Saturday, August 22, 2009

Awesome Exam Day!!

I couldn't be happier with the results of today's exam session. Three of my students were unlicensed (even though this was a General class) and now they have their Technician license. Four students (including one of the unlicensed ones) picked up their General. Three had already taken the upgrade and passed. Even our club president decided to upgrade and he's now an Amateur Extra.

I guess I have to pat myself on the back a little. I had ten students total test throughout the course period and everyone that tested passed. I must be a pretty good instructor. :-D

Friday, August 21, 2009

Big Day!

Well, tomorrow is the big day. Last weekend I wrapped up the General upgrade course I was teaching with a 2.5 hour review. Talking to everybody I think they're all feeling pretty good about passing. Some of the students have already upgraded so that's cool.

Tomorrow is the exam session. I have 8 students taking tests ranging from Tech to Extra. I feel confident we'll have a 100% pass rate. We'll see if I'm right.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

NBEMS Testing

Well, I finally had the chance to play around with NBEMS using fldigi and flarq. It seems like there's some promise but it wasn't without its challenges. It seems much better suited to SSB than FM. We ended up splattering all over a simplex QSO 1K away that we didn't know about. They were cool about it and actually let us test some more to see how much bandwidth we were taking up.

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We started off using it with fldigi set to PSK-31 and this proved entirely too slow for transferring files. We gave up long before we transferred more than 2% of a 35K file because it was taking too long. Unfortunately when we tried changing modes to MT63 flarq on my end quit talking with fldigi. I still haven't been able to get it working.

In the image above the large window is fldigi. The blob of red is the image I was trying to transfer. The small window is flarq.

After talking with one of the guys with WPANBEMS he told me they had similar challenges during their testing. Now they skip flarq and just use fldigi and wrap. Still need to do some testing with it but in my solo run it seems to work. Hopefully I'll have an update on this again soon.