Autopost from M100 file J21-01.DO

Saturday January 9, 2021
01:54:17

Here’s an entry done on the MVT100 using VT100.CO v2.2 – highly anticipating the update to REXCPM that is supposed to include VT100 functionality. I think this is going to be the greatest thing ever. 🙂

Watching Stephen Colbert’s Questionnert special, which is of course amusing, and a nice change from the drama of earlier in the week.

Autopost from M100 file J20-10.DO

Wednesday October 21, 2020
21:45:19

I think it’s been a while since I wrote anything blog-wise, either on the M100 or in the file I’ve been keeping in Tails. I’ve been playing around with CP/M and with WordStar on the M100 quite a bit, but not starting to blog there since I can only run that on an 80×24 terminal. I’m writing this entry in 80×24 using TEXT, but I can just as easily write it in 40×8 on the LCD if I want. I can use VED40.COM on the LCD but it doesn’t support lines longer than 255 characters so that doesn’t work so well. This paragraph is already 6.5 lines at this point, which is 520 characters…

I need to get back into a routine of testing my blood glucose – I bet it’s been more than a week since my last test and I should be doing a couple of tests a week.

Autopost from M100 file J19-06.DO

Monday June 10, 2019
21:49:45

So, this is my first blog entry since returning to amateur radio earlier this spring. In fact, it’s my first blog entry since January when I was playing around with autoposting files I uploaded from TS-DOS to Dropbox into my WordPress site.

Still haven’t fixed my own M100, although the kids’ machines and the T200 (which I’m using to type this) continue to work just fine. Really, all I need to do is order the capacitors from DigiKey, which I’d already put into a cart, but held off on because one cap was backordered. I forget whether I had written about borrowing Ben’s supply of caps, but that only got me two or three matches and didn’t do the job. I did desolder the one which everyone on the mailing list suspected and found small signs of leakage. It also was the only one to fail on Ben’s capacitor tester. So, I really ought to just bite the bullet and do that so I can re-cap all of the M100s and the T200 while I’m at it. (Might be good to order new memory batteries too, or just leave the supercap solution in place? Hmm…)

In any case, Nathan took an interest in online SDR receiver sites and started listening to CW transmissions, writing down the Morse dots and dashes on paper and later typing them into a translation website to determine what they said. It got me thinking about the sad state of my own radio equipment and how I’d left off the hobby so many years ago, not even putting my J-pole back up after re-roofing the house. One day I got Nathan to look at the J-pole with me, and after re-terminating the deteriorated coax connection at the pipes I made a new bracket to fit the new gable end and put it back up. We were back on the air!

That was around early March, and I started showing Nathan the local 2m nets and ended up being invited to the Langley Amateur Radio Association (LARA) March monthly meeting after stumbling across their weekly net the night before. There was a presentation from a local ham who had been on a trip to the LHC at CERN several years before and had lots of stories to tell and photos to show – fascinating.

In the months since then I’ve been catching up with lots of things which have developed since I fell out of the hobby – digital modes using sound card interfaces were just starting up and PSK31 was the hot thing. It’s still around but uncommon, and lots of other things like FT8 and JS8Call have jumped up to take over. Just in the last week I got a chance to receive some SSTV transmissions as well. Bought a SignaLink USB interface which does the whole soundcard interface so much better than it was in the mid-2000s when you basically had to roll your own.

Also bought some more radios – a Yaesu FT-7800 which I installed in the car, a Kenwood TH-D7A handheld because it has a built-in TNC (yes, I also got into packet which I never touched previously), and a Yaesu FT-270R handheld because it’s water resistant. Also made up easy interface adapters to quickly move the SignaLink between the FT-840 and the TR-751 2m in the house, and the FT-7800 in the car. Also modified the TR-751 to give it preamp-level audio output on mic pin 6 which was not really used (it was an input for a pushbutton which the supplied mic doesn’t have). This worked out wonderfully – no hum or RFI at all. Also got Anderson connectors and cables galore to try to standardize and make my power connections neater, and programming cables to use Chirp to sync up the memories on everything (now that I have more than one programmable radio)…

Yeah. Lots going on. It does make me happy, and writing about it brings a bit of a smile. Trying to take the mind off the date, you know.

Autopost from M100 file J19-01.DO

Wednesday January 2, 2019
17:23:31

This was meant to be a test entry to see if the macro to automatically create a public blog post from this file upload from the M100 would work. Sadly, reality has a way of crashing in and ruining plans. 🙁

When I fired up my M100 this afternoon to type this out, bear in mind that it’s already running with one of the spare motherboards after an apparent capacitor failure in the VEE power supply section of my original motherboard. Well, I guess this board has another (different) capacitor failure now – switched it on, and the screen lit up, date advanced to 2019 as expected, and then the LCD began losing contrast. I turned the dial to keep it dark but eventually (after 5-10 seconds) hit the end of travel and watched the screen fade to nothing.

The machine itself is still working – the BEEP test works – it’s just that whatever part of the circuit supplies the LCD contrast control voltage is dead. I hope that’s on the motherboard and not the LCD panel itself, so if I re-cap the failed part of my original motherboard I can go back to that without also needing a new LCD board.

It’s a little bit amazing to me that this old hardware all worked so well for over a year after I bought it, and now it seems like it’s all starting to fall apart at once. I mean, considering the age of it I shouldn’t be surprised at all, but it feels like more than just coincidence that so many failures are happening now, one after another.