Redhatter’s Web Blog

People who know me, will know I’m quite a keen supporter of open source projects. I’m not nearly as fanatical about it as others, such as Richard Stallman, but I try to support open source as much as I can.

However, I suppose I’m a much bigger supporter, of open standards, than open source. I don’t mind if a project implementing a standard is proprietary commercial software — if the underlying standards it is built on, are open, that makes it possible for an open source implementation to be created. This gives users a choice — they may choose for various reasons to go for a commercial solution, or they may choose open source, it’s entirely up to them.

Now I realise that many of you will be reading this on planet.gentoo.org, and thus I’m likely preaching to the converted. I’m mainly aiming this at organisations that are completely blind to the issues faced. I’m hoping some of those might see this post.

Some might ask, what’s wrong with closed standards? There are a number of issues regarding closed standards.

• Vendor lock-in: it locks people in to buying from particular vendors, for better or worse.
• Inflexibility: If you don’t know how it works, how can you modify it to make it do what you want?
• Control: Who controls what you do with the application? Or the data produced?

If you’re using some closed system, and you run into technical difficulties, the only people who can help, are the makers of that product. You can’t easily switch to another product, and you’re completely at that vendor’s mercy. Some charge extortionate rates to fix even trivial problems, if they help at all. Now granted, there are some good players out there, and if you strike one, great… but if things change for the worse, you’re stuffed.

The ability to understand how a system works is particularly important. Not just with troubleshooting… but also with experiments. Users of a system may have ideas that you as a company have not even considered. Now if it’s open, they can either modify themselves, or hire someone to modify, the system to suit their needs.

Experimentation in one’s spare time is a great way to learn too — university can’t teach you everything. But if the system is closed, how can they experiment? The ability to learn about a system is greatly stifled, when you can’t play with the deep internals at the protocol level.

Control over what you can do with the data produced by a system is a hassle. Remember that you, as the vendor, do not own the data produced by someone using your product. As far as the user is concerned, it’s their data. If I put an audio or video clip of my own work up on my site (which I have done on occasions), it’s not companies like Fraunhofer, or Microsoft, or Apple that own the content, it’s me. And I want the right to be able to share that clip under my terms.

The only reason why the Internet is popular today, is because of open standards. You would likely not be reading this, had it not been due to open protocols such as IEEE802.11b, OpenVPN, Ethernet, TCP/IP and HTTP, and open formats such as HTML. Look at what happened to Compuserve… The Microsoft Network… AOL… Ring a bell? They were all closed networks, that died out because the open wild of the Internet was more appealing to their users.

It isn’t just an issue in the information technology realm. Allow me to look at the problem in another context. Amateur radio, would not exist today as a hobby, if it were not for open communications standards.

If you look past the obvious social and competitive aspects of amateur radio, you see there’s another aspect, the experimentation side. As defined by the ACMA LCD (I’m sure it’s similar in other countries) …

6. Use of an amateur station

The licensee:

1. must use an amateur station solely for the purpose of:
   1. self training in radiocommunications; or
   2. intercommunications; or
   3. technical investigations into radiocommunications; or
   4. transmitting news and information services related to the operation of amateur stations, as a means of facilitating intercommunication

The two points I’ve highlighted in bold above, are rather important. Put in layman’s terms… if you’re not in the hobby to talk to people, it’s mainly there for experimenting with the technology.

There’s another restriction here too … we’re not allowed to use cryptography, or any kind of secret code, it must be public domain. (e.g. I could, for instance, theoretically use UTF-8 on CW, encoding ones as a dash, zeros as a dot, and using RS-232-like encapsulation. Morse users would get confused however.)

Now suppose FM, for example, were a closed standard — that is, you had to pay some company royalty fees to use them. (Yes, I know that almost did happen way back in the 1930s, but anyway.) How well do you think that’d sit with radio amateurs, who typically like to build homebrew equipment? I don’t think it’d be liked much at all. In fact, if it were secret, it may very well be illegal in some countries. Thankfully this isn’t the case, and even emerging standards like D-Star, are fully open.

Now… back to the IT situation. We can see that a system where the protocols and standards used are fully open, can work. I have to ask why IT thinks it’s special, and insists on closed standards?

Looking at the educational environment … it’s here more than any other place, where we need open standards. How can students be expected to learn about something, if they can’t conduct their own experiments? Experimenting in one’s own time is a good way to gain a better understanding of the topic of study. It’s people graduating from these universities, that will be carrying the industry forward, and I really do think the present industry, should assist by being as open as possible.

Why is it, that universities like inflicting this poor choice of closed systems on its students? Yes, I’m looking at you, Queensland University of Technology, with your extensive use of Microsoft Office, Windows Media codecs (for recorded lectures), Cisco VPNs, Microsoft .NET framework, and numerous proprietary apps/standards.

QUT have a number of labs for each faculty, but also central labs. The central labs have OpenOffice installed, however the labs for Faculty of Engineering, and Faculty of IT, do not. So sure, I can work on some assignment on my personal laptop (running Gentoo Linux of course) — but if I have to email it to the lecturer, I have to either convert it to a PDF (my preferred method), or some have the gaull to ask for it in Microsoft Office formats.

If I comment that I don’t have the money to purchase Microsoft Office, the comment usually is something along the lines of, “Ohh, well you’ll just have to use the computers here.” Yeah well… how about I email my stuff in OpenDocument (ISO26300) format, and see how YOU like walking out of your cozy little office, into the library, and using a computer other than your own to view some file you’re expected to read. Exactly, you don’t like it … why should we be expected to put up with it?!

If that isn’t bad enough, they’ve now dropped using Java apparently for a teaching language. They instead use Scheme for the first years, then go throw them in the deep end with .NET. Way to go for consistency! Probably worth noting that they know nothing about Mono, and expect everyone to use VisualStudio.NET.

I really do think this is highly hypocritical of the university, and it’s an attitude that really disgusts me. Sadly I know they’re not the only ones doing this — some are even worse in this regard. (Then again, some are really open source friendly.) I have good reasons for using the software I do. I at least give you, the choice of using anything that opens OpenDocument formats — which is quite a lot — just sad that your office suite of choice isn’t among them by default. That’s not my fault, and you shouldn’t blame me for that.

I’ve complained directly to them about this before … so I’m now taking this complaint onto the world stage. Don’t like it? Tough.

I try to practice what I preach. One site I maintain, the Asperger Services Australia site, does make use of open standards. Sure Microsoft Office is used internally to write the documents that get uploaded (I’m working on that, give me time), they are converted to PDF. PDF of course is another open standard, ISO32000.

Any multimedia on the site, uses the XIPH foundation codecs Theora and Vorbis. Sure, I get the odd question from a Windows or Mac user about how to play the files, but thanks to the Cortado player applet, and ITheora, I’m able to make the video play for 99% of users out-of-the-box, and cater for the other 1% by allowing them to download the file and play it any number of players that support Theora and Vorbis.

This is handled automatically in most cases, the user isn’t even aware of the underlying architecture. However, if curious, the underlying architecture is open and present for them to look at.

I think it somewhat ridiculous, when looking at science fiction shows such as Star Trek, depicting (fictional) alien craft, produced by completely different lifeforms, are somehow 100% compatible at every layer of the OSI stack. We haven’t even got this today, and every computer on this planet was built by the same species!

I really do think this closed-standards war is hurting more than it’s helping. It’s about time we cut the nonsense, and actually started working together. Protocols and formats, used by systems really should be open for anyone to implement. I don’t mind closed implementations of those standards, that’s fine, but the standards themselves should be open.

Anyway… that’s enough of my ranting… glad to get that out of my system.

I’ve now began building stages for the upcoming 2008.0 release.  This release will see the introduction of MIPS3 stages for little endian targets (ideal for Loongson 2E users).

In addition, I have my O2 compiling the big endian stages, for MIPS4, MIPS3 and MIPS1 (in that order), so this will also see the introduction of generic MIPS1 stages for big endian systems.

I’ll try to provide these where I can, however there’s no guarantee that these generic stages will continue, nor is there any support provided for non-SGI/Cobalt hardware at this time.

Apparently there’s going to be a shake-up regarding the profiles too.  The profiles used in the snapshots are completely different in structure — whether this will reflect what users see in the Portage tree or not, I’m unsure.  I’ll let you know what the deal is there in due course when I find out myself.

Well… I’ve now been on-air for a little over a month. It has been over that time, I’ve made a number of observations, both about the equipment I have, the technologies, and the underlying culture of amateur radio.

Cultural observations…

Since becoming an operator… it’s amazing how many other radio amateurs you see crawling out of the woodwork… it’s like a secret society. For the most part, the house of a serious radio amateur is covered with numerous verticals, dipoles, loops and other assorted types of aerial. Their car often has several whips attached. But if you only know someone via some online means … it’s often surprising when you discover they also indulge in the hobby too.

I’m getting to understand how nets work, and how to participate in the field, the social aspects of amateur radio. Still have trouble catching peoples’ callsigns, especially 7-character ones such as my own. (Believe me … took me a while to get used to saying it properly.) But this is all stuff I’m learning… and I’m quickly picking up how it works.

Station setup…

I’ve got my station reasonably well set up now. A fellow amateur dropped around with a 2m vertical (see left… it’s that big white stick poking through the yagi TV antenna) to stick on the roof, which seems to do a good job on both 2m and 70cm. Eventually I’ll mount this antenna up a bit higher so it is above the TV antenna (presently, there’s apparently a little bit of interference when I have a QSO) using proper mounting brackets, but this does the job for now.

Using BNC-terminated RG58 (surplus from the days when we ran a computer network using the stuff), some T-pieces and 50ohm terminators, I’ve been able to run a feed out to the front verandah of the house where I do most of my work during summer (see right), and another feed into my bedroom.

This works well… my line-of-sight is crap in this part of Brisbane, but with the antenna up high, I’m able to work a couple of repeaters in my local area — namely, VK4RBC and VK4RBN. Out on the verandah, I’ve also got the bonus that it’s nice and cool, with plenty of fresh air, and natural light. 2W of power gets me into VK4RBN reliably… and while the ACMA recently upped the limit on Foundation license holders to 10W on all modes (previously, we were limited to 3W on FM), I still prefer to use only what is required to communicate — I stay QRP where practical.

The equipment…

I’ve mentioned the rig I’m using before… it’s a handheld, a Kenwood TH-F7E. So far, it hasn’t been too bad to use, does everything I want. I use it to listen to and talk with stations on the 2m and 70cm bands, but also, as a portable AM/FM radio (commercial stations), HF radio receiver and UHF CB scanner. Some of the facilities such as visual scanning are really handy. There are a couple of niggles, however…

My biggest niggle with this set, would be its power supply (see left). It’s a wall-wart power supply, designed for the two-pin power outlets used throughout Europe and Northern Africa (Thanks Tim, again :-D). This is fine… you could get a decent adaptor that will take the weight of the PSU, but it seems that’s not how Kenwood do things. They instead, provided this pissy little converter consisting of a 5cm length of cable, with an Australian power plug on one end, and a line socket on the other. I have to rest the thing on the floor to use it.

The stock power supply is underpowered — sure, you can charge the radio with it… but forget transmitting. Plus, notice the toroidal core? I had to put that in, otherwise when tuned to Triple M (104.5MHz WFM), I’d instead hear ABC Classic FM (106.1MHz) and Triple J (107.7MHz). My advice to people buying this radio — get yourself a 12v switchmode PSU, capable of at least 2A. I’m using a 4A one sold by Jaycar, which works — no tuning inaccuracies, no noise, and I can transmit a full 5W whilst charging without the PSU raising a sweat.

The other niggle, is that the power levels are perhaps a little awkward. When powered by external DC power, I can transmit on 5W (high power), 2W (low power), or 500mW (”economy low” power). If I use the lithium ion battery pack it came with, this becomes a choice between 5W (high power), 500mW (low power) or 50mW (”economy low”). On alkaline batteries, it’s even worse: 500mW, 300mW or 50mW. It’d be nice to transmit on 2W when mobile — this was particularly a bad limitation when my limit was only 3W prior to the ACMA lifting this restriction.

EchoLink experiments…

More recently, I’ve started playing around with EchoLink, a system for linking repeaters via the Internet. It’s similar in many ways to IRLP, however has the added feature of being accessible from a computer with an internet connection. The official EchoLink client is a proprietary Windows-only client, however, there are a couple of free/open-source implementations of the client. I tried two… namely:

• EchoLinux (with echogui) — using an ebuild found on bugs.gentoo.org
• Qtel, part of the svxlink suite (ebuild: media-radio/svxlink)

Qtel seems to work quite well, except when idle, it does seem to chew CPU time for no apparent reason. EchoLinux didn’t seem to want to play nice at all, and had many sharp edges. For what it’s worth, the svxlink package in Portage is a little dated now, you’ll find however that renaming the ebuild file to svxlink-080102.ebuild and running the usual ebuild foo.ebuild digest ; emerge foo dance will work just fine. I’m not sure what’s being done to maintain this package — I can’t, as it’s impossible for me to test the sysop functions in it (I’m not permitted to run an automatic station on a Foundation radio license).

The other night I connected to the EchoLink node KB9OHY-R which AFAIK is in the same general territory as former developer cshields — I wasn’t on for long as it was getting fairly late at night… but we may just make contact at some point in the future. (Yes… what was that about not making contact due to being only on VHF/UHF?)

The purists would probably say I’m cheating using the internet to contact people, but hey… in my situation, it’s about the only way I make reliable contact with people outside of Brisbane. And yes, if either one of VK4RBN or VK4RBC were on EchoLink or IRLP, I’d use the network that way.

Anyway… some time at the end of the year, I might look into getting a HF rig. The hamfests are apparently a good way to pick up gear like this, so I’ll wait and see. There’s one coming up in a few months organised by the Brisbane Amateur Radio Club, a club I’m now officially a member of. My big concern is where to put the enormous antennas needed, I suppose I’ll figure that out in due course too.

Hi all…

With the help of robbat2, I’ve released the full LiveUSB Image of Gentoo Linux for the Lemote Fulong, and similar systems. It consists of two parts…

• The kernel image, which can be used alone to boot the system and perform an installation, or rescue an installation.
• The live system image, in the form of a 870MB SquashFS image.

If you just want to install Gentoo, you can download the kernel image on its own, and either load it from a USB disk or TFTP server.

However, if you want a full blown desktop, you need this kernel image, plus the LiveUSB system image, which you’ll find on the mirrors under the experimental/mips/livecd/loongson-2007.1 directory. I’ve pushed this straight out, due to its considerable size. (For me anyway… remember that my ADSL link pushes data up at a whopping 128Kbps… yes… “broadband” in Australia officially sucks!)

To boot the live environment, download both to a EXT2 or EXT3 formatted partition on a USB disk (FAT32 may work, but you’ll need to tweak the URL passed to PMON2000 when loading the kernel). For simplicity, place them in the root of the directory, with the kernel named “gentoo“, and the live system named “gentoo-liveusb.sqfs“.

Boot the Lemote box up and hit DELETE when prompted. You’ll be greeted by a PMON> prompt… Enter the commands as you see below…

PMON> load /dev/fs/ext2@usb0/gentoo
PMON> g console=tty0 liveusb

The highlights…

The following are some screenshots of the desktop in action. The desktop is based on the latest 2007.1 stages, and KDE 3.5.8. When it first boots, you’re greeted by the following screen:

The desktop is provided in two languages, English (UK) and Simplified Chinese — decided according to the account you login as. Both accounts are set up in KDE as passwordless, so just click on the desired account and press ENTER. If you do happen to be asked for a password, the password on all accounts (including root) is gentoo. Once logged in, you’re greeted with a largely default KDE desktop (click to enlarge). The background image is a departure from traditional Gentoo desktops — based on a photo taken by my father whilst camping up at Biggenden.

The latest stable Mozilla browser, Bon Echo (Firefox) is included. Note that due to licensing, I’m not able to use the Firefox branding that people would be more familiar with (click to enlarge). The default homepage and bookmarks have been tweaked to have some useful relevant links for Gentoo/MIPS. The Chinese version links to versions of the documentation in Chinese where available.

Should you have a query, or wish to chat to people whilst waiting for things to install, a full IRC client and instant messenger package are provided.

A full copy of the KOffice productivity suite is included…

Multimedia playback applications such as KMPlayer, Kaffeine Player and Amarok are provided…

And last but not least… if you get bored… Quake II with qmax goodness, is available… (but bring your own game files) Sadly, hardware OpenGL isn’t working yet, but despite this, Quake II is still quite playable.

I’ve been pondering this idea for a while now. When I’m at home, I like to listen to my music… and sometimes, talk to people using VoIP. One big bug-bear I have, however, is being tethered to a desk by the cord of a headset.

Now… I basically have a few options:

• Cordless headphones (either infra-red or radio) — but these usually are receive-only. I’d need to rig up some sort of cordless microphone to transmit a signal the other way.
• Bluetooth headset — but they’re much too expensive, and I have no idea how well Linux works with them.

I’ve heard comments that both of the above options, have somewhat lesser audio quality, than a wired set. Many cordless headphones operating on radio, use stereo wideband FM to transmit a signal with a bandwidth of approximately 15KHz/channel. This is okay for what I want, but if I can do better, I might as well aim for it.

Bluetooth headsets offering the A2DP profile, may do better, but they do it through the use of lossy compression. To be honest though, I’m also concerned with compatibility — I don’t have any Bluetooth interfaces on my computers so I’m up for a dongle. My phone (a Nokia 3310… yes, I’ve had it since 2001) doesn’t support Bluetooth, thus the only device I’d be able to use it with, is my laptop. I don’t have a lot of money to experiment — and headsets of this nature cost around AU$250 or more.

So I’m looking at homebrewing a set. Looking at the ACMA radio frequency class licenses, it would seem these devices are classed under the LIPD class license. I’ll have to double check with the ACMA on this… but looking at the gory details, it would seem there are a few bands that are allocated under this license for this purpose…

• 88MHz - 108MHz (FM broadcast band) with 180kHz bandwidth and maximum EIRP of 10µW
• 174MHz - 230MHz (VHF television) with 330kHz bandwidth and maximum EIRP of 3mW
• 520MHz - 820MHz (UHF television) with 330kHz bandwidth and maximum EIRP of 100mW

Now… out of these… the 520MHz-820MHz band has the most liberal power limit of the three, and is also the least populated of the three bands. The catch is… all three of these have to use FM.

There are three signals to be transmitted in two different directions for this project…

• Two 25kHz audio channels, transmitted by base station to be received by the headset.
• A single 25KHz audio channel, transmitted by headset back to the base station.

For the headset microphone->base station path, this is trivial… I’ll just use one frequency to transmit a 25kHz mono signal, modulated on a wideband FM carrier. Easy. The difficult bit, is the other direction.

Stereo FM is normally achieved through the use of a subcarrier technique. The left and right channels are transformed into two signals that I call the mono signal (left + right), and the differential (left - right). They’re both band-limited to 15kHz. The mono signal is sent at baseband, with the differential modulated using a DSBSC subcarrier at 38kHz. The entire modulating signal has a bandwidth of 53kHz, generated by these two 15kHz sources.

My idea… is to use single sideband to conserve the bandwidth a bit. I’m undecided as to how I’ll transmit the left and right channels, whether I transmit them separately, or using the mono+differential technique discussed earlier. However it’s done… the plan is that one signal will be transmitted at baseband, and the other… using upper-sideband at approximately 30kHz. The entire modulating signal will have a bandwidth of approximately 55kHz, generated from two 25kHz sources. By reducing the bandwidth of the modulating signal, I hope to improve the noise immunity of my system so I can rely on minimal transmission power.

I have covered the principles behind single-sideband transmission, including simulating a Hartley modulator using Matlab. But looking around, I can’t see any schematic or notes on a Hilbert transform. It should be noted that a real-world Hilbert transform is an approximation, since the theoretical one is non-causal — this is why Harley modulators have a compensating delay.

There’s notes on how to implement them using discrete signal processing techniques, but I really don’t want the complexity of a DSP in something so trivial. I know it can, and has, been implemented using analogue electronics. If anyone knows of a simple, easy-to-follow schematic or notes on the topic… I’d be greatly interested.

Looking around I’ve found these documents… but if people know of others, I’m all ears.

• Google Query: phase shift schematic
  • Transistor/Diode Phase Shift Ladders
  • K0JD - Phasing Network Notes for R2 Receiver

Well… since 2007.1 got cancelled, officially, it was decided that 2008.0 would be much earlier than usual to compensate.

A few days ago I had my O2 busy compiling big endian stages — these were based on the cancelled 2007.1 snapshot,  and I compiled them to ensure that we, as an architecture team, didn’t slip too far behind. Those who are doing fresh installs onto MIPS4-based SGI hardware, may wish to look here.  Note that while they are labelled as “2007.1″, they are not official release media for that release.

At present, I’m building seed stages for the 2008.0 release for both big and little endian, and should start on proper stages shortly after a 2008.0 profile is added to the tree.

Due to a lack of manpower, the MIPS port of Gentoo is moving back to being an experimental architecture.  This means, starting with 2008.0, profiles will accept ~mips keywords.  There won’t be any keywords dropped on mass, the plan is we’ll just gradually let the stable keywords disappear over time (the ones that are there, stay, we won’t add any new ones).   Present users may wish to consider setting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~mips” in their make.conf files if they have not done so already.  As always, any breakage, please report it.

The Loongson LiveUSB image that I mentioned earlier — is still in the pipeline.  It too, is marked 2007.1 as it was built with those stages.  It consists of a 870MB SquashFS image, which gets loaded from a netboot kernel.  The first netboot image for Loongson is now available, you’ll find it, and a rough guide on how to boot it on my devspace.  I haven’t put the LiveUSB image itself on my site yet, as it’s a whopper, and I suspect the Infrastructure team will rightfully frown on me distributing it from there.  It’s presently sitting in the staging area waiting to be pushed out to mirrors.  I’ll let you all know when this happens.

Well, so far, people may have noticed I’ve been rather quiet on the Mt. Glorious VHF repeater, much to my frustration. Google Maps in the Terrain view, shows why…

In red, are the mountain ranges in my way. In blue, the attempted path of transmission. The green arrow shows my transmission location.
(Map Source: Google. Map data ©2008 MapData Sciences Pty Ltd, PSMA)

I can get into VK4RBC without any difficulty whatsoever. It’s a UHF repeater, and as it turns out, the rubber ducky antenna on my handheld, is just 10mm shy of 1/4 wavelength at the required transmit frequency (433.525MHz, the wavelength is approximately 692mm). So 0.5W gets in without any trouble. But… the antenna is not efficient at VHF — it’s a lot shorter than the 500mm required for efficiency, and I’m also far too low for my already weak signal to make it.

Now… if I take a bus over the hill to Keperra, I can get into VK4RBN with only 0.5W of power. No problem. However, here in The Gap, the only way I’ve been able to do so, is using my transceiver at full power (5W; 2W higher than permitted under a Foundation license) and I have to practically sit on the roof to get my signal over the range.

Using a 1/4 wavelength dipole, strapped to an old broomstick (pictured right), I was able to get in to VK4RBN. But only just … the signal was weak, and apparently, very crackly. Aiken (regular in #hamradio on Freenode) confirmed this — we could make contact, but only just. Thus it was necessary to construct a better matched antenna, and mount it up high, preferably on the TV antenna mast.

Whilst talking with Grant on VK4RBC yesterday, he mentioned an antenna design commonly called, the “Slim Jim” which can be constructed from a strip of 300? flat antenna cable, often used to connect TV antennas. They are fed with 50? coaxial cable — very convenient for my set — and can be rolled up for storage. So for a portable antenna, they’re ideal.

Asking around in #hamradio, Magne pointed to this site, which explains the theory behind the “Slim Jim”. Apparently it’s one of many forms of J-Pole antenna, which is itself, related to the Zeppelin antenna (used with the aircraft of the same name). They perform pretty much identical to the end-fed folded dipole antenna — in theory.

This afternoon, I wandered into the electronics store, and bought a soldered BNC socket, and 5m of outdoor-type 300? twin-lead cable (Dick Smith Electronics are selling it for about 80c/m, other places may have it cheaper).  About 10 mins of work, and I soon had my antenna constructed.   I soldered it to the BNC plug I had purchased.  The constructed antenna is shown to the left (click for larger image).

For the feedline… we used to run a Ethernet local area network on coax cable, and still had literally oodles of this BNC-terminated RG-58 cable lying around doing nothing.  A small SMA->BNC adaptor on the top of my handheld, and I was soon reaching VK4RBN on the 2m band.

Performance was significantly better than the rubber ducky I had been using.  I still had to use 5W of power, but it got through!  I had some interference trouble at points, the cause is unknown at this stage, certainly my questionable antenna building skills can’t be ruled out, but despite this, I had a around a one hour QSO with Ken on the VK4RBN repeater (a regular on this repeater).  This means I should finally be able to join in with the BARC net on Wednesday nights, instead of just siting back as a spectator.

My one observation –  I had planned to tape the antenna up to a fiberglass rod (originally from a tent — the rods themselves have some cracks in them, thus need replacing) and use that as a mast — however I soon discovered that this particular antenna did not like this kind of treatment.  Doing so yielded very poor signal strength, and seemed to cause the receive frequency to shift — picking up some foreign radio station (not amateur).

Whether the two metal cylinders that link the segments of the rod together are upsetting the EM fields, not sure.  I’ll have to experiment further, but if I let the antenna dangle in the open air, with the matching end up the top — it works fine.

Certainly in future, I’ll have to look at something more substantial, but this at least gets me to the local repeater.