No Sked Required

Yup…I got a new job…with a (kinda) new company…

On Sunday the 18th, I celebrated my 16th anniversary at Northwest Physicians Network. I started there as a Network Technician, moved up to Network Admin a couple of years later when the then-current Admin moved on. My responsibilities covered servers, virtualization, networking, phones, and desktop support, pretty much a one-man show. As time progressed, I’ve moved up to the fourth-longest tenure of NPN employees.

About three years ago NPN was acquired by Davita Healthcare, which was itself acquired by Optum Healthcare a mere six weeks later. With regional consolidation my job responsibilities were spread out among four or five different departments and I was assigned to the Desktop Support department. I had been hoping to move into systems engineering working on the server and virtualization, but my familiarity with the NPN desktop and phone environment necessitated my assignment. I was supporting NPN under the direction of The Everett Clinic (a part of Optum).

After about 18 months in the Desktop Support area (and being the primary NPN person in-office during the pandemic) an opportunity came up to interview for a Systems Engineering position with the Polyclinic, another Optum organization in the region. I decided to apply, did the interview, and got selected for the position.

I’ve spent the last week getting set up and starting to get up to speed as a Systems Engineer for the Polyclinic. My manager is at The Everett Clinic, and because it is a transfer within the Organization I don’t have to worry about losing my years-of-service, my PTO balance, retirement, etc. I will be working from home most of the time, going into the office (on Seattle’s “Pill Hill”/Capitol Hill) once a week or as needed.

I will miss the day-to-day interaction with the friends I’ve made over the years at NPN, but it isn’t like I’m moving to Mars…we’re all still part of the same larger organization. I am looking forward to renewing and expanding my skills on the server side.

As you might guess from some of my posts, I’m starting to get more into building radio-related electronics. One of the tools that is quite useful for testing these circuits is an oscilloscope. A couple of years ago a friend found a couple of used scopes being disposed of and passed one on to me. It was a B&K Precision 2160, which weighed in at about 17 pounds and approximately 5″x13″x16″ in size. It was good for measuring signals up to about 60 MHz, and free is a good price, but I found that adjusting it was a finnicky process and it took up a lot of space on my workbench.

My birthday was this week, and my wife and sons decided to go in together on a replacement for it. I’d had a Siglent SDS-1102CML+ on my wish-list, and so they went with that. It is very similar to the scopes my younger son used in his Computer Engineering courses at university. It is about the same width and height as the B&K, but is nearly a foot shallower, freeing up a lot of space on the bench. Using an LCD screen rather than a CRT, it is more than nine pounds lighter as well. (My elder son says it passes the “pinky test.” He can pick it up by the handle using only his pinky finger.) It is good up to 100 MHz, and many of the settings are automatically ranging or easier to adjust.

After the initial probe calibration (one adjustment on one of the two included probes, the other was already calibrated) I was able to get readings from a signal generator I built over the winter (keep an eye out for a post about that project as well.) A pure sine wave looked beautiful, and I am looking forward to using this new tool (OK, kind of a toy for a geek like me as well) as I work on enhancements to my Mighty Mite and a radio receiver for which I’m working on plans.

First of all, it has been a LONG time since I last posted to this blog. Much has happened, both before and during the lockdown, but here we are,

That’s the “Back to Blogging” part, but what, you are probably saying to yourself, is “the Joy of Oscillation?” The oscillation in this case refers to a radio signal being generated by an oscillator circuit, and the joy is the satisfaction of building something yourself, and seeing it work. The term was coined by Bill, N2CQR, in his Soldersmoke blog and podcast.

The build in this case was the Michigan Mighty Mite design, a crystal controlled transmitter, making use of a television colorburst crystal at a frequency of 3.57954 MHz, which just happens to be in the Ham Radio 80 Meter Band. Thank you goes to the folks at Soldersmoke for providing that crystal.

There is no one right way to assemble the Michigan Mighty Mite. I decided to base my assembly on a method described by George Dobbs, G3RJV (SK) in a series of books for youth that I enjoyed back when I was in 8th or 9th grade, using a board, and making connections using screws and fender washers rather than solder.

The base board was one my wife picked up at the local hobby store. The transformer was wound with magnet wire around an empty pill bottle. The variable capacitor is held in place with a 3-D printed bracket thanks to my son.

I hooked the antenna port (white cable, upper right corner) to a dummy load for testing, tuned my main rig across the room to the colorburst frequency, turned on my workbench power supply, and tapped the key. Much to my satisfaction, I heard a tone from my receiver. Adjusting the variable capacitor (the only control on this transmitter) caused the signal to strengthen and the tone to be clearer. I was experiencing “the joy of oscillation!” I was now, as Pete, N6QW would say, a member of the “Colorburst Liberation Army.”

I’m looking forward to trying this transmitter on the air. Two things need to happen before that takes place: first, I will need to build a low-pass filter in order to clean up spurious additional signals from this Mighty Mite. Secondly, I need to get my antenna replaced, as it decided to self-disassemble over the winter, and I need to do some tree trimming before the replacement goes up.

This project was a lot of fun. I had started to build this several years ago, and then life intervened. It was satisfying to dust off the parts and start up again, and all the more so that it worked on the first try.

This weekend I finally collected on one of my Fathers’ Day gifts: a steam-train excursion on the Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad with Diana.  Leaving from Elbe, Washington, we crossed the Nisqually River and Mineral Creek on a four-car train pulled by 1-4-1 oil-fired steam locomotive, formerly in the employ of the Hammond Lumber Company.

       

Once we got to Mineral, WA, we enjoyed time wandering through a logging museum, seeing a number of other steam engines in various stages of restoration, as well as several logging cabins and other logging equipment.  Then it was back on the train and back down to Elbe.

After finding a geocache near the train depot, we drove up through Ashford and on up to (but not through) the gates of Mount Rainier National Park.  We then started back down the hill and stopped at the Copper Creek Inn for lunch (the chowder is fantastic…) and then geocached our way back down the road.  We stopped in Eatonville to visit Diana’s dad, and then meandered our way over some back roads into Tacoma.

Our geocaching near the mountain had put me at 1,999 caches.  I wanted to find a fun one for my 2,000th.  We saw that The Drive Through cache, which had been broken when we looked for it previously, had been repaired.  It was fun to figure it out, and cool to reach this milestone.

Well…I can cross that off my never-done list.  This afternoon at 14:32 local time, using an antenna I built myself, I made an amateur radio contact (QSO) via satellite.

The antenna: a couple of summers ago I put together a tape measure Yagi antenna similar to this that uses PVC for the framework and lengths of a retractable tape measure for the elements.

The radio: my Wouxun KG-UV3D dual band hand-held, programmed with seven adjacent memory channels to deal with the Doppler effect as the satellite passes overhead.

The satellite: SO-50 (Saudi-OSCAR 50), one of the Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio (OSCAR) satellites put up by amateur radio operators for amateur radio operators.

The QSO: The satellite came over the northwest horizon at 14:25 PDT, in an arc that took it almost straight overhead on the way to the southeast horizon.  I finally started hearing the carrier signal from the satellite about 30 degrees above the horizon.  WD9EWK was working stations from Montezuma Castle National Monument as part of the National Parks on the Air (NPOTA) operating event.  at 14:32 he finished working another station, and I transmitted my call and my grid-square (CN-87), only to hear him return my call with his grid square and the identifier for the NPOTA unit he was activating.  I was so stoked that I jerked the antenna out of alignment, quickly got it re-aimed and finished the contact.

I tweeted a thanks to WD9EWK, and he responded that he had the contact recorded, and would be sending me an MP3 of the contact.  As soon as I have it, I’ll post it here…

After playing around with a number of different ideas for my Raspberry Pi, I decided to try making it into an APRS I-Gate, which will listen to APRS data packet transmissions on the 2-Meter ham band, and then forward that data on to the internet so it can show up on such sites as aprs.fi. Read the rest of this entry »

Well…I’ve done it again. Multiple projects going at once, and none are actually getting to completion.

Read the rest of this entry »

May was quite the month…and now the empty nest isn’t.

On the 1st, we picked Drew up from his dorm at George Fox.  Doubling up on his engineering classes caused his GPA to slip all the way down to 3.9 for the semester (from the 4.0 he pulled in the Fall term…)  He’ll be in an on-campus apartment next year with three other engineering students.

On the 6th we flew to St. Louis.  That night we stayed at the Fellowship Ranch retreat center outside of Waynesville, MO.  Diana and I stayed in the house I lived in my last two years of high school.  In the morning we toured around the property, which was in the process of being sold, one last time.  Many thanks to Frank & RuthAnn Branham (whom I’ve known since I was in junior high) for their hospitality.

From Waynesville we headed to the Branson area (with a detour to see the Laura Ingalls Wilder farm in Mansfield) to meet up with David and prep for his graduation from College of the Ozarks.  We got checked into our hotel, ran some errands, and then met my parents who had flown into Kansas City.

Friday and Saturday were filled with a combination of playing tourist, David’s graduation rehearsals, and getting together with old friends in the area.  We discovered that David’s roommate’s father and I knew each other from our time at the college…small world, eh?

Sunday brought the Baccalaureate service in the morning, lunch on the lawn (which was interrupted by a midwest gully-washer of a thunderstorm) and then graduation.  That evening we got together with my Aunt and Uncle who had driven over from Kansas.  I hadn’t seen them since my Grandmother’s funeral.

Monday was spent getting David’s dorm room packed out and shipped home.

Tuesday we headed back to St. Louis, but took a round-about way which allowed us to find geocaches in five states in one day: AR, OK, KS, MO and IL.  In the process, we ended up finding regular, virtual, multi, letterbox hybrid and earthcaches, and walking partway across the Mississippi River on the old Chain-of-Rocks bridge.

Wednesday had us flying back to Seattle, and back into the swing of things…only now our empty nest included two young men, and two dorm-rooms worth of stuff.

When Drew headed off to college with his shiny new laptop, he left behind a decent Dell small-form-factor Ubuntu machine with a nearly-new 20″ monitor.  I just couldn’t let it sit and gather dust now, could I? Read the rest of this entry »

Well, after getting hacked and my Drupal install totally compromised, I’m going to re-launch with a different CMS.  We’ll see how this goes…I’ve re-posted my old posts, and I’ll be moving on to new items.