After many years of being out of the media saddle, I’m finally getting right back into it!
Grey Days is a short concept video that I had been thinking about for some time. With having been laid off recently (yep, that happened), I’ve been able to get back in touch with my creative side.
Without further ado, here it is. Enjoy!
Hudson’s Bay is dead. They had watched their competitors Eaton’s and Sears die off in the decades prior (Sears died out in Canada in 2018, Eaton’s much earlier) and failed to learn from their mistakes. Literal decades to get their business in order and transition to a more modern business model, but hey, you gotta keep the shareholders pockets lined I guess.
I regularly visited the local store at St. Laurent Centre in Ottawa over the last few years I’ve lived in this city. I’ve always had a soft spot for the old retail experience. Bringing back the Zellers sub-brand in the last 2 years was encouraging, though they borked that up royally with the Ikea-esque knockoff brand they primarily sold and the lack of any mainstream brands like the OG Zellers used to sell (another missed opportunity).
I visited the store twice more yesterday, and again this morning, the last day of operations for the company. The place is gutted, only a handful of clothing items left on racks and some jewellery and watches left in the display cases. Yesterday they had blocked access to the 2nd floor and move everything to the main level. The racks and mannequins that were for sale outnumbered the actual inventory, though most of those were listed as being sold off already. Curiously, there was a massive amount of identical paperback-style books containing barbecue recipes from 1995 that bore “The Bay” branding. All yellowed around the edges with age. Likely they didn’t sell well back in the day and had been squirreled away in a back storage area for decades. I regret not getting a picture of these.
The end of an era for sure, but they did it to themselves.
Here’s another post that should’ve been made months ago, but better late than never.
These photos were all taken the same day as the lunar eclipse shots in the previous post. I had just gotten a Panasonic DMW-MA1 adapter to run all of my older Olympus lenses on my Micro 4/3 mirrorless camera.
The helicopter was a last second shot before it went behind a building so despite it being fairly close, it’s not the best quality. The shots of the various airplanes were all taken lying on my back on the living room floor for stability.
Enjoy!
I stayed up all night to get some shots of the moon during the total eclipse of March 14.
Oddly enough, the first few shots were handheld with my trusty old Olympus 300mm telephoto lens on my newer Olympus mirrorless camera, while the last 2 were using the same setup while mounted to a tripod. I think the moon was further away relative to my shooting position near the end of the eclipse and it’s speed was more noticeable as a result.
Seems I had made a mistake a few months while back. I was attempting to push another ancient netbook back into service running Linux so that I could mess around with setting it up as a webSDR using my Nooelec Smart v4.
While I was playing with some settings in the software, the dongle locked up and I couldn’t get it to work again. It got a bit toasty and I figured I had fried the thing. All troubleshooting pointed towards that being the case. No amount of reinstalling the software, unplugging/re-plugging the dongle, or rebooting the PC seemed to work. This project was put on the back burner.
Fast forward to this past week, I found the dongle after a recent move and had the idea to see if maybe it could be coaxed back to life. I installed the dongle and SDR# on another, more powerful laptop. No dice. It wasn’t being detected by the software. Defeated, I made the decision to order a new one. This time the Nooelec Smartee v5 (the one with the bias-tee that allows in-line devices to be powered directly from the dongle).
Installed the new dongle and it didn’t seem to work either. What the hell?!
I double-checked that the firmware was installed. It was. Reinstalled SDR# just in case. Pressing the start button wasn’t doing anything. Then I remembered the source settings in the menu, set that to “RTL-SDR USB” and it fired right up. Phew! The new one wasn’t dead!
Then I had the idea to try the older dongle again. You guessed it, it worked too! Not sure why it’s still not being recognized by the ancient netbook, but it’s a good lesson in checking your settings, even if you think you’re right.
So now I’ve got 2 Nooelec SDR dongles. I was planning on getting one with a bias-tee for some futures projects anyways, so it’s not like it’s really an issue.
What it does:
This station listens for and decodes APRS packets from other stations and “gates” them to the internet. These other stations can be mobile (vehicle or pedestrian) or fixed stations (like digipeaters).
When APRS is being used, any other APRS-capable radio can decode the packets being sent out (either natively on the radio, or through connection to a computer of smartphone). So if you and a friend are using APRS in the middle of nowhere and are within simplex range of each other, you can receive positional information or messages on your radios from each other.
But that only works for certain things. If you’re looking at using APRS for tracking your buddy, but they’re outside of simplex range, you would need to employ a digipeater. They listen for APRS traffic and re-transmit those packets to a wider area. This is very similar to how regular amateur repeaters work for voice operations. The repeater is in a prime location and can usually transmit at a higher power level using better antennas for better range. APRS paths usually allow for multiple hops between digipeaters to not only help with range, but also to allow for a higher chance of being picked up by a station running an I-Gate.
Which brings us to I-Gates!
Now, for example, if you’re looking at tracking your progress during a roadtrip, then an I-Gate is a must! Some digipeaters have them built-in already, while others do not. It depends on what equipment is available to the digipeater owners, the local network needs, and a few other factors.
If you traveled from Montreal to Las Vegas and were firing off packets every 60 seconds or so, there should be stations well away from your location that can see where you are. The only thing is, those packets are heard, displayed when received (maybe logged in a file somewhere), and that’s it. Throw an I-Gate station into the mix and everything that it hears is uploaded to the internet. Connecting to the internet allows positional information to be viewed on sites like aprs.fi.
That’s what this thing does:
This I-Gate regularly receives packets digipeated from VE3OCR-2 in downtown Ottawa, as well as simplex packets from nearby mobile stations. Checking the information for VE3OCR-2, it can be noted that it is not gating any data to the internet, just repeating it back out over RF.
There are other stations in the area that digipeat AND gate, such as VE3SHQ located at the Scouts Canada Museum further to the west.
And then you have my IGate. It does not digipeat over RF. The only thing it does is listen for packets, and then upload them to the internet.
Ok, it actually does a bit more than just that. I do have a set of repeaters set up to display on aprs.fi and when I go camping and plan on doing long range testing, I usually place markers to help others see where I will be operating from. There are even airport markers that I was testing out awhile back too.
This I-Gate is set to beacon every 30 minutes. I’m not entirely sure if that position is sent out through other digipeaters with an I-Gate or not (pretty sure that’s an option that can be enabled/disabled by each digipeater). Not that it fully matters as it shows up on aprs.fi and likely isn’t of much use to anyone to know where it is anyways, It’s more akin to behind-the-scenes infrastructure than anything else.
The parts:
This setup takes up a bit of space and it could definitely be run on a Raspberry Pi with an SDR dongle instead, but I appreciate keeping old tech alive and running. The laptop is from 15ish years back and is woefully inadequate for running most modern software and the scanner is from sometime in the mid-90’s, but it’s a scanner. It just sits and listens on whatever frequency you point it at, and it just works. The SlimJim antenna is hooked into the BNC port at the rear of the scanner (not pictured) and is currently strung up in a nearby window in a very temporary fashion. A second SlimJim will be arriving in the next few weeks with a 16′ length of coax so that I can hard mount it outside the apartment. That being said, I’ve been blown away by how well the current antenna setup receives packets over the stock telescopic antenna that came with the scanner, even with it being mounted indoors.
Below is a comparison of the receive-capability of the setup from 2 different months in 2024:
At some point in the future I’d like to deploy a full digipeater + I-gate solution, but that’ll have to wait until I can find a decent QTH location much further out from other local digis.
maltosekincaid.com 