Tait T800 Series I EPROM Calculator

As I said in an earlier post, the Tait PGM800 software will not let you program a T800-10 with 10kHz channel increments.  I need the 10 kHz channel spacing to program up the frequency assigned to me by the ORRC.  After I figured out all the nuances of the bytes that needed to be laid out on the PROM, I wrote a Perl program to calculate the bytes that needed to be pasted into your favorite hex editor.  I also posted this to the Tait_Radios Yahoo! group.  Hopefully someone finds this useful.


#!/usr/bin/perl


use strict;
use Math::Round;


#  SET PARAMETERS HERE


#  Reference clock frequency in MHz
#  6.4 for T855-10
#  0.2 for T857-10
my $refClock = 12.8;


#  Channel step size in MHz
my $channelStep = 0.01;


#  1 for a transmitter, 0 for a receiver.
my $transmitter = 0;


#  Frequencies you want to get lines for
my @frequencies = (
                     439.900,
                     439.910,
                     439.920,
                     439.930,
                     439.940,
                     439.950,
                     439.960,
                     439.970,
                     439.980,
                     439.990,
                  );


#####  NO USER SERVICABLE PARTS BELOW HERE #####


my $scalingFactor = 64 * $channelStep;


foreach my $frequency (@frequencies) {
  my $target = $frequency;


  if ($transmitter == 0) {
    $target -= 45;
  }


  my $M = int($target / $scalingFactor);
  $target -= $M * $scalingFactor;


  my $A = round($target / $channelStep);


  my $R = $refClock / ($channelStep * 2);


  #  Hex Conversion
  my $MHex = $M << 2;


  #  Convert into a proper string
  printf("0%01X 0%01X 0%01X ", $MHex & 0x00F, ($MHex >> 4) & 0x00F, ($MHex >>8) & 0x00F);
  printf("0%01X 0%01X ", $A & 0x0F, $A >> 4);
  printf("0%01X 0%01X 0%01X ", $R & 0x00F, ($R >> 4) & 0x00F, ($R >>8) & 0x00F);
  printf("\t%.3d\t%.2d\t%.3f ", $M, $A, $frequency);
  if($transmitter == 1) {
    print "TX USING ";
  } else {
    print "RX USING ";
  }


  printf("%d KHZ STEPS", $channelStep * 1000);
  print "\n";
}

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Lots of things happening this week with the project.  After a flurry of e-mails between the Benton County planning department, the City of Corvallis planning department and I, I have gotten their approval for the land use issues.  Since it's amateur radio related, they're going to consider it an ancillary use, and it won't need a conditional use permit.  The City also talked to the airport manager, and since he didn't have an issue with it, the City is going to allow it under the Airport Industrial Park Master Plan.  I'd like to thank Dan Mason, the Corvallis Municipal Airport Manager; Kevin Russell from the City of Corvallis Development Services; Chris Bentley from Benton County Community Development; and Bill Clemens of  the City of Corvallis Building Department.  My advice to other hams after going through this process is to be patient, persistent, and helpful with the planning officials.  Explain to them the purposes and goals of the amateur radio service, and help them understand that what you're trying to do isn't to make a lot of cash.  It was particularly important to Benton County that I pointed out that the FCC regulations and federal statutes prohibit pecuniary gain.

This just leaves getting a building permit for the tower.  I had some trouble finding a professional engineer to draw up plans, but after finding the ARRL's Volunteer Consulting Engineer program I found Hank Lonberg.  Hank has looked at my crude drawings and some pictures and given me an estimate of $750 for the required engineered plans.  This is fairly expensive, but I guess it's the price of doing things right.  After I get the drawings, I can finish the permitting process and move forward with tower construction.

I finally got all of the tower segments painted white, and I got to work on getting the antennas attached to the segments.  The receive antenna was no problem and I got it attached a while ago.  The transmit antenna is another story.  The problem is that the mounting brackets for the dipoles are rather large and beefy.  In contrast, the Rohn 25G is rather small.  You need shims to make them fit.  The issue here is the cross-braces on the Rohn 25G tower.  It blocks the clams in places so that you can't mount them.  This is in the area where the horizontal cross-brace bends to go diagonally.  The problem is that the spacing between the dipoles is supposed to be 19.375".  It's entirely possible to make this spacing work with three dipoles, but when you move to four, it's pretty much impossible to get the spacing right.  I ended up getting fairly close, and one of the dipoles is a little less than an inch out of place.  I think what I may have to do eventually is get a mast of galvanized steel pole and clamp it to the tower leg instead of directly mounting it.  Unfortunately, it took a lot of time and frustration trying to get things to work out correctly.

I hooked the top two tower pieces together, and with a little white lithium grease, they went together perfectly.  I then leaned them up against the building to do some rough testing.

I mainly got the antennas going because I finally got the the RF gear from the guy in Idaho.  I now have the T800 gear installed in the rack and hooked to the antennas.  I attached some Anderson Power Poles to integrate with the power system in the rack.  I also attached 6-pin mini-DIN connectors to the headers on the back of the repeater.  The connections are fairly straight forward with the exception of the audio connections.  The cool thing about the Tait is that it has 600 ohm transformers on the inputs and outputs of the repeater for isolation.  Unfortunately, Satoshi's Node Adapter has all of the stuff referenced to ground.  That means that you have to tie one leg of all the transformers together.  Hopefully this won't cause any major issues.

The other trick with the interface between the Tait and the Node Adapter is making the COR work correctly.  The COR is held high when there is no signal, and brought low when the squelch opens.  This is opposite of the "default" configuration of the node adapter.  The settings I used were SW1: ON  SW2: OFF and SW3: 1-2.  With this configuration the COR light on the node adapter lights up when the gate LED activates on the Tait receiver.  This should make things work okay.

The only other problem with the Tait gear I have right now is that I have the T855-10 model.  This is the gear designed for 12.5 kHz channel spacing.  The filters are a bit of an issue, but the real problem is that the Tait programming software will not let you program channels that are not divisible by 12.5kHz.  The ORRC assigned me 434.910 as the transmit frequency and 439.910 for the receive frequency.  These aren't divisible by 12.5 kHz and can't be programmed.  Luckily, there are a few messages on the Tait Yahoo group about exactly how the PROM is set up, and which bits need to be set.  It's a lot of screwy math, and it's taken me a while, but I understand how things need to be set up.  I just have to program the bytes manually in the file, and I can make it work okay.  The thread on the Tait group starts here.  My EPROM programmer hasn't arrived yet, so I have to wait to try it out.

So, we're almost ready for on-air testing and evaluation.  I don't have the duplexer yet, so I'm not sure if I'm ready to go full duplex yet.  There's quite a bit of isolation between the antennas just because of the fact that they're spaced a ways from one another, but I don't think it's going to be enough to work well.  After that, it's just dealing with tower issues.

What's the Frequency Kenneth?

Good News Everyone!  I went up to La Pine on Sunday to attend the operations meeting of the Oregon Regional Relay Council, the coordination authority for Oregon.  During the meeting the application for coordination was considered, and we were assigned the 434.910/439.910 frequency pair.  This is in the "GMSK Repeater" section of the bandplan, and there's really nobody else up there right now.  It turns out that ORRC allocated this spectrum not knowing that the Icom repeaters can't actually tune to this pair.  This isn't a problem with the KF7LDG repeater because we'll be using standard FM gear that's more frequency agile.  The really good part about being on that pair is that we shouldn't be disturbing anyone on FM, and they shouldn't really be effecting us all that much.  Thanks to Daron and Dan of the ORRC for their help and understanding during the process.

Receive Antenna on the Top Tower Section

In other news, the receive antenna arrived on Friday.  As I said before, it's a Telewave ANT450-D3.  It'll be mounted at the very top of the tower mostly because I'm more worried about hearing folks than being about to get to them with the transmitter.  Note that if you're mounting these folded dipoles on a smaller tower like the Rohn 25G, you'll need a shim kit, which is part number ANTS420.  Note that the description says (2) on it, but you'll need one kit for each dipole.  The (2) refers to the fact that a pair of them shims up a single dipole.

I tested them up in ghetto style by bringing the top tower section over to the trunk of my car and hooking the dipoles up to my ID-880H mobile.  I was able to hit FM repeaters as far away as Eugene and Salem, so I'm thinking the antennas should be plenty good for the purpose.  When all of the tower sections get painted, I'll be mounting the transmit antenna on its tower section.

And Then the Government Intervened

Well, things were going a little too well, and the project was moving along as a good clip.  The hole is completely dug.

Perhaps a little too well.  I was doing some extensive reading on tower erection and care and realized that I'd better check the county building regulations to see if I needed a building permit for the tower.  It turns out in Benton County that anything that's over 10' tall requires a building permit.  I could have just proceeded with the project and hoped nobody would notice.  I decided to take the high road instead and notify the proper authorities so it could be done right.  That way I wouldn't have to tear it down later when someone noticed it didn't have a permit.

So, since the airport is outside of the City of Corvallis limits, I enquired at the Benton County building department, and they informed me that they had an intergovernmental agreement with the City such that I would have to get a permit from the City of Corvallis.  This was something I was hoping to avoid.

I journeyed to the City's planning department to figure out what the deal was, and was told that I would have to get approval from the airport manager before they would do anything.  I drove out to City of Corvallis Public Works where the airport manager lives and had a productive conversation with him.  He has been the most helpful and painless piece of this process so far.

Then I contacted the person in the city planning department.  To their credit they have been responsive and helpful via e-mail.  The major problem right now is that they have decided that the stock Rohn drawings aren't enough to get a building permit.  I have to now go to a local civil engineer and get a set of plans in triplicate.  This promises to be costly.

The second problem they have is that the tower may be too close to the property line.  They're concerned that if the tower were to fall it would fall across the property line.  I could understand their concern if this were in the city limits, or if we had any significant neighbors.  The truth of the matter is that on both sides that matter, there is farmland, and there would be no impact if the tower were to fall.

So, we're currently derailed with governmental building requirements.  I'm hoping that I can get through all of the red tape before monsoon season starts here in Oregon and construction will be problematic.

There's a Hole at the Bottom of the Sea...

So... to have a Rohn 25G based tower be self supporting, you have to pour a very substantial footing.  With 25G, you can go up to 40ft in a self supporting configuration, and I really hate guy wires.  On the other hand, a footing for a self supporting 25G tower is 4'x4'x4'.  Initially, this didn't sound like a big deal.  Four feet just doesn't seem like that much in theory.  In practice, 2.5 cubic yards of dirt takes a lot of time to dig by hand.

Scott in the hole -- "This has gotta be 4 ft!"

I started the hole a couple of weeks ago, and got about 2.5 ft down into the ground.  It was disheartening when I first measured the depth thinking it was around 4 ft, and I was barely half way done.  My friends Scott and Chris helped me on Sunday with some of the digging and we made some pretty substantial progress.  There are a couple of problems with such an endeavor.  First, it's hard to maneuver in such a small hole.  Make sure you have short tools or small people to dig (child labor!).  Second is just the difficulties of getting a 6' 230lb guy into and out of the hole to dig.  Luckily I only have to do this once.

So, I'm hoping that I can get the hole dug in the next week or so, and we can get things prepped for a pour.

The other progress that I made is obtaining the rebar for the footing.  Unfortunately, Rohn calls for #7 rebar, which is 7/8" in diameter.  Nobody around Corvallis stocks this, because it's fairly large stuff.  I ended up getting the rebar from Farwest Steel in Eugene.  It was around $75 for 18 pieces of 4' #7 rebar.  Not too bad for 150 lbs of steel.

Partially painted tower section

I also went up to Seattle to pick up the rest of the tower sections from the MicroHAMS guys.  They have graciously donated 4 sections of Rohn 25G that they had laying around.  I'm very grateful to them for their generous donation.  They required a bit of cleanup, and I got them hosed down and scrubbed off a bit.  They still need to get some attention from Scotchbrite and painted.  I have one of the sections almost done, and after I finish the hole I'll work on the rest.  Rodda paint in Salem had some aviation white tower steel paint.  The specification sheet is here:  http://www.roddapaint.com/professional/product-data/31114.aspx  They had it in stock in Salem, so give them a call if you need some.  Notice they have Aviation Orange as well if you need to paint up your tower to be FAA compliant.  It's not exactly cheap at $60 a gallon, but I want to get things done correctly as possible the first time.

Scott also cut down the bottom section that I purchased from a guy in Corvallis.  This is going to be the section that's embedded in the concrete pad.  I don't have any details on the cutting process, but he said he just used an angle grinder.  It's good to have friends to help you out with the physical labor and construction processes.

The receive antenna is on order as well, and should be shipped in a week or so.  I'm also waiting on my Tait T800 supplier to finish reconditioning the repeater.  I'm hoping to head to Boise next week to pick that thing up.  The ORRC is going to meet on August 8th in LaGrande, so I plan on trying to be there to answer any questions with our application for coordination.

So, things are progressing, but always more slowly than one would want.  Things are coming together, and I'm hoping to have the repeater operational sometime in September before monsoon season starts.

Finishing Touches on the Computer

6-pin Mini-DIN connectors in the back panel

I just finished up the configuration for the computer to make it clean looking.  The last bit of work that I intended to do on it was to mount some 6-pin mini-DIN connectors to the rear of the case that plugged into the node adapters.  This way I could keep the case sealed and not have any ugly pig tails hanging off of them.  I purchased some bulkhead connectors from DigiKey (I got an excess of them to save on the outrageous shipping charges, so if people need a couple for one of their projects, I have like 8 left).  The part number is: CP-2860-ND.  They were all of $1.56 apiece, but I ordered 10 of them just to have a round number.  I'm figuring I can rework my APRS Digi computer to use a couple of the connectors as well.

External view of the Mini-DINs

It works out fairly well so far.  I currently have stolen the Kenwood TM-271A off of my APRS Digi setup to be a radio for the D-STAR hotspot.  I'll put CRVLS back on the air as soon as I finish playing with the D-STAR stuff.  I've constructed a cable with a 10µF capacitor in series with the receiver's output to take the DC offset off of the line.  I don't know if the Tait repeater is going to require it or not, so I've held off on building it into the connector on the back of the computer.  If it does, I'll probably solder it internally to the case.  The hotspot is currently on 146.45MHz here in Corvallis and I've kept it linked to REF010 C to talk to some of my friends back in New England.  It's performing fairly well for what it is.  I'm running Scott's (KI4LKF) Linux based repeater software with relatively little problems.  I actually had more issues running the Windows hotspot software.  I think there are still some USB issues with Satoshi's v7 board that rear their ugly head with newer motherboards such as mine.  I may try out one of the alternative boards next go around for the 2m side of the repeater.

The TX Antenna Arrived!

I got the TX side antenna from Telewave.  It's a ANT450D6-9 which should give around 9 dBd gain.  I can't wait to get it up in the air, but it'll be a while before we can get a proper tower erected to test it out.

The Repeater Controller

The repeater controller is pretty much built.  I am waiting with baited breath on the release of David Lake's (G4ULF) D-STAR repeater software.  Supposedly it is in the hands of the K5TIT trust group to package up for distribution to the masses and its release is imminent.

Hardware

Front view of the controller

The system is based around a 2U 19" rack mount case.  While a 1U case would be smaller and take up less space in the rack there is a major reason for using 2U.  A 1U case requires the use of special fans that are shorter than the normal fans that ship with processors.  Many times these fans don't cool as well as the stock coolers due to poor airflow around a small 1U case.  For this reason, it tends to be much better to build systems like this in a 2U case where you can use a normal fan.

PicoPSU 12V ATX Supply

As I mentioned in an earlier post, it made sense to me to try to build this system based on 12VDC rather than a 110VDC.  The RF gear is going to run on 12VDC, and if I standardize on this I can use standard batteries, power supplies, and chargers to make sure that emergency power is readily available.  I used a PicoPSU to provide the 12VDC to the computer.  This is a 150W supply that plugs directly into the ATX connector on a motherboard and takes in 12VDC.

Anderson Power Poles in place of the 120V connector

I modified the cabling a bit on the PicoPSU to have Anderson Power Poles instead of the Molex connector that was on them originally.  This just required a little bit of crimping and soldering.  I also removed the 110VAC connector on the back of the case and inserted a panel mount power pole connector that I picked up at SeaPac from DC Power from Portland.  I'm actually very happy with the setup, although I'm a little bit worried about cables getting pulled out from the back.  We'll see how it works out when it gets its permanent place in the rack.

Satoshi Node Adapter moounted in the case

The modification for 12VDC power allowed me to remove the power supply from the case.  This is going to help with cooling inside the case and also allowed me quite a bit of free space inside.  I chose to use this extra space to mount the Satoshi Node Adapter internal to the case so that it wouldn't look like a bag on the side of the controller.  I purchased a V7 node adapter from Satoshi.  Originally I ordered it in the case and fully assembled because I didn't quite know how I was going to work with things.  I ended up taking it out of the case and using some JB Weld to mount it to some threaded posts.  This should also allow two node adapters to be stacked one on top of another in the case with plenty of clearance.  This will be useful for having a controller that can handle both 440MHz and 2m at the same time.

Front panel USB connector hacked to a USB-A for the node adapter

To clean things up a bit with cabling, I took a USB A header that connected to the motherboard and cut it up to have a USB B plug on it.  I soldered the proper pins and reconstructed the cable.  It connects into one of the motherboard headers provided for front panel USB connections.  This particular header had room for two USB connections on it, and I'm leaving one available for the second node adapter when it's installed.  This makes the cabling a lot cleaner.

Node Adapter LEDs brought to the front panel

I also removed the LEDs from the node adapter board and moved them out to the front panel of the computer so that I can monitor the status of the PTT and COS detection of the node adapter.  Some hot glue on the back of the LED mountings keep them in place.  I still need to grab a couple of 6-pin DIN sockets from Mouser or DigiKey so that I can bring out the radio connections to the rear panel of the computer.

Internal view of the machine

The motherboard is an Intel DH55HC with a Core i3 processor on it.  I chose this setup because the new Core processors are getting a reputation for having very low power consumption for the amount of computing you get out of them.  More importantly the Core i3 has an on-die GPU which both saves power and saves space in a 1U case. The motherboard has onboard ethernet, and I've loaded it up with 2Gb of DDR3 memory.  This should be more than sufficient for a D-STAR controller.

To further reduce power consumption, I decided to put in a solid state drive.  I chose a 64Gb V+ model from Kingston that I picked up at Fry's.  Unfortunately, there was a defective SATA connection that broke when I tried to change out the SATA cable.  It's been returned to Kingston for replacement, and I hope to get it back sometime next week for re-installation.

Rear view

All of this work has resulted in a clean looking installation and has reduced power consumption to about 5A peak at 12VDC.  This is about 60W maximum power consumption.  The machine averages around 2A current draw in normal usage.  This is very good for a full x86 processor such as the Core i3.  I could have gone with one of the Atom systems, but I had doubts that it would be powerful enough to handle the gateway tasks required of the D-STAR stack.

Software

I'm using the CentOS Linux operating system because it seems to be the distribution that most of the D-STAR folks are used to.  This is because Icom has chosen to use it as the only supported distribution for their gateway software.  I'm not particularly fond of CentOS because I've been bitten by RPMs entirely too many times over the years.  Yum seems to solve many of these problems, though, and I will be exploring the distribution to see what I really think.  I'd honestly rather have a Gentoo distribution so that I could cut down on the amount of software on the box.

Until David comes out with his software, I'm using the r2g2_p and rptr software that Scott (KI4LKF) wrote, and that the Dutch Star people are continuing to distribute.  This allows me to run the repeater as a  hotspot and connect to various reflectors until I can become a "real" repeater on the system.  Scott's software does the RF repeater duties, and the big things that are lost in this setup is the callsign routing capabilities of D-STAR.  It does give me an opportunity to check out the RF side and get things tested before adding new software to it.

The KF7LDG Repeater Project

This January I purchased an Icom ID-880H from Ham Radio Outlet in New Hampshire because there was a good penetration of D-STAR users in the Connecticut and Western Massachusetts areas.  I ended up having a lot of fun with the mode, and worked it a lot in the car, and even chatted with D-STAR folks in Dayton.  Unfortunately, upon moving back to Corvallis I found out that the nearest D-STAR repeater was up on Mt. Hebo (W7GC operated by the Oregon Coast Repeater Group) and wasn't able to be accessed from a mobile in Corvallis.

This caused me thinking about how to solve this problem.  After considering a few different options, including setting up a DVAR Hotspot, I decided to set up a full blown D-STAR repeater at my employer's datacenter in Corvallis.  I didn't want to purchase the Icom stack because of the expense and the lack of experimentation potential.  I talked to David Lake a bit while I was in Dayton about his D-STAR repeater software.  This led me to the conclusion that I should wait for his software, and build the repeater based on a standard PC.

Even though a standard PC has some flexibility, there are some downsides as compared to a dedicated controller, and I decided that I should try to make a low power consumption PC that could run on 12VDC. I also wanted to get rid of as many rotating parts as possible, mainly the disk drive.

After that, my repeater experience is really limited, so I embarked on a process to learn as much as I could about repeater design and implementation.  I think the main thing that I learned is that repeater components are expensive, and it's the parts you least expect (like the duplexer and feedline) that can be the significant drivers of cost.

I made the decision to use the Tait T800 series 1 repeater for the RF gear because David was using it, it was nicely 19" rack mountable, and seemed to be cheaply available on the used market.  I met a guy from Idaho at the SeaPac convention in Seaside, OR that had a stack of them for sale, and I made arrangements to purchase a rack of equipment that had both 440 MHz and 2m repeaters in them.  I'm still waiting for him to complete the cleanup and refurbishing on the unit, and I'll go to Boise and pick it up.

After repeatedly seeing their ads in QST and researching them on their web site, I chose Telewave to provide the antennas and duplexer for the project.  I'm going to be using a 2-bay folded dipole at the top of the tower for receive, and a 4-bay folded dipole 10 ft. below the receive antenna for transmit.

The antennas will be on a Rohn 25G tower in a self supporting configuration at 40' tall.  Because of our proximity to the Corvallis Airport, 45' is around the maximum height we can support without notifying the FAA and FCC and going through that process.  If things work, and it seems necessary to increase coverage, we'll look at maybe adding some more sections to the tower.

I formed a club with a few friends of mine that are interested in Ham radio and digital communications.  We obtained the callsign KF7LDG for the Willamette Valley Digital Radio Association to support the repeater project.  I've applied for coordination from the Oregon Regional Relay Council, and we'll see what frequency we get.  That's the primary thing that's holding up the duplexer order.

Throughout the project, I'll be posting pictures and updates so that people can see what's going on, and hopefully the information can help out others trying to complete similar projects.