Fielday PA2014CC .......

I had to think a while how to call this post.....

Shameless advertising might be a good title as well....
And as i am shamelessly advertising on my site, i might as well shamelessly copy qrz.com as well... I am sure Raymond (pa7ray) won mind.....
This is about the local chapters of the 2 major dutch HAM organisations Veron and VRZA


On June 21, VRZA and VERON are jointly going to host a Field Day on a dike called Houtribdijk. How Dutch can it be HI. 
The dike (which is 23 kilometer long) is located in between the cities Lelystad and Enkhuizen in The Netherlands. Our QTH is halfway of the dike at Checkpoint Charlie. Coordinates: 52.38'6"N 5.24'56"E.

A Cessna 150 with 2 pilots will fly over our QTH for both our associations especially and will make radio contact with our ground station.See the "Trailer" on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz6IyvvkZC8

The QSL-card is only available via the bureau.

So you might wonder why i am adding this to my site..... well.... I will be one of the operators there and I am hoping to talk to a lot of you guys....
If things go well, I will have an internet connection available and I will post frequencies as they are being used.
Don't forget to watch the dx cluster, and don't hesitate to give us a shout...

hope to hear you Saturday!

73's
Alex
PA1SBM

Why USB to RS-232 suck in windows, but don't in Linux

Hello all,

Well, as Hans, PD0AC, is quite busy lately, I did not get my usb2rs232 cable back from him yet
As i kind of expected him to use it for a while I already had ordered the cheapest ones I could find on eBay.....

And yesterday they arrived.... a bit late cause of the postal services between China and the Netherlands , but... ohh well, they arrived...

So just to be clear... this is the CHEAPEST one i could find on ebay.... including free shipping....
Then you may ask how cheap... well...1.81 USD including shipping...... yes that cheap...


So.... lets get started.... lets plug it in....

Lets check if we already have a ttyUSB port.....
open a command shell and become root with the command su
when root do: ls /dev/ttyUSB*  (this roughly means list all serial tty usb devices )

hooray!!! we have a serial device

NOTE: I did not, i repeat did NOT install any f*cked up driver at all!!!!

So, next we already know what device we need to use, but what if I would plug in all , and hook up 1..
Then it would look like this.....

Not much to go by to figure out what is what.....

Well, another command we can do is this...... cat /proc/tty/driver/usbserial

Now, i have 4 identical cables plugged in, but if you have several different you should be able to see different vendors and product numbers...
The first number is the number is the number you will see at /dev/ttyUSB?


In the first terminal screen shot you see "root dialout¨  , and that's the last part what is REALLY important, and i forgot to mention this in the previous post....
Root is the owner of the device.... this is usually root, so this is not weird and should never be your user! Dialout is the group who has rights to this device.

make sure you added yourself to this group....
With this command: addgroup <your user name> dialout
see screen shot below.

This makes sure you have rights to this device.


Now, what makes this better the how windows works....

• Works out of the box, no installing drivers that don work
  Every windows version has his own crappy driver version....
• No weird com numbers, linux does not use them, instead they use /device/devicename structure
  The com numbers seem to change a lot as well when you plug them into different usb ports.
  If you only have 1 usb cable, linux will always make this /dev/ttyUSB0

I have heard about people running into problems with these cables, I am not one of them, the cable works like a charm.

Now if you are one of those people who run into some problems, please let me know as I would love to look into this, and try to find a solution.

73's for now...

Alex

PA1SBM