K2GXT: The RIT Blimp

On Friday January 18, 2008 K2GXT RIT Amateur Radio Club flew a remote controlled blimp during the RIT vs. Sacred Heart hockey game. This is the first time the blimp has flown in about five years. The blimp was constructed in conjunction with RIT Aero Club and students (including K2GXT Members such as KC2LLT).

The RIT amateur radio club decided to resurrect the blimp and fly it during the hockey games again. We practiced flying before the game and planned to operate during intermissions between periods. The 12 foot blimp has roughly 3 oz of lift when filled with helium and has a 20 minute battery life. The batteries are recharged during the game when we are not flying.



When we first flew the blimp it was a great success, people absolutely LOVED it! The blimp was flown around the Ritter Ice Arena in a counter clockwise fashion, occasionally flying close to the ice. We apparently had fun "buzzing" Stu, the Zamboni driver after the game who had just about as much fun himself. While flying, we had some unexpected trouble that we did not experience while practicing. During the game, the air conditioning system was on and every few minutes our blimp would be thrown around by the air currents. This made flying the blimp very difficult during those times, especially with the turning and elevation control delay inherent with blimps.

We will be continuing to fly the blimp in future games and possibly other events around the RIT campus. We have plans to install amateur television equipment (ATV) and provide aerial video of the game, possibly down linking the video feed to ESPN Sportszone. K2GXT is committed to being an active club that benefits the RIT community with its actions.

First Year Enrichment Project

My second quarter First Year Enrichment (FYE) teacher posed a nice challenge to us electrical engineering majors. We need to come up with an idea for an "Imagine RIT" display/idea for the upcoming festival in May 2008. We were not required to sign up for the event, rather complete proposals and if we want to, create a display for the festival.

The group I am in has decided on an idea that hit me over winter break as a technology that could be implemented at RIT. I have always had a keen interest in renewable energy and resources, so the idea benefits RIT and the environment in some way! I do not want to go into it with too much detail until our project is completed and we decide if we want to go further onto the festival.

We will try to propose to the RIT community on a way to use a solar based renewable energy source to provide a vital resource on campus with much more efficiency than is experienced now. Whether we go to the festival or not, we are taking it serious and have already contacted faculty to provide information needed to complete the project. If we do decided to build a small prototype to demonstrate the concept at the "Imagine RIT" we will seriously try to gain support and a backing to implement the technology.

I am finally on winter break, what a crazy three weeks... it does not feel like Christmas at all! I've been worked up until now and had no time to get in that xmass mood! The third week was absolutely insane... I had testing in classes as well as Crew. A test in microeconomics, physics, and calculus plus all the homework due for those classes. For RIT crew we had our four day test series consisting of a ten second piece and 6000 Meter test (6k race) on Monday, 2000M (2K race) on Tuesday, 60-second test Wednesday, and the lovely "Hour of Power" 60 minute race on Thursday. Fitting that in with all the other work was comparable if not surpassing the stress of Finals week first quarter.

The ride home was pretty good. Drove two friends back so we had great conversations as well as it helped with the gas money haha. It normally takes me about 6-7 hours to get home from RIT but just before Albany on a Thruway service station we had a McDonald's "Incident". Somehow McDonald's forgot my friends Chicken Fillet order and it took about 45 minutes to make a simple sandwich...we were there for an hour and a half!... so in the end it was about an 8 hour trip!

Being home is great, but I'm slowly trying to relax because I am still stressed out! I decided to play around with Ubuntu a little, get GNOME to be a little more personalized. I am not a Linux geek but I enjoy the open-source idea and the challenge.

I tweaked GNOME to have some Mac OS X features like the App Dock (I used Avant Window Navigator) and the themes for OS X. However, I did not use all the OS X changes and kept it with the original Ubuntu feeling versus a total OS X feeling to the computer.

Winter Quarter at RIT

So Winter quarter is insane for me... I'm basically attending classes, rowing, and doing homework from 8 am until 1-3 am everyday... ouch. I'll try and keep the blog updated when I can, Christmas break is in two weeks so I'm trying to keep up until then!

Biking at RIT and Home

This is a collection of short clips and some pictures of my brother and I biking at a local state park and at RIT. We were more or less just messing around at the state park and on campus we tend to ride urban!

CQWWCW 2007 Contest

I played around in the CQWWCW (CQ World Wide CW(Morse code)) contest this weekend. It is a Morse code contest for amateur radio. The object is to contact as many stations as possible, preferably from another country. It ran from 00:00 UTC Saturday (7pm Friday for EST) until 23:59 UTC Monday (7pm Sunday Night). I didn't contest, instead I relaxed and got as many contacts as I could with my station under no pressure. I did decent for only operating a few hours with my QRP radio that I bring to RIT.

My radio is a Ten Tec 1340 QRP CW Transceiver running about 3 watts into an 80 Meter Off-Center-Fed-Dipole (OCFD) that I built over the summer. The radio operates in the 40 Meter band (7 MHz) and is a kit that I built about a year ago.

The radio has a few modifications. I installed a NORCAL Keyer to allow me to use a paddle and electronically create the dit's and dah's, a lot faster than a straight key. I also modified the output coax connector from the standard PL-259 (UHF) connector to a better BNC-type connector. This required some metal work to make a new mounting bracket, the hole was to large from the PL-259 previously installed. My paddles are homemade NB6M PC-Board paddles, my favorite mostly because I built them from scratch, but they do work incredibly nice and is designed for portable use.

This is all powered by a modified PC-Power supply. I wired it up to put out an even 12V at about 7 amps max (the regulator IC would not go up to 13.8V! Maybe I'll get around to modifying the circuit). Normally, PC Power supplies are noisy switch-mode power supplies, and oh boy... it was! I modified the output by putting massive inductors from old DMC microwave radio power supplies in series on each output (+12V,-12V,+5V,-5V) and a 6000uf capacitor to ground from the output I am using. Worked like a charm! There is little noticeable hum on the power supply and I do not get any comments on my signal about a hum, problem solved!

So the contest went really well, I enjoyed the low power operation and simply using Morse code. If anyone happens to have any questions or wants to know more about the Ten Tec 1340 and it's modifications just leave a comment! Questions about the Off-Center-Fed-Dipole and amateur radio are also more than welcome!

So during Thanksgiving Break I've been playing around....

During Thanksgiving Break (two weeks, THANKS RIT! lol) I've decided in true RIT spirit to install Linux onto my laptop. I'm not a big computer person, I don't play video games... the best program I ever wrote said "Hello World"... etc. I enjoy the freedom assiociated with it, i just came too close to throwing my laptop out the 8th floor window of my dorm way too many times when Vista crashed. So I started with Fedora 8, dual booting it with Windows Vista (fresh install).

Fedora was a little tricky for me, I guess the Linux learning curve was a little to steep for me. So I switched to Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon". After spending hours with Fedora and Ubuntu getting my NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS graphics card drivers installed. I could enable desktop effects in Fedora 8 and Compiz in Ubunto. I set up compiz to true RIT fashion! Supporting RIT Crew (I'm an RIT Crew member), and Engineering House, the special interest house I live in.

Learning to install programs and such has been a huge issue but finally getting more familiar with terminal commands and things like that... again I'm not a geek about computers, this was really really really hard for me to learn!

So throughout the duration of my break, I will be learning to use Ubunto, setting it up to my likes, and most importantly... having fun doing things that don't involve computers!