H's Blog

On 8/7 Monday night, I happened to swipe up ZenWatch display and noticed it said Android Wear Update available. I thought it's just another security update, so I said yes to upgrade. It started updating process but it did not look like ordinary security update. I let it run through the night, and it said Welcome to Wear 2, or something like that, I forgot exactly what it said. It wanted to copy Google profile from my Android phone to the watch so I said ok. It was Tuesday morning and It was taking too long and I had to leave to work I stopped the copying from the phone. I was afraid the watch won't function but it was working fine. After I came home, I copied Google profile to the watch. Impression? I have to use the physical button more than before and it's annoying. The menu structure changed and it's harder to reach to apps. The speed seems to be equal to the previous version. It's supposed to allow you to install apps from the watch but I haven't foun...

I got HRI-200. I set up Wires-X software and I am using FT817 as analog station. It took 3 days to receive Wires-X registration. Whenever somebody talks, FT817 turns itself off. Also, I can't hear anything from receiver. I can hear conversation from HRI200's monitor port (mono only). There is very little amount of information available as to how to build Wires-X  analog node. I am sure many people are using Analog nodes but nobody seems to be sharing the info. I gave up trying to use FT817 and bought FTM100. If it's Yaesu's plot to make people buy FTM100 or FTM400, they seem to have succeeded. Addition to the original post I bought FTM100 and setting digital node with it was very easy.

I passed the General Class Ham Radio license exam today. I mainly studied with this Japanese test prep application called "Extra yosei gips". http://walker.bikkuri.link/jh7bzr Out of 35 questions, there were only 2 that I was not sure of the answers but I knew all other questions and answers. Now I have access to all HF bands that I did not have with Technician class license. I need to add /AG call sign until FCC updates the database. Of course, Extra gives more but General is more than enough for now. People are asking "How long does it take for FCC to update the database after exam?" For me it is exactly 1 week. 

There is no binary available for ADSB# any more but if you have Visual Studio 2015 Community edition and get the source from https://github.com/cgommel/adsbsharp, you can build it. I am no expert on Visual Studio or programming in C#, but the built process went well without any issue. I am now running ADSB# along with ADSBScope to track airplanes. We are having big snow storm right now, but surprisingly, I saw 2 planes departing from LaGuardia.