Random Wire Review 99: July 19, 2024

Trying to load a virtual machine on Vultr. Was your first radio a CB? Drones lost in lake. Tech stack daily drivers. Some bench notes. I'll be testing a couple of consumer radios in about a month.

Contents

1. Installing AllStarLink From a VM to Vultr

2. Did You Get Your Start with CB Radio?

3. Hamshack Hotline Warning About BLF

4. Tech Stack: My Daily Drivers

5. On The Bench…

     5.1 Yaesu FTM-300DR power problem

     5.2 CoreMP135 by M5STACK

     5.3 Old Heathkit shortwave receiver

     5.4 AllStarLink interface from phone patch

6. Tech Trivia: Drones Splash Down

7. Closing

     7.1 Future test of two consumer radios

     7.2 Enjoying my virtual machine AllStarLink node

     7.3 Personal: I bought a new scooter

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1. Installing AllStarLink From a VM to Vultr

TL;DR — I tried to deploy a new server instance on Vultr of a VirtualBox virtual machine running an AllStarLink node. Although Vultr documentation says it can be done, I did not succeed. Why do this? Because ASL 3 opens the door to having pre-made AllStarLink appliances that could be installed easily and consistently! Working on this project was going to be the focus of this issue, but instead I’m reporting that I believe it can be done but I haven’t been able to do it…yet!

A few issues back, I experimented with copying a virtual machine running an AllStarLink node to another computer. The emulator I used is VirtualBox and the only trouble I had after importing the .ova file to a different Windows machine was properly configuring networking. Other than that, it worked fine.

Node 588411 running in a virtual machine

What is VirtualBox? Says VirtualBox.org:

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction.

Now that ASL3 supports running on a virtual machine, the thought occurred to me: where are the pre-built nodes as virtual machines that can be downloaded? Imagine being able to simply choose the kind of node you want, download the appropriate image file, and import it into your emulator of choice. Honestly, that seems like a killer way to get some more nodes on the AllStarLink system.

I think it would be a great thing to take a node that is known to be working well and move a copy to a different system. Change a few key pieces of data and boom, you have an almost instant node.

I’m sure this idea may unsettle some hams who believe we should all build our stuff from scratch, as well as those who decry computer-based things as not being part of amateur radio. I confess that I find it really hard to imagine that any ham can completely avoid using any computer systems or knowledge sources in their amateur radio hobby, even it is only to renew their license with the FCC.

I respect that some folks want to lean on historic practices. I get it. I still have my Kenwood TS-520S around because it is a pleasure to operate. There are no computers attached to it or associated with it. It is relatively simple compared to many modern transceivers. Bonus: the receiver is great and the sound is delightful.

Perhaps my perspective is different than most. I believe that if it connects to amateur radio somewhere in the chain between sender and receiver, it’s part of amateur radio. I view amateur radio as a big tent with soft walls, not a narrow aisle bounded by diamond-sharp edges.

I also suspect that many amateurs want a simpler way forward, i.e., they would prefer a radio appliance, something they plug in and it just works. This is where some pre-made, known-good AllStarLink virtual machines could help build the AllStarLink community. Maybe it would help if I describe AllStarLink nodes as radio appliances instead of radios.

1.1 Importing a VM of a working node

What comes next rises to a level of arcane-ness that most people are not going to want to know anything about. Feel free to skip ahead. Otherwise, take a deep dive into this guidance provided by Vultr: Best Practices when Migrating to Vultr. Specifically, look for the VirtualBox section in that document. I offer this information not because you might want to do it, but rather, to prove that it can be done.

(In all truth, I got so frustrated with this process that I took an hour off for a motorcycle ride. That gave me a chance to reset my brain and approach this again with a fresh perspective.)

To bring a virtual machine instance into Vultr, you have to create a raw image file from the .vdi file in the virtual machine. To create that raw file, you use a command line tool called VBoxManage (in Windows, it comes as part of the VirtualBox application but can only be run from the command line). VBoxManage has a thorough online manual.

You have to extract the .iso file that is part of the virtual machines .ova template, then you convert it to a raw image file using VBoxManage. The raw image file then must be placed in a location that Vultr can reach to pull the file in.

1.2 You have to upload from a URL

During this journey, I discovered interesting things about how Vultr expects to access the ISO file. Vultr wants a URL. No direct upload service is provided. That’s a bit awkward. I went down various rabbit holes to get the image file to a cloud location that Vultr liked. Google Drive did not work, nor did OneDrive. Both of those services append some extra information on the end of the file’s URL and Vultr rejects URLs with appended information.

Vultr explains this in How to Upload Custom ISOs to Vultr but I didn’t find that before banging on the problem for a bit. Specifically, see their Example URLs section.

What to do? I tried to use a pCloud (a secure cloud storage service) account to accomplish this but uploads to pCloud are quite slow. Instead, I tried using one of my WordPress websites, modifying the upload limit and adding .ova as a file type. It still didn’t work.

You can, of course, sign up for Vultr’s Object Storage for $6/month. That $6 gets you 1 terabyte of storage and 1 terabyte of transfer bandwidth/month. I confess that I’m tempted. In fact, after a couple of hours of fighting with good ways to fulfill the upload requirement, I succumbed and purchased the object storage from Vultr. (If you want to try any Vultr services, please consider using my affiliate link, found on the Support page as item 4.)

By the way, using Vultr Object Storage is not quite as simple as it sounds. You need a client application to move files in and out of storage. I installed a freeware program called S3 Browser and configured it to use my Vultr Object Storage account. Then I created a bucket for my virtual machines. Once I had a bucket, I was able to upload my image file to the bucket. Note that for a large file like this, uploading to Object Storage takes quite a while. My upload of about 3 Gb’s took about 20 minutes over Xfinity cable. I like S3 Browser so I did go ahead and buy the lifetime S3 Browser Pro license for $39.99.

One benefit of using Vultr Object Storage is you get a URL to the file that Vultr likes. I also don’t mind having some extra bulk storage available. Figuring out where to put the image file has been the hardest part of this exercise!

1.3 Deploying a server with the image file

To deploy a server, you set up a new cloud compute instance on Vultr:

• In Products, select Cloud Compute. I chose Cloud Compute - Shared CPU for this test, and selected Seattle as the server location.

• Under Choose Image, select Upload ISO, then in My ISOs click the plus sign next to Upload ISO. Enter the URL where your image file is located. Your upload will take several minutes. If no errors are reported, you can proceed.*

• Under Choose Plan, select AMD High Performance. Under that option, I selected the 25 GB NVMe option at $6/month. I also accepted the Auto Backups addition at $1.20/month.

*And the Upload ISO step is where I repeatedly failed. I tried to upload the .ova file. Nope: errors. I tried renaming the .ova file to an .iso file. Nope. I opened the .ova template and extracted the .vdi file, then used the VBoxManage to convert the .vdi file to an .img file in raw format. That should have worked but it didn’t.

I spent about eight hours on this on Saturday, and that is usually the time I am recording and editing the Random Wire Reflections podcast. I’m a day behind my self-imposed schedule.

I’m going to set this aside for now but the idea of being able to export and save working node configurations as virtual machines, and then importing one of those virtual machines into a cloud server seems like it should work. It also seems like having a library of working node configurations for various purposes would benefit the amateur radio community. It might take someone smarter than me to make this work.

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2. Did You Get Your Start with CB Radio?

It’s often very interesting to listen to amateur radio operators talk about citizens band (CB) radio. I often hear a sense of derision from other hams as they talk about “those CBers” and their bad radio practices. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but I have to say there are plenty of hams who have pretty atrocious (oxymoron alert) radio practices!

I suspect that many of us who enjoy amateur radio now once had a CB radio. I did. When we lived in northern Nevada in the very early 1980s, you had a land line phone and a CB radio. There were no cell phones. With a fairly inexpensive CB and a mag-mount antenna, you had comms when the land lines went out and when driving.

Winter in northern Nevada can be brutal! We had a half-circle driveway and more than once I could not get it cleared of snow. The snow was a fine powder and the wind would howl across our homesite. I had a grain shovel for the snow. Starting at the top of the drive where the car and pickup were parked, I’d start shoveling. By the time I got to the bottom, the driveway was drifted in again. Rinse and repeat. One day I got so frustrated I started up the car and tried to go through a drift at speed, only to feel the car rise up in the air and settle down on top of the drift, high centered. That’s a lesson you never forget!

Reno was a four-hour drive to the west, Salt Lake City was a four-hour drive to the east, and Boise was four hours to the north. The countryside was largely empty and we could sometimes drive for an hour or more without seeing another vehicle.

CB was a lifeline on the highway. This was in the era of C.W. McCall’s popular song “Convoy.” In our 1/2-ton Chevy pickup, we looked like David to the large multi-wheeled Goliaths on the highway. Every long-haul trucker had a CB and many were willing to talk. I can’t count how often we whiled away the hours tagging along with a group of big trucks, listening to their conversations, and sometimes joining in. It was often humorous, occasionally a bit salty, and it helped us stay awake.

I had forgotten some of these memories until a conversation on an amateur radio net about how people got started in amateur radio. One set of life experiences I had that was generally positive was using a CB radio in the 80s. This didn’t cause me to get my amateur license but it didn’t hurt, either.

I wonder how many of us got our start in two-way radio with a CB rig?

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3. Hamshack Hotline Warning About BLF

Recently, I received an email from the Hamshack Hotline folks titled BLF and Speed Dial No No's. Well that is a bit of a teaser so I read the message. If you have a Hamshack Hotline number on a SIP phone, this message is for you.

Here’s the crux of the message about the Busy Lamp Feature, or BLF:

If you still use the speed dial with either parameter of "blf+" OR "sub=", your phone still sends the request to our server asking for the status of the remote extension(s), over and over and over, every second. Those requests still put a huge strain on the server.

And there are currently several, several hundred users on the HHUS server that have not stopped using those forbidden parameters in their speed dial setups.

So, HH will be turning on the IP Ban rule for users who are still using BLF.

You should also be aware that almost ALL soft phone apps have a BLF feature as well and set to "On" by default.

All HHUS users will need to turn off the BLF feature in their soft phone apps and in their hard phone(s) by 5pm eastern on Friday the 19th or the automated rule check that gets turned on will ban your IP address and your phone(s) will stop connecting to the HHUS server.

For those who were using the Busy Lamp Feature, Hamshack Hotline has published two pages to help you see who is online:

• Extensions in use

• Active conference bridges

Their page at https://blf.hamshackhotline.com/ explains all this better than I can. I did log into my Cisco SPA525G phone to make sure my speed dial buttons weren’t configured in ways that would cause me to be banned!

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4. Tech Stack: My Daily Drivers

My technology stack is where my personal and work lives intersect. Described below are some of the items I use every day. The things that are backups or are only occasionally used may, or may not, be mentioned. This is not an exhaustive list of the technology I have on hand. Rather, it is just the top layer of my daily drivers.

4.1 Computing: the TomBook

I am really enjoying my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 laptop running Microsoft Windows 11 Pro. It is equipped with 32 Gb of RAM and an i7-3650U processor at 1800 MHz. That processor has 10 cores which, for my uses, makes it a beast.

At home, I have the laptop elevated on a desktop stand. I run a second monitor (Samsung) using a small docking station. To travel, I only have to disconnect the USB-C power and the USB-A dock.

With the laptop on the stand, I use a Logitech keyboard and a Microsoft mouse on my desktop.

When traveling I often take the X1 or an older Surface laptop (named, as you might imagine, the TomSurface).

4.2 Storage: the TomServer

My primary storage external to the laptop is a Lenovo ThinkStation P510 also running Microsoft Windows 11 Pro. This machine has 64 Gb of installed memory. The Intel Xeon E5-2690 CPU runs with 14 cores. Although it is a bit dated, the substantial memory and the large number of cores allow me to run virtual machines on this PC without any trouble.

The primary disk is a 1 Tb SSD. For storage, I’ve installed a 4 Tb SSD.

4.3 Storage backup: Synology box

My backup box is a Synology DS220+ with two 3-Tb hard drives installed. The Synology box is secondary to the P510 TomServer. I use FreeFileSync to maintain repositories for my various machines on the TomServer, and then once a week or so, I trigger a routine to copy those repositories to the Synology box. I also run iDrive (an app) on my machines that incrementally backs up changes nightly.

4.4 Linking machines: Tailscale

Tailscale is on almost every machine I operate. Tailscale allows me to easily make connections through my firewalls from near and far. To operate my Olympia, Washington machine from Portland, Oregon, I use Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) over Tailscale. When in Olympia, I can reach my Portland machines the same way.

My Raspberry Pi’s all have Tailscale on them. Even my Synology device has Tailscale. This software has been a tremendous help because I travel so much.

4.5 Network routers

Did I really mean routers, plural? Yes! My main router at home is a GL.iNET GL-MT6000 Flint 2 router. It feels solid. It has been pretty seamless to operate. Sometimes, I activate the VPN I configured on it, helping to protect everyone in the household who is connecting through it. I also run AdGuard Home on it for the same reason.

One of the great things about this router is Tailscale runs on it. That makes it even easier for me to reach into my home network when I’m away.

As a backup router, I have an interesting device called a Linkstar H68K. I wrote about it in May 2024. This unit is not running AdGuard or anything fancy. On those rare occasions I need to bypass some of the filtering on my home network, I simply switch my connection to the Linkstar.

I kept my older TP-Link router as a backup to the backup, just in case something surges and fries some equipment. By the way, I do have most of my networking gear plugged into an APC-brand uninterruptible power supply.

The other piece of home networking that is significant to mention is my use of NextDNS for filtering and for handling my DNS queries.

4.6 Amateur radio communications

Did you notice I did not say radios? That’s because some of my preferred methods don’t involve radio much, at least on my end. My Portland home has truly awful RF interference so I have gravitated toward digital systems. All of my systems are connected to larger systems elsewhere that do have significant RF-related aspects, so to me, these still fall into the realm of amateur radio.

AllStarLink

ASL was the first digital voice medium I adopted in a big way. I have several nodes at home, a couple that can travel with me, and one (node 57945) running on a Vultr cloud server.

DMR

I do have a DMR hotspot and radio that I occasionally fire up and use. I have it if I needed it but I don’t use it very much.

D-STAR

My Icom ID-5100A mobile radio does D-STAR. There just isn’t a lot of D-STAR traffic around me so I generally leave this machine off.

C4FM: RF and WIRES-X

For portables, I primarily use two radios: an FT-3D and an FT-5D. For mobile, I run a Yaesu FTM-300DR radio.

At home, I have a second FTM-300DR running as a WIRES-X Portable Digital Node. This machine is on unless we’re leaving for more than an hour or two.

I also have a hotspot running WPSD that is dedicated to Yaesu System Fusion. The FT-3D and FT-5D play nicely with the hotspot.

I would say that my two most-used digital voice systems are AllStarLink and C4FM. The audio clarity is really helpful, especially as my hearing slowly changes with age.

HF

For HF radio, my stalwart friend is a Yaesu FT-450D. I’ve used it in the shack and for POTA. I also have a Yaesu FT-891 which is certainly more portable than the 450, but I’m more comfortable with the 450.

Meshtastic

I also have several Meshtastic devices. As I learn more about this technology, it spurs my thinking about how it could be used. I’m curious about Meshtastic even though it doesn’t seem to have many uses that align with my radio hobby.

Those are the bits of my tech stack that I touch and use almost every day.

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5. On The Bench…

5.1 Yaesu FTM-300DR power problem

I had a problem with my Yaesu FTM-300DR operating as a mobile in the pickup truck. I would turn it on and 30 seconds later it would go dark. Rinse and repeat, over and over.

It was a very hot day and I thought, well, maybe the control head on the dash is getting too hot, so I moved it off the dash to a shaded part of the air-conditioned interior. That did not fix it.

I checked the antenna connection and it was tight at the antenna and at the radio.

What was left? If it wasn’t internal to the radio, the only likely thing left was power. I move this radio from rig to rig so I use a Powerwerx 12V plug adaptor for power. In this particular adaptor, there is a small screw collar at the tip of the plug that secures the spring-loaded tip. When I inspected it, I saw it was partly unscrewed. Once I screwed that back into place and reinserted the adapter, the radio stopped shutting down.

I know that using a 12V adapter isn’t a robust solution but since I move the radio from rig to rig, it has worked pretty well so far. I suppose it might be better to wire in an Anderson Powerpole pair and use that!

5.2 CoreMP135 by M5STACK

This is an industrial ARM-based device that runs Debian 12. That’s good enough to run AllStarLink, or should be. This little device isn’t much larger than two small matchboxes stacked on top of each other.

There are two operating system images available. One is for controlling devices and the other is a Debian 12 instance that is, unfortunately, limited. I say limited because the root filesystem is quite small. In the M5STACK implementation, the root filesystem is 100% full. I’ve fiddled a bit with fdisk and gdisk, but I think I’m going to have to try to mount the microSD card in a different machine to expand the root filesystem.

Why does this matter? I can run “apt update” as root but there is no room to install any updates. If I don’t have room for updates, I won’t have room to try to shoehorn AllStarLink on board, either.

This remains very much an experiment.

5.3 Old Heathkit shortwave receiver

The crew over at Ham Radio Workbench were talking in episode 213 about rejuvenating old radios. That reminded me of the old Heathkit Mohican receiver I have sitting in a corner of the workbench.

I wrote about that last December:

I am feeling compelled to pull that out of the corner and open it up. I’ll bet some of the capacitors are shot. One reason I wanted to get a Heathkit is the layout likely has plenty of room for me to get in and work on it. If I muck it up, I’m not out much!

5.4 AllStarLink interface from phone patch

I’ve got some other old devices boxed up that I hope to modify someday. One is a Heathkit HD-15 phone patch that I’d like to use as the housing for an AllStarLink node. But as I thought about this little project, I realized that the Kenwood PC-1A Phone Patch Controller already has an 8-pin microphone receptacle so I ordered one in good shape from an eBay seller. It arrived on Monday so I’m including a few photos as my mind starts contemplating how to convert this into an AllStarLink audio interface.

Kenwood phone patch (knife is 3-5/8 inches long)

You can see the 8-pin microphone jack on the left of the photo. That is going to work well with one of my Kenwood MC-60 desk microphones! One of the two knobs will become a volume control. If I can, I’d like to monitor audio level through the monitor gauge, just for fun. I don’t know what to use the other potentiometer for. I welcome your ideas!

While I was at it, I opened up the box. Everything looks nice and clean inside. The 8-pin microphone connector looks to be in great shape. One rheostat is easy to turn and one is more resistant. I need to think about where to put an indicator LED on the front panel.

Kenwood PC-1A phone patch interior

A quick swipe with a lightly dampened microfiber cloth cleaned up the front panel enough to show this device is in “good enough” cosmetic condition for this project.

Kenwood PC-1A phone patch with front panel wiped clean

I’m not thinking of keeping the phone patch functionality so at this time, removing the board seems likely. There is plenty of room in the case for a CM108 USB fob, a small amplifier, and more. The rheostat on the back panel (missing the knob) could be removed and a headphone/speaker jack mounted there. The USB cable that goes to my physical node (a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client, a Raspberry Pi, or a mini PC) can come out the back panel where the existing cable passes through.

I have a couple of CM108 fobs coming from the U.K. around the end of the month. I chose to go this route because I’ve destroyed several CM108 devices while trying to solder the one very fine wire to one leg of the IC chip. Rather than go through that frustration again, I thought I’d try a CM108 that someone else has soldered. Fingers crossed.

Turning this into a sound interface for my AllStarLink desktop node should be a fun little build. I’m obviously starting to dream a bit about it!

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6. Tech Trivia: Drones Splash Down

I saw the headline and had to read the article because once upon a time, I almost lost a drone in a lake:

• SeaTac’s $40,000 Fourth of July fail: 55 drones drop into Angle Lake

Fifty-five of 200 drones losing their GPS lock seems suspicious. But what piqued my interest was the drones operating over water. I had an incident two years ago where my DJI drone was hovering over the surface of a lake, and I lost control of the aircraft.

Later, I learned that not only does my drone use GPS for positioning, but it also uses the view of the surface below it. I think the lightly rippled surface, moving from the light breeze and reflecting the bright sun, confused the drone. When I told it to return home, it did nothing. When I tried to pilot it back to the dock, it went away from the dock. When I piloted away from the dock, it went farther away.

I was stumped and pretty worried because I had no control.

Finally, I turned off my controller and then turned it back on. That forced a new connection with the drone and about 30 seconds later I had control again. The drone still couldn’t find home but at least I could pilot it back to land for a safe landing.

I don’t know what happened with the SeaTac drones but losing control of a drone is not unusual. I’m glad no people were injured and no property was damaged.

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7. Closing

Well, not much RF-based radio is in this issue. I had wanted to report success on the proof-of-concept installation of an AllStarLink node on a virtual machine to a cloud server. There is more work to be done on that topic!

Hopefully, I’ll have a bit more on traditional radio in the next issue (issue 100 on July 26, 2024).

7.1 Future test of two consumer radios

I expect to have a couple of XHDATA radios in hand soon to review. One is D-608WB emergency weather radio. I’m looking forward to giving it a try. The other radio is not listed yet on the XHDATA website: the D-220. Here is what their rep said about the D-220:

XHDATA is planning to release a new portable D-220 radio. The D-220 radio has good reception performance and excellent listening sound quality. Not only does it receive the FM/MW/SW bands, but it will be surprisingly good value

XHDATA also describes the D-200 as a “high performance global band radio” with DSP.

The two radios are coming from China so I don’t really expect them to arrive before August.

7.2 Enjoying my virtual machine AllStarLink node

I'm really enjoying my AllStarLink node 588411 in a virtual machine on my home server. Node 588411 is currently connected to node 289802, and that node is connected to XLX303 C. (Check out the XLX303 dashboard.) XLX303 C is the WIRES-X node for Olympic Mountain Digital, and that is code for the repeater in my “home” community put up by Jeff N7NEE.

Locally, node 588411 is connected to my Cisco SPA525G SIP phone. To connect, I hit my speed dial button and hear the phone announce the connection to 588411. Then I pull up AllScan and connect to node 289802.

This morning, I heard Ben AB7I and Gary AC7VA in crystal clear audio. This is truly amazing technology.

7.3 Personal: I bought a new scooter

On a more personal note, I just bought a BMW C 400 GT scooter. This is a single-cylinder scoot that can run on the freeway but is happier around town. I have a 2008 Suzuki Burgman 650 that has carried me many thousands of miles around the Pacific Northwest but it has grown too long in the tooth to depend on. The BMW is loaded with technology so my learning curve right now is very steep. The bike, and my helmet, have Bluetooth, so I’m starting to noodle on how to add a ham radio to this package. It would be a blast to have some QSOs while motorcycling!

BMW C 400 GT scooter

Why did I include this? Because our conversations are better when we learn a little bit about each other.

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This is for you Morse Code warriors:

73 to all!

https://www.qrz.com/db/kj7t