TCAS WTF

Having (re)installed (due to idiocy) Ubuntu on my shack machine, I fired up the build-gnuradio script and built gr-airmodes. Some time later, I noticed the following WTF. 

(-48 0.0000000000) Type 20 TCAS report from 9d529e: threat ID: 13e71ba advised:  DON'T DESCEND DON'T DESCEND >500FPM DON'T DESCEND >1000FPM DESCEND DON'T CLIMB DON'T CLIMB >2000FPM TURN RIGHT DON'T TURN LEFT DON'T TURN RIGHT complement:  DON'T CLIMB DON'T TURN LEFT at 33725ft

I hope that this is some quirk in the message decoding.  I wouldn't fancy trying to understand that if my life depended on it!

HABLAB/XABEN1

 More HABs launched today from Cambridge, UK. Receiving on 70cm ISM band.

 

ANU/NANU

It might sound like Mork calling Orson, but its another HAB.  This one launched from Cambridge, just to the west of me, so it is coming in nice and strong.

A while later I spotted NANU's signal. ANU is on the left, NANU is on the right.

NANU's not got much to say for itself:

BALCAN-ONE-A

I've been receiving RTTY from the balloon BALCAN-ONE-A, with my AOR-8600Mk2 this afternoon.

Trackpad RFI

Having spent the long weekend at my Mum's place, I threw up a random wire and counterpoise so I could have a listen with my KX3. 

Even at such modest QRP levels, there were a couple of incidents of transmitted RFI.  Transmitting on most of the HF bands apparently turned her bedside lamp on and off, and would bring her PVR in the living room (where I had deployed the rig) out of standby.

It wasn't all a one way thing though.  As soon as I connected up the rig, I remembered that I'd been obliged to procure a pair of  Powerline Networking adapters for her, so she could watch VOD on her TV.  I also remember the caveat I made at the time of purchase, which was that those things would probably always be disconnected if I came to visit with radios, so they got unplugged without any disagreement from Mum.  However, the broadband hash from her Panasonic TV was unexpected and very harsh on 20m and below.  This limited my listening to the late evening after Mum went to bed, which was also not a problem.

However, the most profound RFI issue seemed to be self-inflicted.  My Lenovo Z570 laptop's trackpad went batshit crazy when I tried to beacon on 30m with PSKmail and didn't recover when transmission ceased.  I was able to exert control over the UI with the USB mouse and eventually found the solution, namely reloading the drivers.  The commands to do this are below.  The main reason for writing this post is so that I can remember them ;)

sudo rmmod psmouse

sudo modprobe psmouse