K6EF(dot)Net

Same station, just different band. Best two first log entries in my new logging software.
He was listening on 7148 and I just called him on 7153 over and over until he listened. (boom)

Had to come up to the W6YX station and use 1500W but I got them! This is my first major DX log entry. Now I don’t have to worry about waiting another 20 years to get them.

Now the goal is to get them on 30 and 40 before they shut down on Sunday.

CE0Z is on now (Jan 21 to Jan 28, 2006)

I heard them on 80 but they were way too weak on my wimpy wire antenna. (11:06PM PST) I hope to work them early in the morning. This would be a great addition to my log book.

The Kure Atoll DXpedition is going on right now with just 5 days remaining. For those who need to brush up on their geography, Kure Atoll is 2204km northwest of Honolulu.

You can check out the status and find out what bands and modes they’re currently working by going to their web site

Check it out.

-Mark

This came from an email list that I’m on.

Andreas Ott Says:

Hello,

I finally found all the tools that enabled me to feed a text
file into a set of scripts and binaries under UNIX where I can
make an MP3 file from standard ASCII text. I can now easily
generate books on “tape” at any desired speed.

Once again: this is under UNIX (I happen to use Linux). If you want
to achieve this under Windows, there are programs out there to do
that but I don’t know more details. Google is your friend.

I started with the ‘tomorse.c’ source code and scripts from Jack
Twilley’s web site at [ http://www.twilley.org/~jmt/morse/ ]. To
compile tomorse.c one needs to have the libsndfile library installed
[ http://www.zipworld.com.au/~erikd/libsndfile/ ], I used version
libsndfile-1.0.11-1 :

$ gcc -O2 -lsndfile -o tomorse tomorse.c

Put the binary someplace in your $PATH .

The script then uses ‘lame’ as the MP3 encoder, downloaded from a
sourceforge mirror [ http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/ ].
I used version lame-3.96.1-1 . The encoding is tweaked for small
MP3 file size, with 8kbps sampling in stereo; see the man page for
lame(1) for all the options. ID3 tag options are also included.

Here is a sample wrapper script to encode the file morsecode.txt into
morsecode.mp3 at 700Hz pitch, Farnsworth 20wpm, effective speed 13wpm
with the intermediate step of a .wav file.

#####################################################################
#/bin/sh
#script snippet by K6OTT
FILEPREFIX=/path/to/morsecode

tomorse -p700 -c 20 -s 13 < ${FILEPREFIX}.txt > ${FILEPREFIX}.wav

lame -f -m f -b 8 -s 8 –resample 8 –tt “file name or description” \
–ta MYCALLSIGN –ty 2005 ${FILEPREFIX}.wav ${FILEPREFIX}.mp3

rm -f ${FILEPREFIX}.wav
#####################################################################

Note: I have not tested what results you get when the tomorse binary
encounters an ASCII character on the input that is not in its list of
49 recognized letters, signs and prosigns.

In case you are interested I have precompiled RPMs for libsndfile and
lame available, compiled for i386 on CentOS-4.1 .

May the source be with you.

73, andreas de K6OTT

Appended

The filesize matters: the .wav file must be less than 2 GByte to be
accepted by lame (this seems to be the old 2GB size limit on any single
file). Lame does give a confusing error message if the file is larger
then 2 GByte: it just says ‘file not found’. The corresponding largest
text file that just fit was about 16 kByte large. The resulting MP3 file
is much smaller, of course: about 12 MByte with over 3 hours 20 minutes
playtime. You can easily estimate the playtime of your MP3 by multiplying
the number of Bytes with (5 * words-per-minute speed). Example: 13 wpm =
65 character per minute, calculated with the standard PARIS word. So,
each 65 bytes of plain text will yield one minute of MP3, give or take.

73, andreas K6OTT

P.S.: I also posted this on my ham blog http://www.athm.net/k6ott/ .

Andreas Junge (N6NU) has posted some of his photos that he took at East Brother Light Station. Lots of great shots, check them out.

A small group of us have sucessfully completed our first local expedition and island activation last Sunday.
The group consisted of K6EF (me), N6NU, N6IL, and AB6SO.
We activated East Brother Island where the East Brother Light Station is located during International Light House Day on August 21, 2005.
I set up my IC706MKIIG with a Buddipole
N6NU had his FT817 with wire antenna up mounted on a flag pole.
N6IL used his IC706MKIIG with his Super Antenna running PSK31
Pictures can be found on the Gallery