pa0r

The WPX 2005 CW was a great experience this time. We made just short of 2500 qso's and a score ofalmost 4 Million points, embedded in a tlf testing orgy. Of course I used the event as a beta test for tlf... the last time we used it for the wpx was the 2004 SSB contest (version 0.9.16), and I expected version 0.9.23 to be more stable.

Some obeservations were quite interesting...

This was the first time this group of operators was confronted with tlf. Detlef, DK3QZ had experience with TRlog, the others (Marcus DL1EKC and Ralph, DL4YD) had used CT. Although nobody had had the time to look extensively at tlf before the contest, after a short run with the simulator we had no problems with operating.

The QTH

The fieldday site of DARC dept L03 is in Schermbeck on a 60 mtr high hill looking over corn fields. Antennas available ude a 3-el cubical quad for 10-15-20 and a TR33. Plus a dipole for 40-80 and a 160 wire antenna. We put up a vertical for 40 mtrs (a GFK pole with a piece of wire). With the exception of the 80 mtrs dipole all antennas worked well. The 80 mtrs dipole is too low for dx.

I envy the people who can use this qth regularly. I had NEVER, NOWHERE, heard 9+40 signals coming out of complete silence. On 160 mtrs!!!

Radio gear


This was an excellent opportunity to compare the K2 receiver to the TS 850. I always liked the 850 very much, I think it has one of the best receivers Kenwood ever produced. But in the harsh contest environment the K2 runs circles around it. Especially on 40, where you have a run frequency about every 100 Hz during the big contests. Only my ORION equals this. Next time I will bring the Timewave DSP filter.

Rig control

Hardware setup of the 2-node system was 2 old 166 MHz Dell desktops. I had put all the new software on at home and build the system up and tested it. Everything worked. I switched the 1 monitor available from 1 node to the other and everything appeared to work fine.
The plan was that one of the other crew members would provide the other monitor. When the system was built up in the contest shack I could choose between 3 monitors, all from the good old DOS days. They were not capable to run graphics. So I had to use one of the systems with a linux text console. No problem, only that somehow the text console started in some strange mode accepting only CAPITALS, and of course my root password was in non-capitals... After playing some (undocumented) tricks I got it running. Everything seemed o.k. Packet, rig control and CW output worked like a charm....

The contest

Marcus and Detlef had volunteered to take the first 6 hour shift starting at 2 o'clock in the morning local time, so we left the system running, waiting for the first qso. I went to bed, as I had the 8 AM shift.

At 01:45 somebody knocked on the door of the camper. "Houston, we have a problem...". So I dressed and went to the shack. And indeed, there was a LAN problem preventing the qso's from the run station to log on the multiplier station. I tried to fix it (ping worked) but I could not get into a root terminal. So I decided to quickly substitute my UBUNTU laptop for the faulty desktop. This took 45 minutes including configuration etc. The laptop communicated with the LAN through wifi, which was a bonus. Everything o.k., and the qso's came rolling in!!

At 02:30. "Knock knock" - "Sorry to wake you but unfortunately your laptop is switching itself off..". I decided to get out of bed and babysit the system for the rest of the shift...
Hardware error again. The laptop had overheated and switched itself off. I provided a small fan and made sure the machine could get enough air.... Mind you, the stuff going in was 35 degrees C, and the machine is missing 2 of its small feet.

Happiness prevails

The rest is history. Happiness 'till the break of dawn... Almost 2500 qso's and 3.880.000 points.
And when we looked at the condx values this morning it turned out the K value had risen to 6 during the last hours of the contest....

The lesson learned is that I have to provide a TEST PLAN for the next occasion. We took too much for granted. And start tlf in VERBOSE mode the first time. The debug messages were quite explicit in this case...

Other minor things I noticed:
- the 'needed' display is quite useless for the wpx, needs some work
- I had forgotten to set the SERIAL_EXCHANGE variable to lock the qso number (corrected during the contest)
- Tlf needs a better "this is a mult you should/can work" indication

A plea to the CQ Contest Comittee:
CAN WE PLEASE SHIFT THE STARTING TIME OF THE CONTESTS TO 8:00 UTC !!!
I think this would be fair after all these years...

We had hell of a time... Thank you L03 - We will be back!!

P.S.: On another foot: I wonder if there is a linux driver to send console data to BRAILLE output devices? Marvin, DL2VD, the 'white sticker' chairman of L03, uses TRlog with a BRAILLE device, and cannot use any non-DOS program. I am not aware of anything similar for LINUX. Any ideas?

We are preparing for the WPX contest next weekend. The contest location is the fieldday ground of the DARC L03 club, near Duisburg (see location on the APRS map). Crew are DL4YR,DL1EKC and DK3QZ. The latter two were ops of CT9L in 2002 and 2004 resp.

Equipment will be 2 Elecraft K2's, 2 linears, a cubical quad, a 3-band TH33 and some dipoles.
We are going to use TLF of course, and this morning I prepared the computers for the wpx.
They had not been updated since last year's wpx so it needed the latest versions of Ncurses (5.4), cwdaemon (0.9), hamlib (1.2.3) and tlf (0.9.23).

If you do the upgrade in this sequence you will be o.k. (don't forget ldconfig after installing the libraries, and make clean before making tlf!!). Under Morphix cwdaemon is copied to /usr/local/bin, which is not in the PATH. We will have a network (Wifi compatible) with 4 nodes, with cluster data, rig control for the K2's and cw via the cwdaemon.

The photo shows how you can use a pool table for contest preparation (notice how the K2 is dwarfed by the computers... is this radio?)

The weather forecast is fantastic, the CONDX forecast is MISERABLE!! So we will have plenty of time for the social aspects of this event....

I have spent most of the rest of the day refreshing the CVS for tlf, on popular demand. This had been dormant since the crash of the servers of Savannah in October 2003, I have cleaned everything and added the complete source tree of version 0.9.23.

Tlf's CVS repository can be checked out through anonymous CVS over SSH with the following instruction set. . When prompted for a password for anoncvs, simply press the Enter key.

The SSHv2 public key fingerprints for the machine hosting the cvs trees are:

RSA: 1024 80:5a:b0:0c:ec:93:66:29:49:7e:04:2b:fd:ba:2c:d5
DSA: 1024 4d:c8:dc:9a:99:96:ae:cc:ce:d3:2b:b0:a3:a4:95:a5

Software repository :

export CVS_RSH="ssh"

cvs -z3 -d:ext:anoncvs@savannah.nongnu.org:/cvsroot/tlf co tlf

You can also use your web browser to browse through the source at:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/tlf/

I hope someone will need it :)

The cw sprint seems to rouse less participants... a lot of regulars were either missing, or I could not hear them. I did not make any qso on 80, and only a few on 40. So instead of the adrenaline-generating event it used to be, it was more of a relaxing experience. Maybe the rx was dead? I did have S5 noise on the band. I worked a few USA stations without problem on 20. Anyway, I made 60 qso's, and the largest number received was below 100, where in previous sprints the top was 190.... Condx??

I missed 1 feature in tlf. The most efficient way to work the sprint is to:
call someone in S&P mode,
then give QRZ in CQ mode,
work the caller and
find the next CQ'er.

It would be nice if after the first QSO tlf would switch to CQ mode automatically. Won't take much effort I think.

Today I have ugraded the software on the shack computer to tlf-0.9.23 and hamlib-1.2.4, in preparation for the eusprint contest tomorrow. Tlf did not compile out-of-the-box, it wanted the ncurses-dev library. After I installed that, everything went without a problem. I only forgot to compile tlf with the --enable-hamlib directive, so I had to do it twice :).

Hamlib-1.2.4 also built without errors. This latest release includes support for my ORION, and I was eager to know if it worked as well as the driver I had written for tlf. I was not disappointed. Everything runs like clockwork!

I also wrote a small script to start to start cwdaemon. On UBUNTU-0.5 it reads:

#! /bin/sh
echo "starting cwdaemon"
rmmod lp
cd /dev
mknod -m 0660 parport0 c 99 0
cwdaemon -x b

#### end #######

After 5 years of tlf experience it is time to optimize the UI (User Interface). Not because the tlf UI is not good. It is just because there is room for improvement for everything... And because I have reduced the possible roadmaps for tlf to 2 or 3 (instead of 14), and they are all about disconnecting the guts from the looks, that time is now.

The idea is to provide an interface for several UI's so it is possible to run tlf also on 'other devices' like organizers, handies and tablets (agree, that will probably take some time), and even an IE (Yuchhchhcc..) browser. Not with the same functionality of course, e.g. when you walk in the woods and you just want to log a qso you don't need the networking facility (?? Bet you want it as soon as the rf network provides it ?? Oh well...). For this I now use my Palm, but there are also iPAQ's and Zauruses which could run tlf if it were properly designed.

What about the ncurses (Text) interface? I think there is still enough reason to keep it. I just have to look at the array of 486's in the shack who wait for duty in a next M/M operation...

Do we need a GUI? I think so. N1MM is quickly becoming the new standard for hf contest programs. And that's what tlf is being compared with. In my opinion the success of N1MM is based on the fact that it is a complete, useable program for contesting and it runs on 85% of the laptops. I have quite some experience with N1MM (ARRL DX at PI4TUE and CQWW-CW at CT9L), and I know what I don't like...


Here is a sneak preview of the first ideas. Note that you don't need a mouse to operate it. All you use is the CALL INPUT FIELD and the EXCHANGE FIELD. The info displays are arranged according to ergonomical principles, with minimum necessity for eye movement.

Another important design decision is to leave log printing, qsl label printing, qso archiving etc. to Xlog. In other words, do only what's necessary for contesting and try to prevent double work. The 'revamping' of tlf will take its time anyway.

If you have a contrubution to the new design your comments are welcome as always. A snapshot of the draft spec is also availabl

I have put together a document describing the feature set of the next generation of tlf.

You can read it here, it is in Open Office Wordprocessor format. There is still ample time to provide input to this. If you have any ideas for stuff I can leave out, or stuff which is missing, please shout NOW!

> I thought I had read in one TLF posting about possibly having a TLF
> Live CD where TLF can just be operated while the ham cd is inside the
> laptop. Â Is this going to happen or has
> it happened already?

actually it happened about a year ago, I have made an update to the first pilot system on January 17th 2005, just in time before my winter holiday trip. Since then I have not had any comment or bug report about it, so there are 2 possibilities.... either nobody is using it, or it works so well nobody is complaining.

The dxpedition disk project was started after my experience with the TS7N dxpedition,where I was responsible for the networking of several Window$ laptops. I have written an article about it in the german Funkamateur" magazine, an english translation of the story is available in http://www.iae.nl/users/reinc/Chaos.html.

There had been quite some discussion on the Linux ham forums about a linux distribution on 1 or 2 floppy disks, but nobody did something about it. At that time (around Feb. 2001), still a rookie at Linux, I had started tlf as a programming exercise. It turned out that tlf was a candidate for the contest distribution together with Cx, a CT Linux clone developed by a team of people from the BCC (Bavarian Contest Club). It looked like Cx was dead. So tlf was included on a 2-disk Debian distribution especially for contesting.

I had never planned to follow this up, and concentrated on finishing tlf. The TS7N exercise triggered the first live CD based on Morphix, a Knoppix variant of Linux. The idea was to show the Linux community how easy it was, and I hoped someone would pick it up as a project. Of course this did not happen, and I put the ideas on ice....

In January 2005 I could not resist having another go at it, and made the system even more flexible by allowing logging to USB stick or floppy disk, and even using the underlying Windows hard drive to store the configuration data, allowing 1 floppy to hold 70.000 qso's. I am now waiting for reactions, and when nobody picks up the project I will freeze it (or develop it further for my own purposes).

The second version is described in http://www.iae.nl/users/reinc/dxpedition_disk.html.

To sum it up, it allows most Window$ laptops to run a variety of Linux programs without writing to the window$ drive. (The log goes to USB or floppy). And allows me to configure a network of laptops all running exactly the same software.

When you can spare a few GB on the hard drive of the laptop, partitioning and using it as a dual boot system is definitely the way to go. Remember that a live CD steals time from the system. As soon as the application is running it
will be fast enough on a 250 MHz system (especially tlf, as it does not use graphics). But you will spend quite some time starting the system and loading apps. I recommend the free UBUNTU distribution. It is based on Debian, the most stable distribution around, and it is updated every 6 month. Actually I switched from SuSE to UBUNTU quite a while ago, and have it running on most of my systems now... it runs tlf and gpsdrive (what about a nav system for your tricycle... wouldn't that be ultra cool?) in my camper. You can find out if it likes your hardware by trying the UBUNTU live CD... (http://UBUNTU.com).
If I am not mistaken they are working on an on-the-fly partitioning system... And if you are stuck there is TONS of people able to help you on the net (try me...).

Hint: If you want a dual boot system, first put windows on it, and Linux afterwards (after partitioning of course). On my laptop each OS has 10 GB space (I need Windows XPpro to update my ORION hehe...)..

Wilbert, ZL2BSJ, said he would like to have the "start sending now" feature of Trlog implemented in tlf. Until now I had been hesitant to implement it, as it does not fit my style of working pile-ups.
During the last years I have learned to type the call into the computer during, not after reception. That means when the calling station is finished sending his(/let's not forget her) call, I have only one more character to type. Moreover this way I use the computer as a 'scratch pad' so I don't have to remember the call.
"Start sending now" also means an ADDITIONAL key to press. Which means 10.000 extra keys during a typical CQWW-CW weekend (we only run at CT9L, hardly any time for S&P). But o.k., not all of us need this speed.
I took the easy approach... First I had to find a key that is not too difficult to find. I think the only one that qualifies is the space key. It is the largest one, and provided you have at least one thumb, a little training will do the job.
After 30 minutes it worked. You type e.g. ZL2 [space] and the cwdaemon starts outputting crisp morse code. At 28 wpm, there is more than enough time to add the suffix before tlf adds the '5NN Whatever...
Your Mileage May Vary, it does not work for me.

Then I thought I might as well have a go a the "start sending after x characters" function, which is quite similar, only you actually SAVE a keystroke...

It works like this: I send ZL2, and the cw output starts... I type the suffix and tlf sends the rest of the message without having to type ENTER. Now if that's not efficiency...
I then experimented a bit with different speeds, and found that for me 4 characters is best over 40 wpm... it takes a while before you have learned to wait before typing the 4th character, as the other station will need time to switch back to rx.

So we now have both methods available, I uploaded tlf-0.9.23 to the websites

All in all some nice stuff to experiment with. And that's why we're in it....

Any comments?

tlf-0.9.23
==========

- incorporated patch from W9WI fixing a bug in the voice keyer
- changed cw speed control: now default active in call and exchange fields, even if field is not empty
- changed qso save logic: RETURN now always logs the qs in SSB and in general qso mode.
- New parameter: CHANGE_RST. If set in logcfg.dat, Pg-up and Pg-down will change RST instead of CW speed if field is not empty. Default: off.
- manpage updated for version 0.9.23

Tested o.k., ready for release into the cruel world. If I have some time tomorrow I will have a look at the "Start CW before call is complete" requirement... will be fun to program.