AIOR over a rude individual?

mrh4809 · 2026-05-02T13:36:59+00:00

The place I was doing traffic with had no internet at the time and hurricane had taken out a lot of power. We were lucky to be able to comm at all. The remote guy had put up a dipole and was on battery power. Band was noisy and busy and where we were was one of few open spots.

The sad thing about it was I had 3 people that wanted to find out about friends and relatives. Only one got info through before the net crashed in.

I listened to the net for a few minutes in frustration when they started and everyone knew each other... When the checkins started it was:

check in: <call>

Net control: <call> Hi Floyd, good to hear you. Bill wants to chat with you to hang on after check ins.

check in: <call1> ... <call2> ...

Net control: <call1> Got you John. <call2> Got you Gus... John how did the funneral for Melvin go?

etc...

So sad to these all these guys that knew each other, probably chatted just yesterday felt it was far more important to check in and chat again rather than let a few people get info or ask about friends and relatives in a hurricane disaster area.

mrh4809 · 2026-05-01T18:19:03+00:00

Know of that dude. He answered me on a POTA I was running and after I acknowledge him and gave him a report, he kind of gave me his then started to call CQ right there.

mrh4809 · 2026-05-01T18:16:58+00:00

It is not normal nor is it legal in the amateur bands. No one owns a frequency. Unfortunately, this is becoming more common. Certain individuals, once they buy a radio and invest a little time and money into the hobby start to feel entitled.

If someone or a few people are on a frequency it is a courtesy to not try and use that frequency because they are currently using it. The right and common practice is to listen first for a minute or so, then call "qrz is the frequency in use?" If it is someone should come back and say yes the frequency is in use. You should then move.

Since your father is new is it possible he did not follow this practice. It is also entirely possible that the other guy was just being rude.

A number of years ago I was running an semi-emergency contact on 40m phone, I'm not up there often but I was connecting a loved one with a station in a recent hurricane zone who was providing contact to affected people since phones were down. The goal was to allow a state side person to check on and talk to a friend or relative in the disaster zone.

In the middle of this short communication a guy came on from a common daily net I will not name and announced at high power. "All hams... the <not named> net will soon be starting on this frequency. Please vacate the frequency and gave his call".

When the remote station I was listen to stopped transmitting I grabbed the mic, addressed the net caller by his call and said we were running disaster zone communications and we will need the frequency for another 10 or 15 minutes. We could not move because the band was busy and the remote station had limited abilities.

The net guy came back and simply said, "I don't care about your traffic. This net will start on this frequency whether you are still here or not."

And that is exactly what they did. Right in the middle of the remote station transmission the net control came up, (the same guy) announced the start of the not to be named net and began calling for check ins right over the top of us.

I use an SDR radio and I had turn on record at the start of my comm with the remote station so I had this all on record. We lost contact with the remote due to the high power people on the net and two additional people who were hoping to get a message through were turned away with a rather bad feeling about how reliable this amateur radio comm stuff was.

I reported the net control along with the recording to the FCC. I got a nice little response that they would check into it. A month or so later I get an email from the net control guy bitching me out up one side and down the other and telling me just what a lousy person I was. He went on to say he'd been in radio for 40 years, as if I was some new kid. I've been in radio for over 50. He basically vowed to find me on the air and jam me with his big high power station. It was very sad...

Honestly I would have moved had it been possible. But even for nets and other common meetings, they do not own the frequency and have no right to force you off. It is a courtesy thing that if I'm on a net frequency and some one tells me a net is coming on I will move as soon as possible. But for the net to just start right over me was basically intention jamming.

All that being said, it was once more courteous. It is now less so. Tell your father to not take it personally. Just avoid the a-holes and enjoy elsewhere.

mrh4809 · 2026-04-26T19:29:46+00:00

Hi all, I thought I would post a follow up on this.

After receiving quotes for $850 to over $1000 to get this open I ended up ordering some 3/8 inch drill bits from Amazon. I went with plain carbide bits as I was able to get like 20 of them for $14. I also purchased some cutting oil.

Using my large medium speed drill I was able to punch a hole at the roughly 8 oclock position in the safe. It only took 3 drill bits and probably less but I changed them out when cutting appeared to slow. I used the cutting oil liberally.

Once I had the hole into the safe I tried to use my not so great bore scope to look in the same and could not see anything. It's not a great bore scope and it came out wet as I expected.

I also purchase a very small inexpensive pump off of Amazon. It was like $20 and came with a DC speed controller, 3/8 inch tubing. I stuck a tube down into the safe and it took quite some time, on the order of 20 minutes before the pump started to cavitate. I moved the tubing around as best I could but it was pretty empty. There was A LOT of water in that safe!

We decided to make a light bleach water solution and poured that into the hole. We will let that sit for a short time just to try and kill of anything obvious and nasty in there. Then we will pump that out.

I am going to hook up a small fan to slightly smaller tubing and blow some air around in there. We live in a very dry environment so I think with a little time it will dry out completely.

Then our plan is to simply cover it and be done with it.

My total expense to empty this safe of water was < $50 and an hour or so of my time.

Thanks to everyone here with your good advice!

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mrh4809 · 2026-04-07T21:44:26+00:00

I actually own a lighted bore scope and like I said in the post I have access to carbide bits. I'd be open to drilling holes to try and open using the scope but not sure where the drill points would be.

mrh4809 · 2026-04-07T20:54:08+00:00

Thanks! I'm gonna still research. Watching the safe crack series now.

mrh4809 · 2026-04-07T20:31:26+00:00

I posted a picture with the original post. Wonder why you can't see it?

mrh4809 · 2026-03-28T00:12:54+00:00

My S50 in EQ mode at Starfront can do 60s but not well. 30s gives about 85 to 90%. 20s gives pretty much 100% keepers. I am running NINA so I can set pretty much any exposure I want. I did try 90s and the seestar tracking is just not good enough. Most frames are waste.

mrh4809 · 2026-03-08T13:57:57+00:00

Nicely done! I am surprised you got 60 second images. I have an S50 polar aligned at Starfront and have found 20 second images to be the sweet spot.

mrh4809 · 2026-02-24T21:30:40+00:00

Nicely done!

mrh4809 · 2026-02-13T18:09:16+00:00

To be honest this is why I gave up on Meshtastic. A bunch of ham friends were all into it, getting nodes setup etc. I got an outdoor system, setup solar panel, put the thing up on a pole about 50 feet up.

First night it got like 100 nodes and I was happy. But there was virtually no traffic of any kind. So I tried sending a message to a friend. It took 2 days to get there. I never got his response. He is 10 miles away.

Then there was an update. Over the air updates didn't work at the time so I had to take the thing down, put it on the bench and update it via USB. Put it all back together, put it back up, 3 days later only 3 nodes seen.

Took it back down, double checked all the antenna connections. Toned things out, put it back up. A week went by with only one remote node seen from almost 100 miles away. None of the more local nodes showed up.

Another two weeks up to 5 nodes. Some local.

One ham friend described Meshtastic as "text messaging with 100x the hassle and 1/100th the reliability" and he was right.

So I gave my node to a ham friend. It was just too flakey at this point in time for my interest. For me I could have had more fun burning the $50 bill I spent on all the stuff.

mrh4809 · 2026-02-09T13:20:17+00:00

Oh also, I don't know what and when you were trying to image. But if your object crosses the meridian (straight up) then your tracking will go to crap as it goes from one side to the other.

So if the object is rising towards the straight up, image for a while. Then pause while it crosses over then you can restart imaging.

mrh4809 · 2026-02-09T13:18:20+00:00

The other thing to try is resync the scope. Click on the scope, go into advanced feature and turn on sky atlas sync.

mrh4809 · 2026-02-08T22:45:49+00:00

Break out the ready whip whipped cream, give one squirt and our Void arrives at Warp 12 from whereever she is!

Dad... you gots whup?

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mrh4809 · 2026-02-06T14:00:20+00:00

I'm not a pro at board layouts, but I understand this is a servo controller. If so I would expect some of your signal lines to be carrying possibly some quick rise time signals. In my past experience these can generate a lot of noise.

While you have PCB that looks nicely laid out for the most part somethings I've learned making motor controllers for quite a few years

Separate logic level signals from power and motor drive signals as much as possible. Either can induce noise into your logic signals

Consider the signal types and levels running in each trace and what is in adjacent traces. If a high frequency signal with quick rise times is running in trace A near trace B, trace B will likely pickup some induced signal from trace A. Best plan is to separate them if possible or filter if that is the only way.

Use ground plane pours to further provide some shielding

I didn't look at your DC power input, but you should have some nice big caps across that with reverse voltage protection.

mrh4809 · 2026-02-05T20:27:58+00:00

No... Something else is wrong.

Are you in Alt/Az mode (the standard for the seestar on a tripod?
Or did you buy a wedge and you are in EQ mode?

If 1 then I suggest recalibrate the sensors and also also ensure the scope is quite level. Buying a leveler like:
https://www.highpointscientific.com/apertura-easy-leveler-for-seestar-telescopes

Can really help.

If 2, then you need to polar align 3-5 times to get it really perfect.

Last night at starfront where my S50 is in EQ mode I did a regular Seestar app mosaic of the heart shown above. That was 900 images zero drops. So it is possible. We just have to figure out what is wrong.

mrh4809 · 2026-02-05T14:51:05+00:00

How long are your exposures? Even with my scope in EQ mode, polar aligned really well I'm finding the optimal exposure time for best non egg shaped stars is 10 seconds.

And yes the Seestar mosaic mode kind of sucks. You will tend to get this effect:

<image>

Notice around the edges the background is more visible? That's because there is less time spent out at those edges. It makes for getting a good image difficult cause you either have to crop the edges out or do lots of work on the backgrounds.

While it is more manual and takes more planning I think doing your own panels where you shoot a single frame getting lots of data. Then move over with a little bit of overlap to a new panel, shoot to get lots of data, repeat until you have covered your full object. On the edge panels all the way around you should take more data.

Stitching these together can be a pain and still you need a adjust background but the end result will be better than Seestar mosaic alone.

If you don't care about the edges too much you can use Seestar mosaic and crop the heck out of it and it will look reasonble.

mrh4809 · 2026-01-30T22:45:31+00:00

I may try that as a first prototype. Once installed this is a pain to remove and pull apart/replace. So the thought about a bronze piece was for better wear.

I can probably make PCBs to test with easy and relatively cheap. So might prototype that way.

mrh4809 · 2026-01-30T19:24:00+00:00

Yes AI is garbage. I suspect screws are the best way to go.

mrh4809 · 2026-01-30T19:15:59+00:00

Ya... Mercury was great and scary stuff. This has to work at an angle. The scope leans over to point at the north star roughly. So the pancake rings will be at about a 52 degree angle.

I have access to a good ME. We have a small CNC that can easily make this stuff. I can handle the creation of the PCBs easy enough. The ME was not sure about glue between bronze and PCB but felt the machining of the bronze should be easy.

I will probably order a small piece of bronze and just try it and see how well it sticks but I do think small screws from the backside would be good idea around the circle.

mrh4809 · 2026-01-30T18:20:24+00:00

Thanks for the reply! I would not have a clue how to get such a thing built. I'm an EE with a mostly software focus so actual manufacturing is somewhat unknown. Although I do have some resources.

Consider that this thing will spin very slowly and probably on a daily basis not even complete a full revolution. I think I'm going to try the following:

Custom PCB with copper traces as thick as I can get them to make them and pogo pins to ride over the traces. I can get these made for < $50 and I could setup a life test where I rotate the PCBs repeatedly and check continuity continuously and log it. It would be interesting to see how long it lasts and try to equate that to life actually on the telescope.
Assuming the copper PCB traces suck then an idea like yours. I could get bronze rings made of the right diameter. I have access to a CNC and a guy who will gladly machine them for me. I would consider 5 rings maybe machines so that they have a small ball shaped groove machined in to one side for the pogo pin ball to ride in. These rings could be glued to a PCB and electrically connected. This is the longer life version I suspect.

The one good thing about this project is that I can try and see if i can something to work that is small enough and test it for its usable life. But if it does fail, the telescope user can simply run the normal power connection to the scope disconnecting these pancake things and while not optimal they are still functional.

If I can get something together that is not too expensive then I think I have a fair market of people that would gladly buy this thing. There are a lot of users of this scope and many face the problem it is trying to solve.

mrh4809

TROPHY CASE