Radio and Weather Statistics for February 2014

February 2014 has continued wet with many floods across the country.

My radio and weather statistics for January are as follows:

Radio Operation

Total number of contacts: 34

Modes

JT65:  34

A poor month again for radio operation, not much time to get on.

Weather

Total rainfall for the month: 132mm

Average temperature: 6.6 degrees centigrade

Maximum temperature of 12.9 on the 24th February at 14.34
Minimum temperature of 1.7 on the 28th February at 00:57


The weather during the month has again been very wet and windy with a succession of low pressure areas running from the Atlantic across the country. As can be seen from the minimum temperature being above freezing point it has also been a mild month.

A Cloud Free Day - Satellite Picture of Flooding

Sunday was a rare day of sunshine and clear blue skies. The weather satellite pictures received via EUMETCast showed the UK in a rare state of being almost cloud free.

The following picture shows the UK from a Metop AVHRR pass.

© EUMETSAT (2014)

It is not really clear from the above picture, but when viewed on a large screen, flooding along the River Thames and the Somerset Levels stands out very well.

I took the following detail from the above picture. This shows the Somerset Levels area with the extensive flooding clearly visible. It will be interesting to compare this with a picture later in the year when hopefully the area has dried out.

© EUMETSAT (2014)

 

After the storm overnight Friday into Saturday, the weather has improved, although still some rain, not as heavy as previous weeks.

 

JT65 Activity on 10m

The 10m band has been very good recently with plenty of JT65 activity.

Have not had much time for radio recently, however did get an hour yesterday evening and put out a call on 10m using the JT65 mode.

Worked the following stations in an hour:

KI0QS
WB0IKF
W9TLG
LU4WAP
W9MDB
KM6CQ
KB1O
KF7GMV
N8BIF

Plenty of stations on from North and South America and very difficult to find any free space on the JT65 frequency.

Did not get a chance to try out SSB on 10m. The Windom antenna had blown down in the rceent strong winds, so the Inverted L which I usually use on the FT2000 was connected to the TS2000 which is set up for data modes.

A Conveyor of Low Pressure Areas

So far this year, we have seen a succession of low pressure areas come across the Atlantic straight for the UK, dumping large amounts of rainfall and inflicting very high winds across the country.

Rainfall has been heaviest in the south of the country with heavy flooding in Somerset and across the Thames Valley.

The cause appears to be the jet stream stuck further south and flowing faster than usual, generating a conveyor belt of fast moving, intense low pressure areas.

I had a look through the NOAA APT satellite pictures I have received for the last few weeks and picked out a series of pictures that give an indication of this weather pattern

They all show intense low pressure areas tracking over the UK.

 NOAA 19 - 1st February 2014

NOAA 19 - 7th February 2014

NOAA 19 - 8th February 2014

NOAA 19 - 12th February 2014

The last picture from the 12th February brought very strong winds to the west and north of the country with gusts in excess of 100MPH.

We have yet another low pressure area tracking across the country through today and overnight bringing rain and gale force winds. There was too much noise on the NOAA 19 midday picture from today. The cross dipoles I use to received APT transmissions are located in the loft of the house. We have a large number of tall trees to the south and what with the rain and thick cloud, I suspect this combines to impact the signal received from the satellite.

Radio and Weather Statistics for January 2014

January 2014 has been a terrible month with so much rain that here in the south of the UK it has been the wettest January on record.

My radio and weather statistics for January are as follows:

Radio Operation

Total number of contacts: 18

Modes

JT65:  12
SSB:   6
A poor month for radio operation, not much time to get on.

Weather

Total rainfall for the month: 177mm

Average temperature: 6 degrees centigrade

Maximum temperature of 11.9 on the 6th January at 00:22
Minimum temperature of -1.9 on the 12th January at 05:03

Frost days: 4

The weather during the month has been very wet and windy with a succession of low pressure areas running from the Atlantic across the country.

Raspberry Pi NTP Server

I run a number of applications such as WSPR which require accurate timing. PC clocks are very poor at keeping accurate time and rather than rely on an internet time source, I have run my own NTP server based on a Garmin GPS unit for some years. This is connected to a computer running Windows XP which takes the GPS data and the PPS signal to provide a very accurate time.

As this system is now many years old, I have been looking for an alternative solution and found a build using a Raspberry Pi and a GPS.

I have also been wanting to play with the Raspberry Pi so this looked like an ideal project, so I ordered the parts last week and completed over the weekend.

I must make clear that none of this is my own original work. I followed the instructions and downloads from:

David Taylor at this link: http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/Raspberry-Pi-NTP.html#trimble

The download and information from: http://ntpi.openchaos.org/downloads/ and http://ava.upuaut.net/?p=612

And the GPS add-on board from here: http://ava.upuaut.net/store/index.php?route=product/product&path=59_60&product_id=95

I would like to thank them for the information, downloads and GPS board they have made available to create an incredibly simple to construct and cheap NTP server.

The first stage was connecting the GPS board to the Raspberry Pi. This was simply a matter of plugging the two units together using the GPIO pins. An antenna is then connected to the GPS board.

The following photo shows the Raspberry Pi with the GPS board added:

The add on GPS board is at top left with the cable attached to the GPS antenna.

After downloading the image, this was written to a new SD card using Win32DiskImager.

The SD card was inserted in the Raspberry Pi, power connected and the system came up and running as an NTP server.

To monitor time on my computers I use NTP Time Server Monitor by Meinberg. The following picture shows the Time Server Monitor screen on one of my PCs:

!92.168.1.85 is the new Raspberry Pi NTP server and 192.168.1.5 is the original NTP server on the Windows XP machine.

Really remarkable how simple it was to put this project together and my thanks to those who had put together the image, instructions and made available a compatible GPS board for all this to work so easily.

Also a good start with the Raspberry Pi, a remarkable little computer which seems to offer no end of possibilities for building simple applications to perform specific functions.

QSL Cards from the Bureau

Received a batch of QSL cards in the post last week for my MQ5LMY and MO5LMY call signs celebrating the Queen's Jubilee and the Olympics in 2012.

 
If your call is amongst them, many thanks for sending the card. My special event QSL cards were sent to the bureau at the start of last year so hopefully you have received mine.