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Archive for 27. December 2009

Alan Spicer works St. Maarten on HF/SSB 14.240 Mhz

27. December 2009 by admin.

This was an interesting one, not only because it’s a nice DX (Long Distance) contact on Amateur (Ham) Radio, but also because it’s a popular Yacht Destination.

Anyway I worked a station: PJ7UT on USB (Upper Sideband) HF/SSB today. It’s a Ham Radio “Net” on there for the http://www.iparc.org/ International Police Association Radio Club. Anyway, QRZ.com gives the following information about the call sign.

PJ7UT looks like a callsign from St Maarten, Saba, St Eustatius (DXCC Entity #255).

Anyway this is somewhere on the order of 1200 miles away on a bearing of around 300 degrees from my QTH. I read somewhere online where a ham said something like: What’s neat about Amateur/Ham Radio is that it is communications that does not depend on any of the normal (expected) infrastructure of the times, namely it does not rely on Satellite, Cellular, WiFi, or any other such “controlled by others” systems in order to communicate.

The rig here is Kenwood TS-480SAT - power output was 60 watts - antenna is Hustler Trapped Vertical model # 6BTV, ground mounted.

—

73 de KA4UDX

Alan Spicer Telecom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net - http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954-683-3426

communications (at) marinetelecom.net

Posted in Main | No Comments »

Fun with Outlook Express: 2Gb Message Folders (File) Size Limitation

27. December 2009 by admin.

I had a problem sending emails last night. I had to get one sent that was kind of important. I use Outlook Express because, well, I’ve always used Outlook Express. It’s simple to use and does One Thing Good (a Unix ideal: Make programs small and do One Thing Good, and allow them to “connect” with other programs in case you want to do More Things Good.) that is send and receive Emails. Anyway the problem resulted in emails getting an ERROR, a Blank Error to make things more confusing, upon sending messages. The message would get stuck in the Outbox. Recipients would tell me that they not only “got the message” but “got 20 copies of it”. So the email messages were getting sent, but OE was not registering that fact correctly. So off I went to find the un-technology or aged-old-technology that causes this phenomena. Here is the transcript of an email that I wrote to a friend and customer about my trouble-with-tribbles troubles with Microsoft Outlook Express:

> Hi Alan!  No Trouble Here!! John

> On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 8:49 PM, Alan Spicer Marine Telecom <communications@marinetelecom.net>

> wrote:

> Email test 1234 … having email sending trouble sorry to bother … testing 1234 

Thanks for QSL Card :-) 73 from KA4UDX. :-) But seriously I think I ran into one of the limitations of technology, 32-bit technology anyway. I use Outlook Express for email. I like it … it’s simple. Anyway to make a short story long I believe my “Sent Items” folder hit or exceeded 2 Gigabytes in size. It seems that at that point Outlook Express exhibits a strange phenomena, when I sent an email it would get “Errors” but the errors would be blank. Sometimes it would say it could not find the message in the “Outbox”. Google.com search for that told that I should locate my Tools > Options > Maintenance > Store Folder location (which is a button under maintenance. I should delete Outbox.dbx. If I still have problems I should look into backing up “Sent Mail” dbx as well and delete that one. When I went to look at it (see attached JPG) it was at 2 Gb. So my theory is that “Sent Mail” hit a limitation, Outbox writes to “Sent Mail” a copy of messages after they are sent, so Outbox was mucked up because “Sent Mail” couldn’t be written to.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. :-) Anyway I guess it’s a good time to “clean house” a bit - I had sent emails going back to the year 2005.

I’ve heard of that issue in PST mailbox files for Outlook, but not Outlook Express. But I’m sure it’s the same type of thing. And I’ve probably had this problem before … although it might be that Windows XP itself or a hard drive suffers a glitch or crash before OE gets to that point. I say that because I remember backing up OE files (and thus email) in the past … and re-importing them into a fresh Windows XP install.

Anyway, reference: http://help.wugnet.com/windows2/Blank-Error-Message-Emails-ftopict493707.html

There used to be hard drive size limitations, and no doubt file size limits in 16 bit FAT/FAT32 and NTFS as well. But I know these days I have much larger FILES such as DVD movies on NTFS in 4, 8, 54 (Blue Ray?) Gb Sizes without any problems.

See also: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/903095

I guess it’s a matter of “bandwidth” somewhere. Extra Class Ham Operators get more Bandwidth on HF. Newer compression technologies and communications transmission methods give more bandwidth for Television and Internet bandwidth situations. 64-bit IP Addressing Methods (e.g. IPv6 vs IPv4) give more bandwidth in IP Address “Space” and in Computer Operating Systems (e.g. 32-bit Windows vs 64-bit Windows.) In fact I’m running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit on a computer with 6 Gb or RAM memory and it can actually use it all. In a 32-bit Operating System it can not. 64-bit Operating Systems are starting to take over. It’s at the “Tipping Point” where you won’t be able to buy a new computer with a 32-bit OS, it will come out-of-the-box with a 64-bit OS.

—
Alan Spicer

Alan Spicer Telecom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net and http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954-683-3426

communications (at) marinetelecom.net

Posted in General Computer onboard Sail and Motor Yachts | No Comments »

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