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Hugh Blemings's Blog, A Diary and Miscellaneous ramblings
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Sun, 09 Jan 2005
Was able to spend the hour or so necessary to do the hardware mods on the TiVo I brought back from the US to make it work here in Oz. Standard PAL/Tuner modification and added an ethernet card. Moved our hard disk over from the borrowed unit we've been running for the last few months (Thanks Tridge!) and things were up and running nicely nicely. Can give Tridge his spare back now :)
Back when we were in Austin I ordered a pair of PocketTracker kits. The intention being to use one as a portable tracking unit (along with a GPS receiver module I already had) and the other to transmit weather data from the block. The only difference between them is the firmware in one of the PIC microcontrollers. The units transmit APRS data at low power in the 2m (VHF) Ham band and are quite compact.
Completed assembly of the tracking board this weekend. Was quite fun, Rachael helped by placing some components and applying solder as required. Nice to be able to do a bit of hardware hacking for a change too. Pleasingly the unit fired up first go with a nice clean transmit signal on the local frequency.
The various configuration options are set with a little (freeware) PalmOS application called pTTConfig. Duly configured I gave it an on-air test and with assistance from Michael, VK1TMS a few kilometers away, was able to confirm that the signal was reasonable. A bit more tweaking of the digipeating path brought it up on FindU via the local iGate. iGate is a system that takes off air APRS data and sends it to a central server on the 'net.
Spent a couple of hours jury rigging it up on the trike using my Garmin handheld for a GPS. Permanent arrangement will be more black box style and involve less gaffa tape :) Took the temporary setup out for a quick spin just now, light setup on GT3 worked nicely, and thus encouraged will give it a go on the way to work tomorrow. With any luck you'll be able to follow my progress here