General

Lincoln Short Wave Club took part in this year’s VHF National Field Day contest from the regular site we use near Brattleby.

The station was equipped with 6m, 4m, 2m, 70cms and 23cms – with all the stations set up in pne of the tents, using dual headphones to keep the noise down, but the 2m station also had a speaker feed for the people not operating to keep up with what was going on. Each station position was eqipped with a laptop running WinTest for the logging and I networked the laptops to share information. One of the laptops had a 3g internet connection and WinTest then passed cluster information to all the stations.

For a couple of years we have been using a Dlink NAS at the office – without too much trouble, its interface is a bit clunky, and there were some problems with my Windows 7 laptop when I first got it, but other than that it has worked fine.

As part of our new Distaster Recovery service to clients we have been specifying Iomega NAS boxes, as the storage on the Dlink is starting to be a limiting factor I replaced it with a Iomega StorCenter ix2-200. The 4TB model set up for mirror raid, giving 2TB of storage.

It is an excellent box. Easy to use and configure, I have allocated space to the company with various levels of access as well have having space for the family to store images and media. I have it protected by a UPS controlled from the NAS.

One of the things I am lookking forward to is the availability of an iPhone client so I can make full use of the cloud services installed on the device.

Here are some photographs of the Lincoln Shortwave Club station for the Postcode Contest. We set it up near the perimeter of RAF Scampton and near the village Brattleby – a high point in Lincolnshire!

I have been working in Brighouse this week, upgrading a client’s network, reconfiguring Outlook to work from a remote site to an Exchange server, installing NAS storage and setting up terminal services for the reception staff. It has been a rushed job to address some of the limitations the company met when trying to run the factory production via terminal services – I came up with the solution at the end of one week and was there for 6.45am on the Monday to make the changes. Some problems with availability of software and hardware deliveries meant that it was an early finish on Monday, with a stay overnight in Brighouse to complete the job on Tuesday.

I stayed at the Waterfront Lodge in the centre of Brighouse, which is located next to the canal. As the weather was fine I had a good walk up and down the canal which included a visit to “Brighouse Marina”, (I could not find the Geocache hidden at the Marina, too many muggles). I managed to fit the walk in during the sunny break between showers. The canal walk is a real gem, giving a green corridor through the town.

It was my Dad who first introduced me to Science Fiction, lending me books he had got from the library – in particular he introduced me to the likes of Robert Heinlein, Edgar Rice Boroughs and EE “Doc” Smith and I developed a taste for the big space opera and pulp fiction sci-fi story.

Today with the internet I consume vast amounts of material, listening to StarShipSofa and Escape Pod and reading stories from a large number of sites including Project Gutenberg where much of the 1930s and 1940s pulp fiction is ending up.

I was looking for a few cover images to add to my Calibre Library when I came across this site – http://www.philsp.com/ – all you ever wanted to know about Pulp Fiction Magazines including a vast collection of covers. Now when I was looking for a book I would always be attracted to book with the exciting laser beam weilding space suited hero and heroine rather then the series all yellow covered book – I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover – but that saying was only thought up by boring do gooders, give me crashing spaceships and dinosaurs any day.

Have a look on the site above there are some real classic covers.