New gadgets .. before the year end comes ..

Bought two new gadgets, an iPhone to replace my aging HTC Touch and WZR-HP-300NH draft-N router ... and guess what, both are below my expectation. Before buying the iPhone, I was contemplating on going for HTC Android based phones but after looking at the pros & cons and the packages given by the two telcos (HTC Hero on Celcom & iPhone on Maxis), I went for the iPhone. I guess it will take sometime for me to get used to the iPhone.. been using stylus all these time and now .. I need to use my fingers to enter texts etc. I wonder those who're using the iPhone to browse the net, how on earth could they select a link which close together w/o using stylus. One other thing .. unlucky me, I got the later version of iPhone which come with iBoot 359.3.2 and I couldn't use Pwnage since Apple has fixed the firmware. Grrr.. I could however blackra1n it .. but I'll let it stays virgin for the time being.

The other gadget which is below my expectation is the WZR-HP-300NH router. I was expecting that the HP which stands for High Power could solve my problem getting the signal up to the 3rd floor of the house .. but it just failed. I couldn't see it from my son's PC which could see the WHRG125 it replaces. I should've done my research for buying this .. no 3rd party firmware is available at the moment and none in the working either. Oh well...

First few contacts on 6 Meter ..

Couldn't hold my excitement .. I've tried few times working on 6 meter, most of the time by listening to 50.110 but most of the time, it returned with just load of noise .. nothing much excitement coming from 6 meter band .. so I thought until I call on CQ this afternoon .. did my call at 3:30PM MYT and thanks to the following VK6 stations for the contact:

VK6KXW (Peter) - 55 to 57

VK6ADI (Barrie) - 53 QSB

VK6JJ (John) - 42 and lost you on your last transmission

VK6IA (Andrew) - 53

VK6IQ (Glen) - 55

Thanks all for the contact, you guys really made my day today. Sorry if I missed to wish all of you Merry Christmas & Happy New Year ..

Using Ubuntu Karmic Koala for remote logging

I've few routers running DD-WRT and OpenWRT in my house, one acting as the main router, another one as AP only and the last one running APRS4R package to gate traffics from APRS/RF to APRS-IS and vice-versa. These routers are running on limited memory and I do need to sometime check the log when some of them suddenly stop working, so logging into the router itself is kind of useless (it will be gone when I restart the router) and added to the problem.

Since I've Ubuntu Karmic Koala running on my LHS, this is the best time to use it fully. One thing that I'm not so sure is, how to enable remote logging. I had Debian Lenny running on my Buffalo LinkStation II before and I didn't need to do anything fancy.. it works out of the box.. but it doesn't seem to be with my current LHS. I searched around the net with even more confusion .. but finally, I found a discussion about the logging system on Karmic .. it is no longer using syslogd but rsyslogd now. Yes, that is it .. so, I went to look for a guide on how to enable remote logging via rsyslogd and found this document:

www.ubuntu.com/system/files/CentralLogging-v4-20090901-03.pdf

Remove the comments for UDP/TCP syslog receptions from /etc/rsyslog.conf and rerun the rsyslog and this seems to solve this problem.

New mailing list for APRS users in Malaysia

It seems that the number of APRS users in Malaysia has been increasing steadily of late and as such, having a mailing list to discuss issues and suggestions to make APRS even better assimilated within the amateur radio operators is the best way. Currently, APRS is mainly concentrated in KL, Penang, JB and Kota Kinabalu with some others are coming up with the infra and slowly adapting.

From my past few weeks experience going around Peninsular Malaysia, it seems that the setup in Penang is more toward having one way igate, with JB following suite but I believe there is at least one working digipeater somewhere in Tampoi. Hopefully with this new mailing list, we could share our knowledge locally and discuss what the best to improve the adaptation of APRS among Malaysian radio amateur operators.



For those who're interested, our mailing list is: myaprs @ yahoogroups.com.