Sun Coast Amateur
Radio Club Society - blog

ic-7300mk2_remote

IC-7300MK2 Remote

To remote into my IC-7300MK2, I connected its LAN port to my AREDN hAP, then used wfview (a free and open source program), to access it anywhere on the AREDN mesh.

The settings I had to get from the radio were:

Hostname
Control Port
Username
Password

This page lists settings that should be adjusted in the radio to get better results. I haven't played with that yet.

printed_references

Printed References

Computers are great, but for some things, there's nothing like paper... Here's a list of references that I have printed at my station:

Page 1‒3 of my Radio Frequency List found on the Radio Programming page under the “Refs” section. On that page, I've got the repeaters that I use the most circled with some hand written notes.
The radio “Reference Guides” for the three kinds of radios I have at my stations from the Radio Programming page. These are single page print outs that show me how to setup a frequency, repeater offset, and tone in the VFO in case I need to work a repeater I don't have programmed. This is the kind of stuff that's important to know but really easy to forget.
Page 2‒3 of the nets page using the PDF output command. I also hand wrote the channel numbers for quick cross reference.
A paper copy of the Sunshine Coast Emergency Communications page filed in my emergency binder.
I also have my Grid Square taped to my desk. A Grid square is a series alternating pairs of letters and digits like CN89. The more characters are listed, the more precise the location, which is a good way of giving your location to any desired level of resolution and keep any level of privacy you like. At my latitude:
- 4 characters covers an area of about 16,000 km²
- 6 characters covers an area of about 28 km²
- 8 characters covers an area of about 0.2 km²
- 10 characters pretty much pin points my house.

school_amateur_radio_club_network

School Amateur Radio Club Network

SARCNET is really cool site that lists activities and projects to explore the world of ham radio. I stumbled on it searching for an 2-axis antenna rotator.

cyd_ham_dashboard

CYD Ham Dashboard

This project seems really interesting:

A HamClock-inspired ham radio dashboard for the ESP32 Cheap Yellow Display, supporting both the 2.8“ ESP32-2432S028R and the 4.0” 320×480 ST7796S variant from a single source tree.

Here are the seven screen it displays:

If anyone is thinking of building one, let me know, I'd love to have one of the 4“ ones!

reactos_attempt

ReactOS Attempt

I recently just learned of ReactOS, a Free and Open Source Operating System that has been in the works for over 20 years and aims to be able to natively run Windows programs and drivers. It's still feature-incomplete alpha software, but I thought it could be a good way of running ham radio programs made for Windows so I gave it a try in Virtualbox and tried to install Winlink.

TLDR:

Winlink loads but I can't seem to be able to configure it. Here's what I've done so far and where it fails. If anyone else is interested in tinkering with this, let me know if you manage to get passed any of these issues...

Download ReactOS

First step: Downloaded the BootCD (not LiveCD) of ReactOS 0.4.13 and save it.

Virtualbox

I used Virtualbox 6.1 under LinuxMint 20 XFCE.

Create a new machine.
Name it “ReactOS” and the version will pre-populate to “Windows 2003 (32-bit)” on its own.
I doubled the RAM to 1024MB
To load the “install CD”, click on the word “Storage”:
Select “Empty” and click on the CD icon.
Navigate to the file ReactOS-0.4.13.iso and you should see:
Back to the first screen, you can now start the machine.

Install ReactOS

The install screen will start and you simply press ENTER.
In fact, you'll have to press ENTER a few times until this next screen, where you need to press P first, and then ENTER:
On version 0.4.15, press C instead of P
ReactOS will show a bunch more screens, simply follow the prompts. It'll reboot and install more things. Then at some point, it'll ask to remove the CD. This is done using the CD icon at the bottom of the Virtualbox screen:
That looks promising! ReactOS has a Windows 2000 look, which I personally prefer to all the other versions of Windows.

Install Firefox

Now that ReactOS is installed, we're ready to install some programs.

Click on the Applications Manager:
Search for Firefox and install version 48.
Once Firefox is installed, do not let it update; that broke it for me.
Up to this point, everything works fine, but we're about to break things so before we continue, let's create a clone of the Virtualbox install...

Attempt #1

The first thing I tried was to install Winlink Express.
It installed but wouldn't load at all.

Attempt #2

This Winlink with Wine page says to install these in the following sequence:

.NET 3.5 sp1
“Microsoft Visual Basic 6 Runtime Service Pack 6”
“Microsoft HTML Rendering Engine 8”
“Visual C++ 14.0”

I got stuck at step 1...

At first, it looked like it was gonna work:
But then it seems it got stuck downloading some components and after a while failed:

Attempt #3

I deleted the machine and re-cloned the clone I made earlier.

From the Applications Manager, I installed .NET version 2:
and VB6:
Installed Winlink again, and this time it loaded. It took about 15-20 seconds, but it loaded:
But unfortunately, when I go to Settings → Winlink Express Setup... and fill out the information, it doesn't “Update”.

Attempt #4

I tried the same thing as the previous attempt but with .NET version 2 SP2. Same result.

Attempt #5

I tried the same thing as the previous attempt but with .NET version 4 and Winlink wouldn't even load.

Attempt #6

I tried the same thing as all the previous attempts with the daily version of ReactOS without luck. It looks like they did fix a small bug in Firefox though.

To Be Continued...

... maybe. I don't really know what else to try so I'll leave this aside until I think of something else to try. If you have ideas, please let me know! – Patrick, VA7FI 2020/09/28 10:15

Sun Coast Amateur Radio Club Society - blog