Yaesu FT-818ND QRP and CW keyer
Stefan Helander

How to operate QRP successfully

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Operating ham radio QRP, that is using low power, is probably not a good choise for the new beginner. To successfully operate ham radio QRP you need to use all your skills when it comes to selecting the correct bands, modes, propagation and evauluating current conditions. As a beginner to amateur radio it might be a better idea to start off with for example a 100 watt rig to get a lot of successful QSO:s and acquire knowledge about propagation and conditions first.

However, when you start to know how propagation and band conditions work, operating QRP from a portable location with a small temporary antenna can be an exciting and rewarding challenge. When operating QRP any contact is a success, not just far away DX stations. A contact just 500 or 1000 km:s away using a few watts is really exciting. But operating QRP requires patience. Don’t expect to come home with a log book with hundreds and hundreds of QSO:s.

  • Use CW. It comes through better with small amounts of power than SSB.
  • Listen around on the bands to estimate which bands are open and select the one with most or strongest stations. I usually start off on 10 meters and walk downwards on 12, 15, 17, 20, 30, 40 and 80 meters. If 10 meters is open, it can give you nice contacts with small amounts of power. That is during day time, if it is evening or night you might start off at 30 meters and walk your way down to 40 or 80. But as you know how propagation works, this is not news for you 😉
  • If you have Internet connection, send out a few CQ:s on each band and search for your call on Reverse Beacon Network (enter your callsign in the DX box) to see on what bands you show up and where your signals are strongest.
  • I prefer the WARC bands (12, 17 and 30 meters). They are contest free and generally less crowded.
  • Responding to CQ:s are way more efficient than sending CQ:s yourself. Even though your CQ might be heard, people have a tendency to respond to stronger signals and your will be weak when operating QRP.
  • If you decide to CQ yourself, use the QRP calling frequencies; 28.060, 24.906, 21.060, 18.086, 14.060, 10.116, 7.030 and 3.560 MHz. I usually add “QRP” one time before “PSE K” to indicate that I am operating QRP.

My QRP “go to” band usually is 30 meters. It is often open, it has propagation characteristics between 20 and 40 meters. And I usually get best results on RBN when I work 30 meters.

In the pictures below, I am operating QRP as SM0RGM/6 from a location nr Strömstad, Sweden.

Good luck and hope to see you on the bands! 73 de SM0RGM / OZ0RGM

Yaesu FT-818ND QRP and CW keyer
Yaesu FT-818ND QRP and CW keyer
HF-P1 10-80 meter portable antenna
HF-P1 10-80 meter portable antenna
EFHW 10-40 m on glass fibre fishing rod
EFHW 10-40 m on glass fibre fishing rod
Operating ham radio QRP as SM0RGM/6 from a temporary location nr Strömstad, Sweden
Stefan Helander

Why is my Dropbox full?

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Your dropbox is full and the amount of space you are using shown in the app or web interface does not correspond to the size of the Dropbox folder on your computer. You are not using selective syncing, i.e. all folders in the Dropbox cloud should be equal to the size of the Dropbox folder on your computer.

The reason might be you are using an external USB-drive on your computer.

When external USB-drives are connected, Dropbox asks if they should be backed up. If you selected yes, the content of the USB drive is copied to Dropbox cloud and occupies your space. If this was not the intention (for example if the external drive contains a backup copy of your files in the Dropbox folder), remove the external drive from the Dropbox folder.

Stefan Helander

How to make WordPress display PHP errors

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Your site is down just displaying “This site is experiencing technical difficulties” and you need to investigate what is causing the error. If you turn on PHP error reporting at your hosting provider, WordPress still just displays the generic message.

Turn on PHP error reporting at your hosting provider.

Edit the wp-config.php file and comment out the line define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, false ); 

// define( 'WP_DEBUG', false );

Then add the following lines and make sure they occur before the line /* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', true );
@ini_set( 'display_errors', 1 );

When you are done, remember to revert the above changes.

Stefan Helander

apt update error message “Could not execute ‘apt-key’ to verify signature”

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It turned out the reason for this was changed permissions on the /tmp folder (caused by restoring a folder with BackupPC to /tmp instead of it’s original location).

Solution: 

chown root:root /tmp
chmod 1777 /tmp

After this apt update worked as normal.

Stefan Helander

How to indicate where a word should wrap in HTML/CSS

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By using word-wrap, word-break and overflow-wrap in CSS you can control the browser’s behaviour when it comes to word wrapping. However, it is not possible to control where the word breaks. It just breaks when the word no longer fits in the container.

To indicate where a word can be broken, the soft hyphen can be used. The soft hyphen is a html code:

­

For example:

Thisisaverylongword

and we want it to break just after “very”, then we type:

Thisisavery­longword

When the container doesn’t fit the word, it will be displayed on two lines:

Thisisavery-
longword

L2TP VPN fails after january 11, 2022 update
Stefan Helander

Microsoft January 11, 2022 update breaks L2TP VPN [solution]

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Microsoft update KB5009543 breaks L2TP VPN functionality causing error message “The L2TP connection attempt failed because the security layer encountered a processing error during initial negotiations with the remote computer“. Investigating the log shows error 789 for rasclient.

A temporary solution is to uninstall KB50009543. Run cmd as administrator and enter:

wusa /uninstall /kb:5009543

After reboot VPN will work again.

See also this article.

Erik Svensson

How can I use a PC to recover data when my Synology NAS malfunctions?

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Purpose

This article will guide you to recover data on your PC when Synology NAS malfunctions.

Notes:

The drives may not be able to mount the volume again after being migrated to a new NAS.

Environment

  • Available on DSM version 6.2.x and above.
  • Only applicable to ext4 or Btrfs file system.
  • Ubuntu version should be 18.04 and above.

Resolution

  1. Make sure your PC has sufficient drive slots for drive installation.
  2. Remove the drives from your Synology NAS and install them in your PC. For RAID or SHR configurations, you must install all the drives (excluding hot spare drives) in your PC at the same time.
  3. Prepare an Ubuntu environment by following the instructions in this tutorial.
  4. Go to the Files on the left bar and select Home.
  5. Right-click and select New Folder, and create one or more folders as mount points for accessing data.1
  6. Right-click on the new folder(s), click Properties, the parent folder with folder name is ${mount_point}.
    Example: If the parent folder is /home/ubuntu/ and the folder name is Test, the mount point will be /home/ubuntu/Test/.
  7. Go to Show Application in the lower-left corner > Type to search….
  8. Enter Terminal in the search bar and select Terminal.
  9. Enter the following command to obtain the root privileges.

sudo -i

  1. Enter the following commands to install mdadm and lvm2, both of which are RAID management tools. lvm2 must be installed or vgchange will not work.

apt-get update
apt-get install -y mdadm lvm2

  1. Enter the following command to assemble all the drives removed from your Synology NAS. The results may differ according to the storage pool configurations on your Synology NAS.

mdadm -Asf && vgchange -ay

  1. Enter the following command to get the information of ${device_path}.

cat /proc/mdstat
lvs

According to the output of pvs/vgs/lvs, the device paths are as follows:

${device_path}
No lvs output/dev/${md}2
With lvs output/dev/${VG}/${LV}3

Below are the samples of md status corresponding to its RAID and volume type:

Device PathsClassic RAID with single volume
cat /proc/mdstatroot@ubuntu:~# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md4 : active raid1 sdc3[0] 73328704 blocks super 1.2 [1/1] [U] unused devices:<none>
lvsNo output
${device_path}/dev/md4
Device PathsSHR with single volume
cat /proc/mdstatroot@ubuntu:~# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md3 : active raid1 sda5[0] 73319616 blocks super 1.2 [1/1] [U] unused devices:<none>
lvsroot@ubuntu:~# lvs LV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Meta% Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert lv vg1000 -wi-a—– 69.92g
${device_path}/dev/vg1000/lv
Device PathsClassic RAID/SHR with multiple volume
cat /proc/mdstatPersonalities : [raid1] md3 : active raid1 sdc3[0] sdd3[1] 73328704 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices:<none>
lvsroot@ubuntu:~# lvs LV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Meta% Move Log Cpy% Sync Convert syno_vg_reserved_area vg1 -wi-a—– 12.00m volume_1 vg1 -wi-a—– 30.00g volume_3 vg1 -wi-a—– 30.00g
${device_path}/dev/vg1/volume_1
/dev/vg1/volume_3
  1. Enter the following commands to mount all the drives as read-only to access your data. Enter your device path (according to RAID and volume type in Step 12) in ${device_path} and mount point (created in Step 6)in ${mount_point}. Your data will be placed under the mount point.

$ mount ${device_path} ${mount_point} -o ro

  1. Check the data in Files > Home > the folders you created in Step 5.

If you still cannot recover the data through the above steps, refrain from trying any other methods to repair because it may cause more damage to your data. As your last option, please seek the help of a local data rescue company. Kindly understand that data retrieval is still not guaranteed.

Notes:

  1. A mount point is equal to one volume. If you have multiple volumes that need to be recovered, please create the same number of folders as the number of volumes.
  2. The number of md (array) will be listed in the result of cat /proc/mdstat.
  3. syno_vg_reserved_area can be ignored, the number of volume_x is equal to the number of volumes.
Stefan Helander

Akeeba Backup restore problem restoring large backup file [Solution]

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I had a rather large Akeeba Backup file (about 25 GB) which I tried to restore using Akeeba kickstart from the web browser. It took a long time unpacking the archive but never reached the point where database is being restored.

The Akeeba kickstart (version 5.0 or later) can be run from command line (shell) and this works better with really large backup files. Simply go to the directory where you have your JPA-file which should be the same directory where it should be restored and enter:

php kickstart.php archive.jpa

But of course replace archive.jpa whith your archive name. There are more command line options available.

After unpacking the archive, go with your browser to https://yourdomain.com/installation and complete the restore.

Reverse Beacon Network spots using my EFHW and QRP 6 watts
Stefan Helander

Why I love end fed half wave (EFHW) antennas

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The antenna seems always to be a compromise between practical matters and performance. While not being the most high performance antenna, I find the end fed half wave (EFHW) a very practical antenna, especially during portable operations.

The EFHW doesn’t need to be straight. It can be bent in angles and be “abused” a lot.

In this video I have a temporary installation in a vacation home (time share) where I am not able to erect any masts, not being able to use trees or other houses as fixation points for my antenna. I used some zip ties only that can be removed without leaving any marks.

The antenna height is far from optimal and the antenna is bent several times. It is also close to the rain gutters made of metal. Still I have fine SWR levels on all bands (10/15/20/40 m) and can work all of Europe on my QRP rig (6 watts) (see the screenshot from Reverse Beacon Network).

Stefan Helander

pfSense port forward to a NAT:ed IP-address located on the other side of a ipsec tunnel

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This is kind of a special scenario but actually occured for me. A port on the pfSense WAN should be NAT:ed to an IP-address located on a remote subnet via an ipsec tunnel. The problem here was the router on the other end of the tunnel did not route all it’s outgoing traffic over the tunnel. Only a few subnets behind the pfSense went through the tunnel. All other traffic was using the routers normal Internet connection.

In the image above, a port (123 in the example code below) on the pfSense (100.1.1.1) should be NAT:ed and port forwarded to 10.0.0.7. The result was the NAT:ed port forwarded packets reached the intended host (10.0.0.7) but replies probably went straight back on the internet, not going back through the tunnel.

I solved this by setting up a simple proxy on a server using iptables located on a machine in one of the subnets at the pfSense site which was reachable from 10.0.0.7 through the tunnel. See next image.

The proxy was made using iptables in a Ubuntu machine on 10.2.2.2. Both the proxy server on 10.2.2.2 and the host 10.0.0.7 could reach each other over the ipsec tunnel.

In pfSense I changed the NAT / port forward of port 123 from 10.0.0.7 to 10.2.2.2 (and deleted the existing states in pfsense from my previous tries, until I did that, this didn’t work).

The proxy server using IP-tables was set up like this (guide found here):

sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ens160 -p udp --dport 123 -j DNAT --to 10.0.0.7
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ens160 -p udp --dport 123 -j SNAT --to-source 10.2.2.2
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p udp --sport 123 -j SNAT --to-source 10.2.2.2

You will probably want to make sysctl ip_forward and iptables statements persistent over reboots.