Grand eyeball at 9W2TU house (9W2ITU wedding)

 
    

A group of us from KL gathered at Johor Bahru this weekend for 9W2ITU wedding. We had a grand eyeball at 9W2TU house last night. There were at least more than 50 hams from MARES, JASRA, Pelangi and our good neighbour representing ORARI Karimon and Batam gathered for this grand eyeball (will update with photos taken during the eyeball later when I got back home).

I've taken this chance to cross over the Selat Teberau to get some radio stuffs yesterday too. I was looking for antenna tuner and a new mobile rig, mobile antenna and antenna for my HT. So, spent few hours yesterday at Sim Lim Tower and Square.. there are too many electronics stuffs at Sim Lim Tower and all PC and camera stuffs at Sim Lim Square. Since I don't have budget to upgrade my camera, so, didn't buy anything from Sim Lim Square. I asked R One for ATU before, and they quoted SGD$80 more expensive than at Blazer. So, Blazer is still the best place to get radio stuffs for the best price, and guess what .. spent around SGD$1k there.. what I got from Blazer yesterday:

• MFJ 949E Manual antenna tuner, MFJ claims that this is the most popular tuner they have made.
  
• Kenwood TMV-71A, the latest VHF/UHF dual bander mobile unit. Somehow, Kenwood has changed the design and not following the previous TMV708A that this unit replaces. And he..hee.. somehow, 9W2CCW and 9W2JAZ saw me buying this unit while at Blazer and they got one each for themselves too
• Diamond SG7500 and SGH779 for my HT.
• Supercall magmount which could hold those big Diamond antennas at high speed.
• Opek antenna switch

Today will be the d'day for 9W2ITU. We're going to convoy in a group of three Tritons, one RangeRove and two Hondas from where we stay at the heart of JB and will most probably joined others too in a big convoy back to Kuala Lumpur.

BTM - May, 2008

It has been a while since I attended my last BTM (Beam, Talk, Makan .. or if I remember correctly, it was meant to be Black Thing Meeting). Still remember when most of the members in the PalmX were using Palm based PDA and we gathered around having fun, beaming contacts, talk about all the latest gizmos around Palm based PDA/OS and surely, eating (you pay your own foods! :D)... now, the central topic is no longer Palm based PDA/OS.. many members have migrated to sorry-to-say much better OS and platforms .. expanded to GPS, swiss army toolkits, and some .. back to basic buku 3-5 a.k.a moleskin notebook. We might try to persuade some of them to take up ham radio too :) Will see who'll take the bait .. anyway, here are some of the photos from the BTM.. courtesy of Abedib (err, stolen from his flicker actually .. hee.. hee)..

Antenna installation - Rotor/Rotator + Mast

Thinking hard on how I could bring up my mast + rotator + yagi + 10m delta loop antenna to-be. Found the following diagrams and photos which might help me later on..

1. Load bearing support

2. Roof mount (no idea where I could get this though)

3. Guy ring and clamp, turnbuckles, etc.

Place to visit/URLs:

1. KAMCO 

Ikea has invaded my home office!

It seems that my new home office to-be, has been invaded by Ikea furniture. 

List of them now (originally):

1. One Galant combinations table (corner).
   
2. Two Effektiv wall cabinets.
   
3. Two unit of Mikael drawers.
4. One unit of BESTA storage for my radio stuffs.

Added as of last Saturday:

1. One Billy bookcase.
2. One Karsten swivel chair.
3. A Signum cable management tray and Summera pull out keyboard tray.
4. Two Lindmon blinds of 120cm and 60cm sizes.

I will update this blog with photos when everything is in place and ready to be occupied.

SAP/ABAP - Unicode conversion

Due to expansion, my client is currently involved in Unicode conversion exercise which is due next week. The project has started quite a while back and as usual, most of the code changes had been outsourced to third party which seems to outsource it to you-know-where region. Anyway, found out that many of these programmers were interested in getting the codes past the syntax check and not more. 

Anyway, for those who are doing Unicode conversion, the following might be helpful:

1. Transaction UCCHECK is available and very helpful to do a first time check on what needs to be changed in your coding.
2. OSS Note/SAP Marketplace is the first place to pay a visit when you're working with copied version of standard code. There might be some codes that have been changed to reflect the Unicode support, especially if they've to do with file interfaces.
3. Carriage return & line feed (CRLF) which has been denoted as hex '0D0A' all this while will fail during execution, change it to cl_abap_char_utilities=>cr_lf.
   
4. Any calls to the old Function Modules WS_DOWNLOAD and WS_UPLOAD need to be changed to GUI_DOWNLOAD and GUI_UPLOAD.
5. Any direct assignment of non-compatible structure will surely fail, do a casting instead, especially from type P to type C. 
6. To make life easier, use method cl_abap_container_utilities=>fill_container_c to assign structure of mix types into a string/text.
7. OPEN DATASET, for syntax which specify IN TEXT MODE, you need to add the ENCODING, the easiest is by DEFAULT, but if you found a syntax which does not specify the TEXT MODE, be very very careful. It might be opened in BINARY mode in previous release and need to be tested very carefully or otherwise, the file produced by your code will be garbled. There are few OSS notes related to this, check them out.

10m delta loop antenna?

Had a long chat with 9M2AU yesterday about 10m, antenna tuner and antenna. He suggested that I should look into a delta loop antenna design. It has simple and easy to assemble and to source for the parts and it has gain too. Since I'm at my base at that time, I fired up my Safari browser and look for the delta loop antenna using google and found few interesting websites that I've already bookmarked. As said, it looks really simple .. and no antenna tuner is required. To find the overall length of the loop, just follow the following equation:

length = ( 1005 / centre operating frequency  ft ) * velocity factor

e.g.: for 1

0m, overall length = ( 1005/28.450 ) * 0.75  = around 26.3ft 

Since it is a delta loop (triangle), divide the final length by 3 to get the equal length of each side.

Sample delta loop found in the following website (requires 4:1 balun):

H5ANX Mk4 Delta Loop

How to brew a 4:1 air-wound current balun? Here is the instruction found in this website (PA3CNJ).

This air-core balun is wound using the following components :

• 40mm diameter grey PVC pipe with a length of 9.5cm

• 2 endcaps 40mm PVC

• Simple zip cord (multi-stranded core insulated wire)

• 8 turns bifilar wound

• 2 banana type chassis connectors

• 1 SO239 socket

Terminals B and C are wired to the banana chassis connectors for hooking up the feedline. The SO239 terminal center pin is wired to C and it's shield to D. Make sure to connect D and A together. As can be seen on the image at the top of this page, the wiring enters the PVC pipe and all connections are made internally. In my case - since I am using the balun inside - I did not glue the endcaps to the pipe but used a couple little screws instead. This way the balun is easy to service should the need arise.

NOTE: Let give the credit where it dues, the above instruction was originally taken from H5ANX design.

There are some other delta loop designs that do not require balun too. GOOGLE is your friend!

Found another one:

Another unsuccessful 10m Dxing :(

Went back to my parents house and trying to monitor the 10m .. but I guess the propagation was not that good at Muar on Saturday evening .. tho' I could hear audio coming out at around 18:00hr MYT, but it was so weak. Anyway, I was using long wire antenna and somehow, ignoring that I have my Buddistick with me .. argh! 

Anyway, some photos from the back of my parents house

.