RF Capabilities

Both rigs provide 50W power on the 2-meter and 70-cm ham bands.  The 350R additionally can transmit 1W on the 1.25-meter band.  The extended receive ranges are also divergent, with notable differences being the lack of 13cm/1.3GHz band (and possibly the 33cm/902MHz band per a footnote) coverage on the 350R .  There are published mods to provide extended transmit capabilities for both units.  Both radios have a cross-band repeater capability.

APRS

APRS is the feature that places these two radios in their own category.

GPS

One aspect of APRS is the use of a GPS for automated position reporting.  In the D710A, an external third-party GPS receiver (such as the GPS-710) needs to be connected to the control head.  For the 350R, Yaesu sells their own FGPS-1 module which installs in the back of the control head.  Documentation indicates it is possible to use the FGPS-2 module, which is the GPS receiver used on the VX-8R, but the required CT-133 cable could not be located from various retailers websites.  It does not seem to be readily possible to use a non-Yaesu GPS receiver.  Personally, I think having a GPS connection available from the radio body would make sense.  My intended control head mounting location is not likely to have the best view of the sky.

Digipeater Functions

The D710A appears to have a robust set of digipeater functions.  This feature would primarily be useful in situations where a temporary digipeater was needed to serve an area not covered by a permanent digipeater.  The 350R appears to not have this feature.

Other APRS Features

The D710A supports QSY information, weather station attachment, and a Kenwood GPS format for tactical display integration with AvMap G5.  Both radios are equipped with the SmartBeaconing feature which bases position update intervals on the speed of travel and direction changes.  The 350R has some navigation enhancements providing direction indication to other stations.

TNC

The built-in TNC on the D710A can be used by a PC or other external device, and supports KISS.  The 350R supports a “modem” mode for both 1200 and 9600, which hopefully means it can be used as a TNC as well, but I’ve not found anything explicitly confirming success with this.

Software / Firmware

These modern radios, like most recent electronics, have some computer-ness to them.  Programming software and firmware updates for the D710A are freely available from Kenwood.  These updates have added new features to existing products at no additional cost.  So far, there is no indication of any software available for the 350R.  The repair for the navigation issue discussed below involved mailing the unit in for repair – for what should be a firmware update.  Given the newness of the product, it is possible that the rolling out of consumer firmware updating is forthcoming, but the situation with the VX-8R upgrade to VX-8DR doesn’t make this prospect seem likely.

Bluetooth

It’s only fair to mention that the 350R has an optional Bluetooth module.  The only Bluetooth capability provided is audio, such as the use of a Bluetooth headset for using the radio.  I’d be much more interested in this if Bluetooth data capability of some sort were provided.

Quirks

The 350R is a really new radio, and that means there is not much information available, and that it has a few bugs and quirks.  Already there are reports that APRS navigation feature leads you in the wrong direction.  There are also reports that the radio will hang, requiring power to be physically removed to reset the unit.

Conclusion

While the 350R does introduce some new capabilities (222 MHz, Bluetooth, integrated GPS, navigation feature), there are still features of the D710 that it seems to lack (digipeating, tactical GPS protocol).  The free firmware/software of the D710 is hard to beat.  Given the quirkiness of the new hardware, and feeling that the features unique to the D710 have more potential use than those unique to the 350R, my inclination would be to get the tried and true D710 if purchasing a unit today.

The install was straight forward and relatively painless.  The hardest part was getting the wiring connector detached from the factory radio.  I used the kit from Crutchfield since I wanted a no-hassle return option, mostly.  The USB connector is a cable emerging from the back of the radio, while the 1/8″ miniplug external input is on the faceplate.  It would have probably been more useful to have both on the back, or swapped.

The basic functions work as expected.  CD audio sounds fine.  AM radio reception seemed to have the same sensitivity as my factory radio, despite comments elsewhere on the web indicating problems with this.

The USB and CD are capable of playing back MP3 audio, of course, as well as the similarly encumbered WMA and AAC formats. Naturally, for ideological reasons, a decent amount of my audio is in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC formats, which this unit can’t play on its own.

Bluetooth audio sounds pretty good paired to my Android G1 running cyanogenmod, though it can be skippy at times which I blame on the G1s underwhelming RAM and CPU.  The G1 running cyanogenmod has the ability to play my Ogg Vorbis and FLAC media.  The menu interface for pairing the phone is incredibly unintuitive on the CZ509 – have the manual and patience handy when attempting.  The radio does have an auto-connect feature which should cause the CZ509 to connect to your Bluetooth device upon powerup, but I have never had this work.  I’m not sure which device is at fault for certain, but I suspect the CZ509 isn’t doing something right.  Fortunately with the help of a shortcut on the G1, manual connection is only a few screen presses away.  The Bluetooth playback only has play/pause/forward/back controls and has no song title text.  I’m guessing this means the CZ509 only supports AVRCP 1.0.  I’m not currently using the phone audio capability of the CZ509 – I’m not sure where the microphone would go.  Sometimes the G1 will not produce any audio despite an established connection which is readily solved with shutting down Bluetooth on the G1 and starting it back up.  I’ve not had this happen in the middle of a connection.  It would also really be nice if the headset volume controls and Bluetooth volume controls were stored separately in the G1 as I need it full-scale for A2DP and near the bottom for wired headphones.

I’m overall pleased with the purchase.  I certainly could have gotten a more featureful or less expensive radio had it not been for the A2DP experimentation goal, but this radio should serve my needs.

It was good to read more of Ender following the war before his transition to the much older character found in Speaker for the Dead.  The journey to Shakespeare Colony and Ender’s work there was a great story line, and one that I think could have been expounded upon further.  The book also gives a much more complete picture of Colonel Graff that was welcome.  The story line surrounding Ganges Colony and the Bean-offspring-raised-to-be-Achilles seemed more forced and interested me less.

What stories are yet to be told in the Enderverse?  Well, apparently one is in the works.  My hope is that it will continue Bean’s story.  If I remember right, we last see him departing Earth on his own relativistic voyage.

Also heard an interesting quote today:

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” – Ben Franklin.

I think there is some wisdom there.

I’d love to see some of these places in person!

It was brought to my attention recently that the late Michael Crichton had given a speech about his skepticism of “global warming” (the non-literal term) and I had to give it a read.  In case you don’t know, he’s the author of books such as Jurassic Park which I thoroughly enjoyed for their technical detail.  Not to mention he was working on the movie adaptation of his book The Andromeda Strain while still in medical school, if I remember correctly – so a pretty gifted guy.  While I think his speech makes some oversimplifications (just as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth does – yes, I have seen it), there is one point he makes that I emphatically agree with: “I [regard] science as the business of testing theories with measured data from the outside world. Untestable hypotheses are not science but rather something else.”  If I do manage to do some reading on this, that sentiment will be the standard I measure against.

Over the past few days I’ve been upgrading my file/media server from Fedora 9 to Fedora 12.  I did this with yum, upgrading from 9 to 10, 10 to 11, and 11 to 12 incrementally, removing conflicts as necessary.  This actually went surprisingly well, and at the end, with just one reboot, I had gone from 9 to 12.

It may have booted, but there were a number of things I had to fix afterwards:

• The kernel video mode setting had to be disabled to not break the NVIDIA binary driver (“blacklist nouveau” somewhere in /etc/modprobe.d/).  Apparently this is supposed to be handled by installing rpmfusion’s kmod package, but that wasn’t the case for me.
• The X server would crash immediately upon a login.  I eventually figured this out to be a missing gnome-session-xsession package.  I’m not sure if this is something I had removed for dependency reasons earlier, or if it was split from another package at some point and yum missed it.  Either way, it was a real pain to debug, but easy to fix.
• The kernel would not recognize the partitions on three of my disks.  This was a major pain, and the main focus of this article.
• I don’t like MythTV 0.22’s new video gallery

Fedora 12 (2.6.31.6-145.fc12.x86_64) Disk Partitions Issue?

So… sdb, sdc, and sde each have a single partition on them, but the kernel (per /proc/partitions and other means) would only report block devices for sdb, sdc, and sde not sdb1, sdc1, and sde1 as should have additionally existed.  Naturally, the first thing to consult would be dmesg:

sda: sda1 sda2 sda3
sdb:
sdc: sdb1
sdc1
sdd:
sde:
sdd1 sdd2 sdd3
sde1
sdf:
sdf1

At first glance, this looks really, really bad.  sdb1 existing on sdc?  That’s not supposed to happen.  But after looking at it further, and having had some experience debugging multi-threaded things, I became convinced this was the mangled output of multiple parallel partition discovery processes.  If that were the case, it looked like it should have been successful, but was not.

So, is this what happened?  Googling turned up a bit on the so-called “fastboot” patches to the Linux kernel, at least portions of which have been accepted into recent mainline kernels.  Supposedly these would only be enabled with the “fastboot” kernel parameter, but searching the source and docs for the latest kernel didn’t turn up this option.  The async libata device discovery does indeed appear to be in 2.6.31 mainline, and I was unable to find a knob to turn it off.  There were also references to this interfering with partition discovery.  I started the process of rebuilding the kernel to disable this, to see if it fixed the problem, but gave up in favor of a workaround.  I’m not fond of maintaining custom kernels – I think the last I did this was to support a boca card.

The workaround.  I had noticed that the kernel could be instructed to reread the partition tables (partprobe, for instance) and the missing partitions would appear.  I threw in a quick init script to do this and assemble the array early in the startup process:

mdadm --stop /dev/md2
sleep 1
partprobe
sleep 2
mdadm --assemble --scan /dev/md2
vgchange -ay
mount /storage

So… if I have time, I should complete that kernel rebuild and report this somewhere.  In the meantime, I’m posting this for the benefit of others.  Lucky for me the partitions affected did not contain my root partition, or this could have been less-work-aroundable.

Wednesday. The PA turnpike had next to no traffic from Blue Mountain to Harrisburg East, though had ludicrous 40 mph speed limits posted for much of the distance.  Airport security at Harrisburg was relatively speedy, though they did decide to perform some kind of chemical test on my shoes.  We had an expensive and slow lunch before our flight to Charlotte, NC.   We were a bit late arriving in CLT, it was raining, and there wasn’t much waiting around for the next flight.  The flight to Orlando was uneventful.  We were above the cloud deck much of the time during both flights.  I was only able to get GPS lock very briefly after leaving MDT.  I’d very much like it if GPS worked better inside of aircraft.  The shuttle to the off-site Hertz location was speedy, we got our car, and made our way on the Beachline Express to Cocoa Beach at which point it was dark.  Checked in, got food, and walked the beach a bit.

Atlantis with the STS-129 stack, viewed from Cape Canaveral National Seashore

Thursday.  It was only in the 60s today, and after just having had some Indian Summer in PA, it didn’t feel like we were anywhere tropical.  We walked Cocoa Beach from the pier to Jetty Park in the morning.  We then drove around the Merrit Island Wildlife Refuge.  Had our first view of the shuttle on the pad from the Cape Canaveral Seashore.

Atlantis with the STS-129 stack and pad 39B viewed from camera tracking station

Friday. We were at the KSC visitors complex when it opened, walked around the shuttle Explorer and then boarded our bus for the “NASA Close Up” tour.  The tour took us to the causeway where the lucky 3000 people with the best tickets can watch a launch from the closest allowed distance.  We drove past one of the massive crawler transporters and approached pad 39B which is undergoing modifications to accommodate the Ares rockets.  We parked at a camera tracking station which provided the closest view of the shuttle we had the entire trip.  I was able to get some closer though less clear pictures via binoculars.

Saturn V - S-IC-T

Our next stop was the Apollo / Saturn V Center where we walked under and around a real Saturn V rocket laid over horizontally.  It’s crazy huge – really amazing to see the thing in person.  We then took the bus to the ISS building and were able to look down on the clean room used for processing space station modules – though it was difficult to tell what one was looking at.  Back to the main visitors center, we watched a 3D IMAX film, “rode” the Space Shuttle Launch Experience, and called it a day.

Friday night we drove out to Port Canaveral and parked along the road (where many others were also parked) to see the launch of an Atlas V rocket containing a commercial satellite payload.  I had my radio scanner with me, listening to the Coast Guard announcing the area restricted from boats, and also aircraft dispatched to patrol the area.  We heard that the launch was scrubbed via the scanner, due to technical issues with the rocket.  We headed back to the hotel, not sure how this scrub would affect our chances of seeing a shuttle launch.  The shuttle launch had already been moved from Thursday to Monday because of this rocket, and if this rocket would be ready for another attempt on Saturday or Sunday, the shuttle would again wait.  Fortunately, this launch was put off for more than a week as announced the next day.

Blockhouse Console

Saturday. We returned to the KSC visitor’s center touring more of the exhibits there and watching the other 3D IMAX movie, and had the launch experience again.  After lunch we again boarded a bus for the “Cape Canaveral: Then & Now” tour, for which we had to have our photo IDs checked and recorded, presumably since the tour is largely on the US Air Force’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.  We walked through the blockhouse used to control some of the early manned flights, complete with its Burroughs computer, wiring, consoles, blast doors, etc.  This was the one facility we toured that had the appearance of being frozen in time and not a reconstructed prop from a museum.

We also walked around the site of the launch tower where the Apollo 1 fire occurred.  The memorial was very simple compared with the elaborate displays elsewhere, and the tower is gone, with only concrete remaining.

We then went to the Astronaut Hall of Fame and toured its exhibits.  Katelyn and I took a ride on the centrifuge flight simulator.  I wondered why they opened the doors with the ride still spinning, but later figured out it wasn’t.  Pretty cool though.

Kayak Trail

Sunday. We went kayaking on the waters of the Banana River.  We could see dolphins and manatees, but no alligators as it was salt water.  The most interesting part were the “kayak trails” that were essentially tunnels of foliage that you pulled your kayak through by hand.  Really cool, and nothing like we have around home.  In the afternoon we stayed around the hotel, getting in the ocean for a bit (long enough for me to lose my glasses, go figure, but at least I had packed spares).

Launch of STS-129, viewed from Titusville

Monday. This was launch and return trip day.  After escalating concerns about traffic, especially around the visitors center (it sounded as if they would hold us for an hour after launch… by which time who knows how many of the 3k causeway viewers would have been brought back to jam things up) we elected to view the launch from another location.  We checked out and went to the Space View Park in Titusville.  After fooling around with finding a non-towed place to park we waited while the park filled up and then the launch.  It was distant, but very cool to see Atlantis rolling after it left the tower by binoculars.  The pictures don’t do it justice.  After about a minute we could hear the tremendous noise of the launch.

We waited around a few minutes then dashed for the car, and made excellent time without traffic on a highway that is less impacted by launch traffic.  We were able to get home without incident.

Overall, it was an excellent trip.  I’m glad to have had the opportunity to see a Space Shuttle launch before the impending retirement.  I really do want to see one of the real shuttles in person some day, but it may take awhile before they are turned into museum exhibits.

HR3962 calls for the punishment of those choosing to go without health insurance with a fine (assessed as an increase in taxes).  A government mandate of this  nature is contrary to the personal freedom to exercise one’s means as they will.

The bill also calls for the creation of the “public health insurance option” which will be a government alternative to private insurance.  Reducing the cost of health care is a primary goal of the current reform effort.  This goal, combined with a government health care option, would further open the already unlatched door to government regulation of personal behaviors, such as what we eat and what we do, in order to promote health and cost savings.  Such regulations would represent an incredible loss of liberty in the interest of the fiscal responsibility of government-funded health care.

When considering the inherent aspects of this bill that undermine our freedoms, it seems clear that the bill must be opposed in its current form.  The congress should set its sights on fixing the problems that exist in ways that do not erode our liberties.

As always, I hope that everyone takes the time to really consider the implications of proposed legislation, regardless of their affiliations and preconceptions.  As technology and communications open our government process further, we’re given the opportunity to be more democratic, with voiced opinions on individual issues and not just which representative has the least objectionable set of opinions.