processing hassles I went through when I filed broadcast FM licenses back when I did community radio stations.

Step 2 — go apply for the call letters

I did this by logging into the FCC’s Universal Licensing system and heading over to their vanity call sign page. I found the process to be pretty much like any online-store type thing. The FCC suggests submitting more than one set of call letters so that if my first choice was taken by the time they review the application (which mine was — my first choice was KQ0c), they can still grant the call. They charge a fee — I recall it being around $25 — which covers the license for 10 years. Compared to domain-names, a bargain!

By the way, there’s a bug in the FCC’s system. When I typed in my choices, the grid was numbered left-to-right then top-to-bottom. But when I looked at the online “reference copy” of the application, the grid was numbered top-to-bottom then left-to-right. But my choices were in the positions that I’d entered them online. Yikes! I called the FCC and the nice person there patted me on the head, said “there there” and assured me that my preference sequence had been preserved. It just shows up wrong in the reference copy of the app.

Step 3 — bite nails and hope for the best

This is a long tradition amongst people who apply for call letters. It used to drive me nuts back in the community radio days. My favorite story was the first set of call letters I applied for in Madison. I was all set to go with WOMB (in the cradle of the revolution, Madison, WI) until wiser heads prevailed. So we settled on WART (which was available). We submitted the application, nail-biting ensued and dang! We missed that one! I called up the station that got it and asked them why on earth they wanted WART??? They came back saying “because we’re an ARTs station!” I came back with “yeah but don’t you see? you’ve got WART!” They were stunned. But they didn’t want to give up the call so we settled for our second-choice which was WORT.

Now days the nail-biting is web-enhanced because now you can watch your application fight its way through the process, and you can watch all those other people go after the same calls you covet. The place to do all this is the RadioQTH vanity call page, except this time you click in the “Filed Applications” grid on the right side of the page. I think their database is several days behind the FCC’s — I’m looking at it right now and it doesn’t reflect that I’ve gotten the KZ0C call yet. It still shows my application as in progress, even though they predicted the day that they estimated the call would appear in the FCC database on the nose.

So here I am — the proud owner of a really neat set of call letters. I’m going to find out everything I can about the previous holder(s) of this call. The person I’ve found so far is James Bohnsack who lived in Waterloo, Iowa. It seems to me that, since I’m not the first person to occupy this little piece of ham-radio real-estate, I need to honor those who’ve been here before me. If any family or friends of Mr. Bohnsack happen across this little blog entry, I’d love to hear from you!

Updated - maps (aerial, topo, elevation)

Here’s a picture of “the problem”

The farm is a wonderful place, and the house is in a nifty location. South-facing so it gets lots of sun in the winter, huddled in the valley out of the way of the prevailing north winds, close to the water table so the well isn’t very deep, etc. A great spot for a house. But a lousy spot for a ham-radio antenna. The arrow points to a much better spot for the antenna. The question; how to make that work?

Here’s the latest block diagram of The Plan

This’ll change as I get smarter, but it’s a first-try. There are some interesting choices;

- Should there be a PC up there to do the housekeeping on the serial-port, or can I push serial through the transceiver?

I’m going to I was going to use a TenTec Omni VII radio, which can push serial out the back — which may or may not work for controlling the antenna rotor. The cool thing about the Omni VII is that it can be directly controlled via Ethernet, which eliminates a lot of fussiness.  Update: the not-so-cool thing about the TenTec is that there are some pretty hefty security issues, which (along with lower price and better compatibility with the TRS-Mgr remote-control software I’m using) led me to a Kenwood TS-2000 as the transceiver choice.

- Where should the WiFi access point be?

Right now, I’m leaning towards mounting the AP up near the WiFi antenna, to keep the coax run between the AP and the antenna as short as possible. That means either running AC power up the tower, or using power over Ethernet. I’m not keen on having 120v power on a steel tower that I’ll be climbing around on, so I like POE as the solution. Looks like the distance won’t be a problem — max according to the spec is 100 meters — I’ll only be going about 30.

Here’s a picture of the tower

I used to have a wind turbine mounted on this old water-pumper tower. But the whole shebang came down when we moved and it’s been sitting in the weeds ever since. This will be a great chance to recycle this 50-foot tower.

Update - maps

Did me some fooling around with the mapping program tonight. Here’s the result.

This is an aerial view — the red line is between the house and the field where the tower could go.

This is a topographical view…

And this is that same line, but showing distance and elevation. It’s looking like the 50 foot windmill tower would “see” the house, but only with some tree-cutting. A 100 foot tower would be a cool thing. Then I would be at 1300 feet, which gives me a line of sight shot into Eau Claire and Winona. I’ve got a line on a really neat 100′ Pirod tower from my friend Don Overbye.

Here’s a wide-area map — some interesting possibilities. Winona and Eau Claire are about 25 miles, Alma’s around 14 miles and Wabasha’s about the same. Maybe I could get tied into a repeater network or two… Or get me some high-speed Internet access with a microwave shot…

Here’s one of the great maps from the Milwaukee Area Amateur Society site that shows where I set in relation to the repeaters that they’re tracking.

So I took the exam today. Passed all three sections I did, by golly. So today, St Patrick’s Day, 2007, I’m finally in the ham gang. No call-letters yet, but this is the “hello world” post of this amateur Extra type guy.

Since my house (at the farm) is way down in a valley, it’s going to be a while before I actually get on the air. I’ve got a boatload of projects to do — gotta put up an old windmill tower on the top of the hill, figure out antenna-mounting, figure out power and Ethernet up there (might do solar power and long-distance WiFi), figure out remote controlling the transmitter and antenna rotor from down here at the house, etc. The classic ham project. Should keep me entertained for at least 6 months.

Woohoo!