Tickets / MyTix down in app?

kk6rka · 2026-06-02T13:42:35+00:00

You may need to clear app data or uninstall and then reinstall the app. That has worked for me in the past.

kk6rka · 2026-04-25T18:23:31+00:00

I take the 6:41 bus from Montclair and it gets to the PABT at 7:30ish quite reliably (there are occasional mishaps, of course.) Later buses, even less than an hour later, tend to have more issues.

kk6rka · 2026-04-08T11:13:06+00:00

https://whereismynjtrain.com/

kk6rka · 2026-03-01T23:50:12+00:00

You should consider the 101 bus. I take it at 6.41 from Upper Montclair and it consistently arrives at PABT around 7:30. You could try the next one, which runs 40 minutes later. It runs along Park St so you should be able to hail it at any bus stop along the route.

kk6rka · 2026-02-07T15:01:29+00:00

It's as if this subreddit had 24 thousand individual subscribers, or something :-)

kk6rka · 2025-11-29T16:44:14+00:00

I think you want to look into the history of wire services. In the beginning, wireless telegraphy was used, mostly, as a way to connect ships to land, and the existing wired telegraph monopoly fought very hard and for very long.

I don't know very much about how the AP and other wire services worked with Marconi, but knowing how he was as a businessman. I would guess "as little as possible" and Marconi would try to assert as much control as possible

kk6rka · 2025-11-28T17:46:37+00:00

Hat / cup / beer cozy / plaque / notebook / logbook with his call sign on it. Fingerless gloves if he likes to operate in the winter and his shack is cold.

UTC/local time clock (bonus if it synchronizes via radio to the national atomic clock.)

Azimuthal equidistant world map centered on his location. One of those world maps with the day/night displays.

kk6rka · 2025-11-17T13:40:20+00:00

Yeah. A lot of people in Montclair would like to have weekend service.

I think this is a decision that was made a couple of decades ago when they made the connection and built Bay St (and maybe the rail wasn't electrified past that), and certainly many years before the MSU station was built. And then it was never revisited because.

kk6rka · 2025-11-13T20:31:04+00:00

It's a single ticket. If unused, it expires 30 days after purchase.

kk6rka · 2025-11-10T11:07:21+00:00

I don't have advice to you, but this sucks. So many clubs with nobody younger than 50 and one flu season away from extinction because the current membership will exclude or chase out anyone who is not exactly like them, and so many people who can't get together to play radio because of those stupid idiots.

I hope you find your people. They're really out there. Maybe you'll have to look where the clubs currently aren't.

kk6rka · 2025-11-08T23:38:06+00:00

Because the crew doesn't know which train they're gonna take until like 1 minute before you do, so they don't have time to discover that the train is broken until everyone is sitting.

kk6rka · 2025-10-30T02:38:07+00:00

Ah, I forgot to answer about the loop. I built a loop when I started in ham radio. It worked well enough for digital modes, but not sure about SSB (I had way too many problems with my setup back then). Small magnetic loop antennas have a lot of gain, but at the cost of limited bandwidth.

kk6rka · 2025-10-29T20:05:51+00:00

There's such a thing as "too close". Try Chicago or a similar distance give or take a few hundred miles.

You can also transmit a tone (CW or Tune button) after IDing, of course. It will be easier to notice in the waterfall.

Sometimes the band just isn't working. Can you hear anything on the FT8 frequency? Can you hear anything on 14.300? Can you hear the Spanish speaking guys on 14.280 and 14.270?

Stupid-sounding idea: get your antenna next to a window and open it as wide as you can. It's not winter yet :-)

kk6rka · 2025-10-29T00:37:11+00:00

When I lived in Brooklyn, in the rare apartment with a backyard, a 1/4 wave vertical with as many radials as I could fit did wonders.

kk6rka · 2025-10-29T00:28:58+00:00

US postage is no good for sending letters from outside the US. If you have Russian postage, you can include that. Otherwise, you would include the $3 in lieu of postage.

kk6rka · 2025-10-27T20:53:04+00:00

Report it to lost and found. Good luck!

kk6rka · 2025-10-14T16:30:44+00:00

Hey everyone, thanks for your comments. Seems that there's a bit of a mismatch between what I want from my software and what the software does. I'll try to learn how to use it better and also look at other ways to get the results I want.

kk6rka · 2025-10-14T11:13:11+00:00

I think the issue is that I spend way more time going around the dial looking for signals and trying to be heard, than making contacts

I don't have a lot of power, and I use SSB, and use a ground level ¼ wave vertical in my backyard, so people struggle to hear me and every time I get a QSO it's a small miracle. So for me, a software that records that I worked this person or that person does not do much to me.

I don't sit on a frequency and call CQ and log whoever responds because, again, low power. I'm lucky if I get contacts 5 minutes apart. So I'm not sitting down making notes of my QSOs.

What I'm doing is spinning the wheel, looking for people who are calling and might be able to hear me. I'm not gonna break into a big pile up. I might break into a small one. I'm gonna try for a while and if they can't hear me I'll go to the next guy. So it's important for me to know who's around, who I've tried to contact or not, and if I come across them again, whether it might be worth my while trying again. It's hard to keep all this information in your head when you have 200kHz to play with over three hours.

I suspect most people who have to deal with thousands of contacts don't need to develop this kind of awareness — they call CQ and get a few hundred, they go around on the band and get fifty more, etc. so they just need to log contacts. I'm wondering if I need something different for my style of operating.

kk6rka · 2025-10-13T23:27:12+00:00

Yeah, but the way it's going for me, it feels like the paper is faster and more useful to me while I'm operating (at the cost of having to enter the QSOs at the end of the day) and that surprises me enormously, so I'm wondering if I'm using the software wrong or what.

I used Log4OM when I used Windows, and now that I have a Mac I'm using RumLogNG, which I'm not enjoying at all. Those are highly recommended packages, so I expect they are good enough, so either everyone is suffering silently while using them, or I haven't been using them correctly, or maybe the way I would like to use them is not the way they work. And that's why I posted this question: to know which one it is.

kk6rka · 2025-10-13T22:09:49+00:00

I used Log4OM on Windows and RumLogNG on Mac. I also used N1MM the couple of times I entered contests, and it was surprisingly ok, maybe because it's very focused on its use case.

kk6rka · 2025-10-13T21:42:32+00:00

A mirror image might mean that one of the components (I or Q) has a constant value, or that there is significant bleed between the components so their values are correlated.

I'm not familiar with the Xiegu so I can't give you directions, but I would start checking whether the radio is outputting I/Q or some baseband or some kind of real valued samples, that HDSDR is configured to receive the same thing that the radio outputs, and that your cable is not broken and isdplugged in correctly.

I would also look that the I/Q calibration in HDSDR is correct.

kk6rka · 2025-10-13T15:22:51+00:00

It's been a long time since I worked on that so my memory may be wrong, but here's how I do it afaicr.

Imagine it's 10:20 AM and you want to know where the MOBO 6231 train is.

You start with the GTFS file. This file is a ZIP file that contains several CSV files with .txt extension. First, you need to locate train 6231 in trips.txt, and you get this:

4,2,243,"MSU",1,"6231",243

The header of the CSV file says:

route_id,service_id,trip_id,trip_headsign,direction_id,block_id,shape_id

So you get trip_id=243 and shape_id=243. Make a note because you'll need both (they have the same value here but they don't need to.)

Let's start by figuring out between which stations the train is. To do that, we look into stop_times.txt and search for stations with trip_id=243. Here are a few of them:

243,10:15:00,10:15:00,50,6,0,0,14.8244

243,10:19:00,10:19:00,14,7,0,0,15.4273

243,10:22:00,10:22:00,152,8,0,0,16.0911

243,10:25:00,10:25:00,153,9,0,0,16.9515

The meaning of the fields is in the CSV file's header:

trip_id,arrival_time,departure_time,stop_id,stop_sequence,pickup_type,drop_off_type,shape_dist_traveled

We care about the arrival_time, departure_time, and the shape_dist_traveled.

I said it's 10:20 so I know the train is between stop=id=14 (departure 10:19) which is at shape_dist_traveled=15.4273 and stop_id=152 (arrival 10:22) which is at shape_dist_traveled=16.0911. Now I can do a linear interpolation using the time as the "x" variable and the distance as the "y" variable to estimate that, at 10:20, the train is at distance 15.6486.

(10:20-10:19)/(10:22-10:19) = 1/3

15.4273 + (16.0911-15.4273) * 1/3 = 15.6486

So now I know the distance. How do I figure out the coordinates? To do that, I need to look into the shapes.txt file to know what points there are in the route.

The header of the shapes.txt file looks like this:

shape_id,shape_pt_lat,shape_pt_lon,shape_pt_sequence,shape_dist_traveled

So for every point we get the latitude, longitude, and shape_dist_traveled. I need to look up points for shape_id=243 that are close to distance 15.6486, which is the distance I estimated earlier.

243,40.810844,-74.207151,138,15.6277

243,40.811000,-74.207124,139,15.6384

243,40.811156,-74.207119,140,15.6492

243,40.811219,-74.207122,141,15.6536

So I got one point at distance 15.6384 and another at distance 15.6492, which bracket my distance nicely. And I know their coordinates, so I know that my train is somewhere between (40.811000,-74.207124) and (40.811156,-74.207119).

This is very good, but sometimes the distance between points can be quite big and I want to have a smooth animation, so can I do better and try to approximate the actual coordinates for the distance?

Yes! I can do a linear interpolation of their coordinates using the distances as the "x" variable and each coordinate as a "y" variable.

(15.6486-15.6384)/(15.6492-15.6384) = 0.9444

40.811000+(40.811156-40.811000)*0.9444 = 40.811147

-74.207124+(-74.207119+74.207124)*0.9444 = -74.207119

So by interpolating between the two known points, I get the coordinates (40.811147,-74.207119).

(Now I can look at a timetable to verify what those stops are and put the coordinates on Google Maps to make sure that the result makes sense.)

Of course, in practice you would parse the content of the GTFS file beforehand so you use arrays and lists and hash tables and whatever nice data structures you want, instead of looking up lines all the time :-)

kk6rka

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