I set up my ham radio stuff to listen to an AO-51 Echo pass last night. I heard people, and I was ready to jump in with my call sign and grid square, but there wasn't much dead air, and the pass was over pretty quickly (AO-51 is a low-earth orbit satellite).

Photos from my tea circle's spring chakai have been up for a few weeks, but I hadn't as yet posted a link to them. Speaking of seasons, I recently learned that the Japanese vocabulary I'd learned for spring, summer, autumn, and winter don't exactly match up with Western seasons. 春, or spring, includes February, March, and April; 夏, or summer, runs from May through July; 秋, or autumn, is August through October; and 冬, or winter, includes November, December, and January. And speaking of Japanese language, I'll be taking classes downtown this summer with elwing2000.

The Chesapeake Bay watershed has been interesting me lately. I've been looking into watershed management volunteer groups, like Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and my county's "stream team" and conservancy. ACB organizes kayak eco-trips along some of the Bay's major tributaries, though I'll be out of the country during this years'. It might be fun to go kayaking (independently) along the shores of the Bay.

I don't understand how Firefox decides when to ask users if they want it to remember a password. On a recent Ubuntu installation, Firefox 1.5.0.3 has been failing to ask at most of the sites where other installations of it (similar versions), on different machines, have recognized the password field and prompted the user about remembering the password.

Ooo! Ooo! I have an idea!

Remember how I whipped up a few scripts to tell me when amateur radio satellites would be passing overhead in modes I can 'work' with my radio requipment? It's functional and all, but what would be neat is if I used the Google Calendar Data API to create a google calendar for each satellite's passes (for my location)! That would make it easy to see which passes might fit into my schedule.

I've set up my amateur radio equipment a couple times lately in anticipation of AO-51 satellite passes. Once was at a party—yay for geek parties! :) We got good reception and heard people chatting nearly continuously. I think we heard someone tell someone else they'd heard him make a contact with the ISS recently. I hadn't really prepared to make a contact, though, since I forgot what grid square we were in, I wasn't sure if I had the CTCSS tone set right for uplink, and I generally wasn't familiar with what to say in making contacts via amateur radio satellite.

The second time I made sure I was prepared with those first two items, at least. But I heard nothing at all. WTF? True, I was standing more or less directly under some neighborhood power lines, but could they really cause that much interference? That's the only theory I had until I realized, several days later, that the satellite had been operating in a different downlink mode than I'd been expecting—specifically, S-band instead of UHF. I'd been relying on my python scripts to highlight "good" passes, where "good" for this satellite includes downlink_mode != OFF, essentially, when it really should be downlink_mode == UHF instead.

On Friday night I went out with brian_252, elwing2000, and her bf Chris for Mongolian barbeque in Chinatown and then to see Night Watch. It's probably a good movie, but the grisly violence made it hard for me to watch.

I've been doing a bunch of tea ceremony group things lately, since I was appointed recording secretary for this year. We have an entire year of activities planned out, including tea ceremonies and workshops. Our next big event will be Children's Day tea ceremony in May. Unfortunately, I don't think it will be open to the public, or I'd invite yinz^* to come. Well, I'm happy to demonstrate Japanese tea ceremony for anyone who's interested; it was fun at the last annacon. Now if only I had a couple of tatami mats… ::want want want::

^* What has the world come to when this word has a wikipedia entry?!

I recently whipped up some python scripts to generate a web page that gives me information about upcoming amateur radio satellite passes, all collected in one place. Here's an example of its output. The bulk of its data is scraped from Heavens-Above (customized for my local area). I supplement that with AO-51 Echo status and some general status on the OSCAR satellites. I'm trying to think of more I could do to enhance it. For one thing, I could generalize it so other people could use it by inputting their geographic coordinates. They might also have a different idea of what maximum elevation constitutes a potentially 'good' pass—my scripts' threshold is 70 degrees. Another thing I could do is calculate AO-7's status, which alternates predictably between two modes; the question is which mode it's in now.

My understanding is that most amateur radio operators who want to make contact with a satellite find upcoming passes using standalone software like PREDICT or SatPC32, which present an overwhelming amount of data for someone at my stage of involvement. There is an Online Satellite Pass Prediction tool with similar features to those I envision adding, but I like being able to know each satellite's status (particularly AO-51 Echo's), cull the low-elevation passes, and see information for multiple satellites. I don't know whether other people care about those things; whether they do could drive my decision to maintain my scripts as a custom, one-user project or as a general service.

I wasn't going to post about it, since it seems like un-news, but I didn't hear SuitSat on Saturday morning. It appears there was some malfunction with it that has caused it to emit a very weak signal, so people generally haven't been able to hear it very well. I don't think anyone has been able to clearly receive the SSTV image, which makes it just as well that I didn't find an audio cable that could connect my receiver's speaker output to my laptop's microphone input.

I'm surprised at how much news coverage SuitSat's getting. I first heard about it several weeks ago on an amateur radio satellite mailing list and figured it for an obscure experiment. But it has been covered on NPR and CNN.

It's going to be making a good pass over this area tomorrow morning, and I'm going to listen for it. Apparently “The SSTV signal can be decoded with personal computer SSTV software after you connect your computer to the speaker output of your radio.” I wasn't planning on recording the audio, but now that I think about it, it should be pretty simple. Tonight's mission: finding the right audio cable to connect my radio with my laptop's microphone jack.

Update: I watched the suit deployment on NASA TV. Spacesuits really are quite rigid. From a moderate distance, a spacesuit stuffed with electronics looks pretty much like a spacesuit stuffed with a person. Which is pretty eerie to watch float away in space.

I heard an amateur radio satellite for the first time today! Or rather, I heard its downlinked UHF signal. The satellite in question is AO-51 (Echo), a satellite in a polar low-earth orbit that has been making good passes over this area roughly every five days. The last time I tried to listen its voice downlink was off, and its digital telemetry was less than exciting to listen to—actually, it sounded just like static noise. This time the voice downlink and uplink were on, and I could hear people "working" it. Maybe next time I'll transmit to it, which involves more coordination and etiquette than does just receiving the signal.

Here's a description of my amateur radio gear.

My amateur radio appartus is now, as General Taggi would say, fully operational. My next step will be keeping an eye on which amateur radio satellites will be making good passes (where I'm guessing "good" means something like at least 45 degrees elevation) and when, and then spending some time listening to downlinks to get familiar with satellite operating procedures and tracking techniques.

After trying out a few options for tracking satellites, it seems the simplest is to refer to a web site like Heavens-Above rather than repeatedly feed Keplerian elements files to an offline program. Then there's the issue of (handheld) antenna pointing, where I imagine a compass will be helpful; I wonder if a protractor is advisable for elevation. Or maybe it's just as much art as science. I hope to find out.

I'll start off looking at the low-earth orbiting satellites with linear transponders for basic analog communication. It's too bad that recently-launched SSETI has been having problems, but there are plenty of other amateur satellites to choose from.

In the meantime, I've been aimlessly scanning UHF and VHF ranges with the antenna just leaning against the wall, but I haven't come across any terrestrial traffic strong enough to break through my receiver's squelch threshold, which, come to think of it, I haven't tried adjusting.

I've taken up yoga again, in the form of classes at a local studio. I just wasn't doing it on my own at home; the external discipline of scheduled classes seems to be important for me. I'm taking it easy, at level 1, with an instructor I've had before and like because she's laid-back and playful (and, admittedly, because I enjoy listening to her accent). I'd probably be doing a lot better with my Japanese study if I'd found some external discipline to apply to it.

The current obstacle to completing my ham radio setup is the antenna connection. My hand-held yagi satellite antenna has a BNC connector, while my radio's antenna input is a PL-259 jack. An adapter is on order, along with a mobile magnetic antenna for my car. Which brings me to my next realization: 'mobile' ham radios don't seem to be designed to be alternated between base station use and in-vehicle use. I say that because the manual has the user connecting the radio's power leads to her car's battery terminals. It's not clear to me where the wires would pass through the car's engine firewall. Ideally I'd like the flexibility to switch between using my radio at home and in my car, but I'm not sure how I'd set that up, considering the manual advises soldering any cable used to extend the power lead. :/

I'm planning to force tulips some tulips this winter. (Doesn't that sound aggressive, and maybe a little illicit? ;) By 'force' I mean 'cause to grow or mature by artificially accelerating normal processes.') I saw some beautiful, unusual varieties at Breck's, so I bought a few bulbs, and we'll see how they turn out. I don't think I can recommend the vendor, though; within a few days of placing my order, I got a phishing scam e-mail sent to the unique e-mail address I'd given Breck's. Indeed, their privacy policy leaves something—a lot of things, really—to be desired. Next time I'll shop elsewhere.

Our spacecraft weathered Hurricane Wilma inside its shipping container down at Kennedy Space Center, where it stayed safe and sound. There was some damage, however, to the Vertical Integration Facility, the building in which the Atlas V launch vehicle is sitting. The building's 'megadoor' was damaged, causing debris and rain to blow inside. Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be any unrecoverable damage, and launch is still planned for 11 January 2006.

Maybe I'll audit a grad-school class next semester. Data Visualization and Rapid Development of Engineering Applications Using Python look appealing.

My first ham radio came in the mail the other day. Until I get a power supply (on order, should be here in a few days), no tinkering is possible yet.