RSGB VHF NFD

/ General

Lincoln Short Wave Club took part in this year’s VHF National Field Day contest from the regular site we use near Brattleby.

The station was equipped with 6m, 4m, 2m, 70cms and 23cms – with all the stations set up in pne of the tents, using dual headphones to keep the noise down, but the 2m station also had a speaker feed for the people not operating to keep up with what was going on. Each station position was eqipped with a laptop running WinTest for the logging and I networked the laptops to share information. One of the laptops had a 3g internet connection and WinTest then passed cluster information to all the stations.

RSGB VHF NFD
RSGB VHF NFD
RSGB VHF NFD
RSGB VHF NFD

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New NAS in the Office

/ General

For a couple of years we have been using a Dlink NAS at the office – without too much trouble, its interface is a bit clunky, and there were some problems with my Windows 7 laptop when I first got it, but other than that it has worked fine.

As part of our new Distaster Recovery service to clients we have been specifying Iomega NAS boxes, as the storage on the Dlink is starting to be a limiting factor I replaced it with a Iomega StorCenter ix2-200. The 4TB model set up for mirror raid, giving 2TB of storage.

It is an excellent box. Easy to use and configure, I have allocated space to the company with various levels of access as well have having space for the family to store images and media. I have it protected by a UPS controlled from the NAS.

One of the things I am lookking forward to is the availability of an iPhone client so I can make full use of the cloud services installed on the device.

Iomega StorCenter ix2-200
Iomega StorCenter ix2-200

 

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Improvements to My Mug Cooker

/ Outdoor Gear /

I have had a new stand made for my titanium stove/mug cooker set. It is a slice of copper tube that holds the mug high enough to get the flames to heat the mug efficiently. I had struggled with this cook set whilst at Scarvorough a couple of weeks ago as the mug was too low to allow the meths to burn efficiently. In kitchen tests it worked well – the next test will be in the field next weekend when I use it for my lunch time brew whilst practice walking for the West Highland Way. (I have now walked 80 practice miles in preparation for the West Highland Way trip.)

Ti mug cooker
Ti mug with aluminium lid and copper stand

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IRLP

/ General /

This is an early image of the amateur radio IRLP station that Roger G3PVU and I are making. It will be located near Lincoln city center and be available on the 70cms repeater GB3LS.

LSWC IRLP Station
LSWC IRLP Station

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Lightweight Camping

/ Camping, Outdoor Gear, Photography, Walking / , ,

I took a few days off from work this week to try out some of my light weight kit – which eventually will make up the kit I will use on future backpacking trips.

Coleman Bedrock 2
Coleman Bedrock 2

Although I had the car I limited what I took. It gave me a chance to try the tent, food ideas and stoves I plan to use. I probably will not be carrying the folding stool on my backpacking trips.

The tent is a bit heavy for backpacking – but at £17.50 in a sale the price was right. It weighed 2.5kgs but by changing the steel pegs with titanium ones and not using the stuff sacks the weight drops to under 2kgs. It is also large enough for two (at a squeeze with rucksacks) but for one it gives that extra bit of space and comfort. I can sit up in it and cook outside the door easily or look at view whilst drinking tea. The window panels in the fly sheet doors adds some weight but this allows you to look out at the view even when it is raining!

I camped at the Camping and Caravan Club site on the outskirts of Scarborough. It is well placed so I could just walk out to the cliff top footpath, without having to use the car.

Map Clip
Camping and Caravan Club Site
Cliff top view
Cliff top view
Cliff top view
Cliff top view
Sunset from my tent
Sunset from my tent

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Probably the Best Server Backup in the World

/ Technology / ,

Last Christmas we had a real problem recovering a server, following a serious crash. Although we had a series of tape backup, using only the best quality tape, a Sony tape drive and BackupExec, when we came to move the tape drive to a new server to recover the all important data we could not find a driver for the drive. Neither the native drivers or the BackupExec driver would work. The skills of one of my engineers saved the day with the use of a PE type boot CD in the failed server with allowed him to access the one of the raided drives and copy the data to a USB portable hard drive.

So we have been looking for a better solution.

In conjunction with Basic Business Systems (http://www.basic.co.uk/) with now use CA ARCserve D2D for backing up servers, first to NAS devices and then we copy this to either USB protable HDD or across the internet to remote storage. Backing up is fine – but the real strength is its speed of recovery. The Bear Metal Recovery simply speeds up the time to recover a server. It is also practical to test the recovery process and several of our clients who are now using this software are going to have a Disaster Recovery practice – we will go in on a Saturday with a spare black server, turn off the working box and recover ti to the spare using only the D2D files. If it works great, but if we do have any issues we will be able to solve them, whennot under pressure of a real crash.

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