After reading Ken’s pages and shooting him a quick email I realized that I needed to replace the cathode and screen resistors in my TS-530s. Never having owned a Kenwood, and having only some limited experience digging in under the hood of a Heathkit HW-101 I was a little bit afraid. But curiosity prevailed. I was also able to download a service manual for the radio here. I could not find schematics of the 530, but I did find schematics on Ken’s site of the 830 which is similar if not identical in terms of the final board and the rectifier board, which are the two boards where we find the screen resistors and cathode resistors.

I ordered the parts from Ken which arrived in a few days, and then I set out to make my repairs.

Ken told me the cathode resistors would be on the final board, as well as two 100 ohm screen resistors. The remaining screen resistor is a 470 ohm on the rectifier board. It took me a while to figure out what was where, but it was fairly easy to identify the four 20 ohm cathode resistors and two 100 ohm screen resistors on the final board. The 470 ohm screen resistor on the rectifier board sits right in the middle and you can’t miss it.

A SAFETY note: Danger!! High Voltage!!
“Hybrid rigs such as Kenwood TS-520-820-530-830
have high voltages that can be as high as 800 volts in the power
supply and final section. These voltages can kill you!
This is actually true of any rig with tube finals. Keep this in mind
when working inside these rigs.
After these rigs are turned off, these voltages remain
in capacitors and can still harm or kill you. Most of
these rigs have bleeder resistors that are SUPPOSED to
discharge these capacitors in a short time after the
power is off. These are usually of values in the tens or
hundreds of thousand ohms and are usually placed
across the capacitor to drain it. Are these working
right in your rig? Would you bet your life on it? I
wouldn’t.
As a safety precaution, one should ALWAYS discharge
these voltages manually before touching anything in
the rig. To do this, unplug the rig and let it set for 3 or
4 minutes. If the bleeder resistors are working, this
SHOULD discharge most of the charge. Then using a
screwdriver or a good clip lead, short the
top of the plate choke, to ground. The top of the plate
choke is the place that feeds the two tube caps by way
of parasitic chokes. Discharge the top of the plate choke. The top
of the plate choke is the place that feeds the two tube
caps by way of parasitic chokes. There is enough
voltage stored up in these capacitors to create a high
enough current to stop you heart.”

I removed the top and bottom covers of the case. I disassembled the protective cage around the finals. *make sure you short the I removed the finals, making sure to note which final came from which socket. (I don’t know if this is necessary, but its probably a good idea to not mix them up and alter the adjustment of your radio). I then unscrewed the final board from the bottom and was able to pull it out just enough to remove the old resistors and replace them with the new ones. I did the same for the one resistor on the rectifier board. I then put it all back together and proceeded to enjoy my repaired rig.

See the following illustrations (you can click on any image for a large version):

1) This is the bottom of the radio after removing the case. The final board is in the upper left hand corner and the rectifier board is just to the right.

.

2)Here is a closeup of the final and rectifier boards.

.

3) Removing the plate caps and pulling out the 6146b finals.

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4) The final board of the Kenwood TS-530s showing the newly replaced resistors. Note the location of cathode and screen resistors.

.

5) The rectifier board showing the single 470 ohm resistor.

Please see the comments – I moderate all comments but I attempt to post any comments that contain helpful information about the subject.

In particular many people need to install all the libraries, I may have already had them installed. Also, users now report audio issues that I did not experience.

Again, please see the comments and the additional information.

You may find this site helpful – but I have not personally verified the information and am since running a different version of the OS altogether.

http://kd8bxp.blogspot.com/2011/10/echolink-on-linux-ubuntu-1010-notes.html

Please see the comments for additional information.

Here is the original post:

I got my amateur radio license back last week after nearly 15 years since I let it lapse!

I wanted to try the Echolink ham radio application out, and I was able to install the Windows client at home on a Windows 7 64-bit box. My workstation at the office runs Ubuntu Linux, 64-bit and I had a little trouble getting a client to work. Installing under Wine did not work for me, the program just froze after connecting.

Fortunately, I was able to get the QTel client working on my 64-bit Ubuntu Linux desktop, using getlibs to install all the dependencies. I connected to a local repeater KC2CIG-R in Staten Island, NY and had my first Echolink (Internet VoIP to 440MHz repeater) QSO with Carl, WA2IAF.

Here is how I got the QTel Echolink client working on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 64-bit

• 1 – Download packages from http://www.chrisronk.net/ham/qtel-debian.tar.gz or http://lz5pn.homeip.net/lz5pn/echoli…-debian.tar.gz.
• 2 – Extract
• 3 – Install getlibs – (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790)
• 4 – Type: sudo dpkg -i –force-all qtel_0.11.0-2_i386.deb (or whatever the name of your qtel .deb file is – we won’t be using the other deb files you extracted)
• 5 – Type: getlibs /usr/bin/qtel
• 6 – Change the directory server option in QTel to one of the following:
  nasouth.echolink.org
  naeast.echolink.org
  servers.echolink.org
  backup.echolink.org
• After this, the application should work on 64-bit Ubuntu or Debian with no issues. Getlibs is a very handy application for installing 32-bit apps on 64-bit.

The book is organized in three parts. Part one begins with an imaginary story of a young woman involved in an automobile accident. She was recovering well in the hospital when suddenly her condition deteriorated. A globule of marrow fat from her shattered femur had lodged in a blood vessel feeding her pancreas. Deprived of its cellular needs of oxygen, the pancreas died. The young woman’s doctor sent a sample of her cells to a laboratory where the nuclei from some of the young woman’s cells were transferred into the inner mass of a fertilized egg whose nucleus had been removed (stem cells). Thus, the undifferentiated cell mass was now genetically identical to the young female accident victim. The rate of division, chemical and physical environment of the cell were carefully regulated to prevent them from growing out of control, or differentiating into a specific cell type other than pancreas cells. The end result is that a pancreas is grown and sent back to the hospital for transplantation into the young accident victim. Since the organ was genetically identical to the woman’s own, there was no risk of rejection from the woman’s body. The new pancreas would not be attacked by her immune system as a foreign body. No dangerous immune suppressing drugs would need to be administered. Thus, the young woman’s life was spared. The story illustrates one possible outcome of stem cell research – as well as some of the sensitivity around the issue including the use of a fertilized egg.

The book goes on to give an overview of stem cell history and a rudimentary introduction to the related biology. One of the first scientists to make observations related to stem cells was the Dutch scientist Abraham Trembley in the 1700’s. Trembley discovered the regeneration and growth features of fresh water hydras. He observed that when cut in half, the hydra would regenerate into two identical hydras. He also observed that the process of regeneration followed the same pattern seen during the gestation of animal embryos. The most fascinating achievement of Trembley involves an amazing feat of surgical skill – he managed to turn one hydra inside out, like a sock, and then using a spike of boar’s bristle he jammed this inverted hydra down the “throat” of a second hydra. Instead of the inside out hydra being digested, the two organisms fused together forming a single, thicker hydra. This paved the path for scientific speculation that perhaps people would one day benefit from the ability to replace dead, dying or damaged skin and organs. The key to the hydra “mutation” is that the two layers of cells, inner endoderm and outer ectoderm, act as stem cells. The cells perform functions such as digestion, but they do not lose the ability to regrow into new tissue or new types of cells. This ability is at the heart of what drives modern stem cell research.

This ability to become different types of cells is called plasticity. The most common designation of plasticity is called pluripotency. Pluripotency regards stem cells that have the ability to become many different types of adult differentiated cells. Totipotency refers to the most precious ability to become any type of cell. Multipotentcy refers to stem cells that are limited in what type of cell they can become. An example of these would be hematopoietic cells, which are found in the blood. These types of cells can develop into many types of blood cells, but not nerve cells or kidney cells or any other type of cells. The least of stem cells in regard to plasticity are unipotent cells. Examples of these are the cells in the epithelium or outer most tissue layer of our skin just below the dead squamous epithelial cells. Current technology allows sheets of skin to be grown from these cells to form transplantable sheets of skin. Future progress holds a great deal of hope for generating cartilage to treat injuries of the knee and elbow.

Totipotent stem cells can only be found in one place – the inner cell mass of a blastocyst. The blastocyst is a hollow mass of cells that is created when the initial female egg is fertilized. The inner mass is called the embryoblast and these undifferentiated cells are the source of the highly controversial embryonic stem cells. As soon as these cells are removed and placed in culture, they begin to change and lose their plasticity. They retain a high degree of plasticity, but the disruption causes them to change into pluripotent rather than totipotent cells.

There are adult stem cells which should not be confused with embryonic stem cells. Typically, these are multipotent or unipotent cells and include cells (listed in order of decreasing plasticity) in the brain, bone marrow, digestive system, internal vessels, liver, pancreas, muscle, and skin cells. These adult cells are less plastic and thus less versatile and useful.

Much of the modern research on embryonic stem cells is the result of developments in invitro fertilization, or IVF in the 1980’s. People such as Dr. Ariff Bongso of the National University Hospital of Singapore developed ways to grow embryos, improve their sustainability, and increase the odds they would survive the transplantation procedure. This resulted in the creation of lines of cells that could be grown into tissues at a later date for treating disease. The cells Bongso worked with grew up until the day 5 blastocyst stage at which point the inner mass of stem cells was removed. It was only a short time after this the cells would differentiate and lose plasticity. Additional research and developments were made by people such as Dr. James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin that allowed the cells to retain their plasticity in the lab. Thomson obtained his cells from the extra human embryos left over from IVF clinics. The IVF process involves the creation of several fertilized eggs, only one of which can be implanted in the patient’s womb. The surplus embryos are either kept frozen or discarded. Thomson was concerned that the research would generate controversy. He mandated that he would only use cells up to about day 5 of the blastocyst phase. He also wished to avoid coming close to the 14th day of embryonic development since this is when the first nerve cells start to differentiate and form the barest silhouette of a nervous network. He intentionally avoided this 14 day mark to avoid any argument that his work could cause an embryo the sensation of pain.

A substantial portion of the mid section of the book discusses the political processes and religious opposition to stem cell research. President George W. Bush announced his administration’s policy in 2001 would be to allow federal funds for research and experimentation on embryonic tissue to only the existing, roughly 60, cell lines – those already cultured and stored in laboratories. In California, they responded by passing a bill in September 2002 allowing therapeutic cloning, which Governor Gray Davis signed into law. Following this bill was the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, or Proposition 71, which made stem cell research a state constitutional right, allocated 3 Billion dollars over ten years, and made embryonic stem cell research a priority. In May 2005, the Republican-controlled House passed a bill allowing federal funds to be used for embryonic stem cell research. Republican senator Dr. Bill Frist broke from the pack to support the legislation, saying:

“Because they have a property called pluripotence — the ability to become almost any other type of body cell — embryonic stem cells could eventually help treat spinal cord injuries, mitigate diabetes, repair damaged organs, relieve pain and preserve lives. Even though cures may take years to develop, I believe that we cannot ignore the promise these cells hold. But I also believe that whatever research the federal government funds should follow clear ethical guidelines and use only embryos that would otherwise be destroyed.”

President Bush vetoed the Bill. The ban on federal funding was lifted by President Barack Obama in March, 2009.

Though Proposition 71 succeeded and established a board called the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), it is unclear if the grants will ever be issued. A lawsuit challenging California’s open meeting laws, and other suits from the People’s Advocate, National Tax Limitation Foundation, and California Family Bioethics Council attack the way CIRM is structured. The suits are tying any progress in knots.

The deadlock on embryonic cell research has led to developments in the use of adult stem cells as well as the use of “cord blood”. An entire industry has grown to salvage and store the blood remaining in the umbilical cord after birth. This blood is one of the richest sources of stem cells and is removed from the umbilical cord and the placenta right after the cord is cut.

The future holds great promise of treatment for cancer and a host of other diseases, regeneration of tissues and organs, grafting of spinal cords. There are many ethical and political hurdles that must be overcome in addition to the medical and scientific ones. Bellomo proposes that once feasible therapies are available for widespread disorders such as sickle-cell anemia, the demand for cures will exceed the opposition. The question then becomes where will these therapies emerge? He predicts such advances and demand within the next ten years.

I said, “Honey, you know I’ve been in IT way too long to do some rookie thing like that…” and so it stayed.

New York City Taxi Cab Software Kiosk Windows Crashed Application

There are lots of solutions. I use ssh and scp and sftp all the time – but do you want and incredibly easy way of synchronizing one folder of files between your Mac, Windows and Linux boxes with minimal effort? There is a new iPhone application as well. How about a solution that is free?

The answer is Dropbox and it is incredibly simple. You sign up, download and install a small app that runs in the background, and you get 2GB of storage, synchronized between each computer for free. If you need more space, you can sign up and pay a monthly fee – but I find the 2GB suits my needs perfectly – and for larger files I can use ftp or scp and ssh.

The nice thing about Dropbox is its just a regular folder. When you are working you don’t have to open an application like Filezilla to access your files. And when you save the document, it is automaticaly synchronized for you. Simple and easy.

Here’s the link if you’d like to try it out – Dropbox

In additon to the easy synchronization of your files, there are also options for monitoring and reversing changes to your files! You can also share folders for other people. You can access an manage your files and shares from any web browser. You can even monitor via an RSS feed.

monitor changes to your dropbox files

share and manage files and folders online

Most of the malware attacks on computers today are not done by thrill or attention seeking hackers. They are created by criminals who seek to use them to relay unsolicited commercial email (spam) or worse. They could care less about making Windows look bad. They are completely agnostic as to Microsoft, Apple, or your Linux distro of choice. It only stands to reason that while it is more difficult to trick a saavy Linux user into installing malware with root privliges, efforts will almost certainly escalate as the popularity of Linux distros like Ubuntu gain popularity.

There are several free and open-source tools that can be easily installed and used to scan for viruses, rootkits, and other nasties on your computer. Clam AV, rkhunter, and chkrootkit are three tools that are easy to use. Clam even has a GUI. All three tools are available in the Ubuntu repositories. They are almost certainly available in others, but aren’t difficult to install manually either.

If you use Ubuntu, you can install the three packages:

sudo apt-get install clamav-daemon rkhunter chkrootkit

If you want to try the GUI, it is called ClamTK (sudo apt-get install clamtk)

Update the Clam AV scanning definitions by running sudo freshclam

It is probably easiest and most intuitive for most to use Clam via the GUI and not the command line – This installed under Applications > System Tools > Virus Scanner on my Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 desktop.

Clam does not scan your files on access – so it takes up very little resources. You can schedule scans as cron jobs or simply run scans manually on a regular basis to be sure your system is clean.

To scan for rootkits, simply run sudo rkunter --check and sudo chkrookit as root. It is safe to run them side by side. They will not change anything on your system, they will simply alert you to the presence of suspicious files. (a few warnings are pretty normal).

Ubuntu ships with a Linux firewall called iptables installed by default. Most people find the text file configuration to be cumbersome. Firestarter is a very simple GUI option for iptables that makes it easy to manage. A good firewall will go a very long way to prevent any system from being compromised.

sudo apt-get install firestarter

To run Firestarter, go to System > Administration > Firestarter. When you first open the program you will be asked some questions. Don’t worry if you get them wrong, you can re-run the wizard any time… You will most likely want to choose yes and tick the box for DHCP. You’ll then need to set up a policy. This is very simple. If you are not sharing your computer, do nothing for Inbound policy – it will block inbound connections from starting a session on your computer. If you use Bittorrent, ssh, ftp, etc on your desktop you will need to create rules to allow those services Inbound. Again, very easy to do. For Outbound you usually want to allow all services out except those you block intentionally – so select “Permissive by default, blacklist traffic” – which will allow you to go out to the Internet freely but give you an option to block outbound traffic you do not want to allow. This is the default configuration on most commercial firewalls also. You can make outbound restrictive, but be prepared to add rules for every software you run that needs to establish Internet sessions… (updates, web browsing, backup programs, dropbox, skype, etc, etc…)

Any system should be backed up. I really like sbackup sudo apt-get install sbackup – you can find documentation online. It isn’t difficult to use and the defaults work well – though you may wish to change the default backup location. You can also backup to remote computers via ssh.

Keep your updates current. Ubuntu will alert you by default when updates are available. You can also use System > Administration > Update manager.

One last additional precaution I take is to use the laptop’s built-in security features to password protect the boot process. While this isn’t un-breakable, it will definitely slow down a casual thief who swiped your laptop. For a more secure approach, encrypt your hard drive’s file system.

It is very easy to install using Synaptic/Apt and is available in the Ubuntu Universe Repository. There are two front ends available using GTK, and QT. The only issue I had to troubleshoot was that the recorded audio was out of sync and choppy. It was very easy to fix by changing the DEFAULT sound option to plughw:0,0.

The software is capable of using a variety of audio sources including Jack audio server. The capture provided an excellent quality file in .ogv format.

If you are sharing the video capture with Windows users, you will need to convert it to a Windows-friendly format for them. I used mencoder - 

mencoder -idx mycapture.ogv -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -o mycapture.avi

For a helpful page on installing additional repositories and software in Ubuntu, see here Enabling Extra Repositories. You should also see the following link:  Medibuntu  – to install the W32 Codecs.

This is only required if you need to convert the output into a Windows format like .avi. In order to play the converted avi video in Windows,  I still needed to install this free codec: FFDShow MPEG-4.

Click For Large Image Diagram

I serve a large organization with multiple branch offices in remote places. Typically, these offices are staffed with from one to fifty employees. Most of the offices have a local Windows Domain Controller, which doubles as a file/print server, DNS, and DHCP server.

The larger of the offices are usually connected to the Internet via T1, or DSL via a local service provider. In addition, the offices have a firewall that is connected back to headquarters via IPSec VPN tunnel.

This arrangement has provided a good solution for several years, however there are limitations. Recently, many of our offices have begun providing Internet access for clients – this added network load, in addition to increased usage of high-bandwidth services like You Tube, have placed new demands on us to manage the bandwidth. In addition, configuring servers and firewalls per individual office – and getting local support who can help us on site – is challenging.

A major point of our current initiative is to make our network locations more homogeneous, and more under the control of IT staff at headquarters. Virtualization has become an attractive option for several reasons: it eliminates the cost of a separate hardware firewall, and it allows us to configure a hardware-agnostic server “image” for use on any local hardware.

My “One Box Solution” allows for the firewall, bandwidth management, and Windows Domain Controller to exist on a single, portable, server.

I recently began piloting such a solution in one of our offices. Not having a current budget for my project, I took advantage of an unused Dell workstation at HQ. I added an additional 10/100 NIC we had lying in our closet. I installed Ubuntu 8.10 server (any version of Linux will work) and VMWare’s latest version of free server for Linux.

If you haven’t been exposed to VMWare yet, go to www.vmware.com and download the free player and one of the free virtual appliances (pre configured workstations and computers). VMWare server is also free and will allow you to build and configure your own virtual machines.

Having built the Linux box and installed VMWare server, I configured one of my NICS as an internal nic, with an address on my local subnet, and the other NIC as an external NIC with one of my assigned Internet IP addresses.

Inside VMWare server, I configured three virtual networks. One network connected to my external interface of my Linux server. The second connected to a host only virtual network, and the third connected to the internal NIC of my Linux server.

The first virtual server I built was my M0n0wall firewall. Note that M0n0Wall is available PRE-BUILT! AS A VIRTUAL APPLIANCE! This means you don’t have to compile or build it. Just download the Virtual Appliance files and open them in VMWare Server.  I choose M0n0wall for several reasons. It is free. It is easy to configure. It allows for QoS, Traffic Shaping, and most importantly the IPSec tunnels that connect back to Headquarters and our DR NOC. The external WAN interface of M0n0Wall was connected to the external virtual network. The internal LAN interface of M0n0Wall was connected to the HOST ONLY virtual nework (we’ll see why in sec…). The WAN and LAN interfaces were configured with appropriate network settings, NTP server settings, DNS, etc. The WAN IP will be on our Internet subnet, and the Gateway will point to our ISP’s router or gateway IP address. The LAN interface will become the internal default gateway for our local network. M0n0wall is a powerful firewall solution for a small office. With the addition of a third NIC, you can easily set M0n0wall up to provide a DMZ, or a Captive Portal for your Wireless users. A Captive Portal will allow you to plug in a wireless device, authenticate users in a browser, and/or use RADIUS for advanced authentication.

The second virtual server is Untangle – also available Pre-built as a virtual appliance! Untangle can install as a bridge – meaning there is no routing involved. It sits between your firewall and your internal network. Untangle can also function as the firewall, but since it lacks the IPSec function for our tunnel back to Headquarters, we choose M0n0Wall. Where Untangle really excels is in Internet filtering and management. Untangle provides a suite of free modules for management and OpenVPN. There are also paid and supported modules available. The free version provides for very granular reporting and a powerful degree of access control right out of the box.

The third server is our Windows Domain Controller. This is the only commercial device which requires a paid-for license. Our virtual domain controller runs inside VMWare and connects via one interface to our internal network.

This arrangement has allowed us to provide a one-box all-in-one appliance to our remote offices that can be built and exchanged as needed, with a minimum of configuration. The Windows server can easily be promoted to a domain controller on site. IP Addresses and other site specific information can all be easily configured through graphical utilities.

Using online backup, such as Mozy Pro, in conjunction with our single box, we have discovered a way to provide highly-available network services to our smaller, budget and staff challenged offices in the field.

Options include using ESXi, which is VMWare’s free version of ESX server. The downside of ESXi is that it requires more expensive hardware. It will not run on a workstation with a SATA disk drive. However, if you have a true server that is on the hardware compatibility list, ESXi will provide a better platform. It installs as it’s own OS. Linux and Windows are not required. The management tools and options are also much nicer.

One additional thing we’ve looked at – and likely something we’ll be hearing more about in the coming months – are WAN optimization appliances such as Riverbed that run as a virtual machine. This will likely become a solution in our most remote offices where slow satellite connectivity is the norm.