g7kse.co.uk

ooooo eck…….what have I let myself in for?? I’ve been up Hardknott twice, both of those times I nearly had a heart attack!!

a proud day, I’ve spent quite a few man hours getting this site up and running as well as a reasonably reliable Beacon Monitoring station. Name up in lights at NCDXF website and the sucessful pages displaying the rather shady results I’m getting here in the bleak part of Cumbrian winter.

I hope you find them useful, leave a comment or make a suggestion if the data isn’t as you’d like it. Tell your friends and I hope to see you on the Hf bands on PSK31 or SSB when the wind drops and I can raise the antenna

If anyone is interested in how I managed to sort this out for myself then I’ll be putting together a short HOWTO that will compliment the existing ones that I used.

73’s

G7KSE

unfortuantely the ftp upload saga continues with unreliable transfers, crashing ftp programmes all compounding the local broadband issues which I can happily say are now significantly reduced.

So far I have tried the following programmes and so far I have not found one that is truely reliable all the time

1. WinSCP - A very versatile programme but…..Refused to synchronise and hung during transfers

2. FTP synchronizer - Nice and simple but manual only, needed a button press to upload but altogether very reliable. i contacted the developers but not luck

3. AutoFTP - A freeware application that is again nice and simple but suffers from the ‘AutoCrash’ feature so it’s nearly there but not quite robust enough

4. Carbon FTP - Does it all manually but not a hoot when it comes to scheduling unless you are using a different tool to schedule

5. Auto FTP Manager - Not freeware, in fact it’s $40 but if it works in the long run then I’m sure it’ll be worth it. I’ve not tried this for long enough but it seems to be working well.

6. FTP Sync Pro - Again not freeware and uses command line and windows task scheduler, massively gums up the task bar when running every hour so not a runner really. Although having said that it didn’t ever miss a synchronisation when it was running.

Not tried…yet

Peter’s Updater - looks from the description that it may work, but I think I’ve been here before

Save2FTP - Recommended by Mike, VK3AVV in a previous comment. Not freeware but it looks and sounds like a good option and it has a 30 day trials so nothing to lose really.

After some in house testing of the system??I thought I’d give a little insight as to what I’ve been doing and why. So, the background is that the station consists of an IC-703 and and old laptop connected by a CT17. The laptop is running Faros quite effectively but the ftp synchronisation was a bit of a headache as was the choice of antenna.

FTP synchronisation.

The recommendation is to use Win SCP as a tool to synchronise the gif files between the local hard disk and the website. After diligently following all the instructions I found that it was dropping the connection regularly and failing to upload the gifs. basically the software was not reliable. perhaps some setting were incorrect but essentially it wasn’t performing correctly. I found another utility call FTP synchronizer that looked a lot simpler to set up. I was right, so much easier to use, however it didn’t have a scheduled sync setting so it had to be done manually. I contacted the developer who has agreed to look into it but as he (or she) is not currently developing the software it may not go any further. So the search for a reliable piece of software thats simple to set up and use is still on.

Antenna

My QTH has a hustler 6-BTV set up in the garden, however living by the sea it has been very windy. The poor antenna is getting a beating from the salty air and the wind so it came down and a temporary diamond portable antenna is installed. As expected the results are much worse with the smaller antenna. I am investigating if it is possible to use my HFV-5 that has had a years beating on my old QTH’s roof and was badly corroded. I’ll clean it up and carry on testing.

The upshot is that the testing shall continue for another week or so

I found this little gem over the last few days..It’s called Portable Apps??its a bunch of applications that run on or rather off a USB memory stick so you don’t have to carry them around with you. makes perfect sense for keeping email and documents in a format that you can use close to hand. Especially as I’m an open office????user.