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Monday, June 30, 2014

Mobile Squalo Antenna

Squalo antenna is a deritative design from halo antenna. Half wave with gamma match provides good performance and compact design. Halo antenna originally a dipole with gamma tuning match using a variable capacitor bended to a circular design. Squalo follows halo but instead of being circular, it was designed to square. Suitable for mobile station and also fixed or portable station. 

9M2SE 2013 CQ WPX Certificate


Congratulations to all participated members. See you next event. 

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Eyeball QSO With 9M2FB


Last week was my last eyeball QSO with my friend OM Ian Buffham before he migrates to Thailand. He lived years and years here in Taman Tun Dr Ismail. Alone while his wife is in Thailand running a Thai restaurant.

I invited one of my fellow friend, mutalib 9m2sql to meet ian buffham in TTDI. 




OM Ian is one of my CW friends. We talked in morse code on 20m before and had our first eyeball QSO in Sungai Buloh. 

June 2014 will be his last month living here in Malaysia and after that he will be staying in Thailand with his family. 

In TTDI he had problems putting up the antenna. All he had done were only a wire dipole at his apartments balcony and the view is heading to pasific sea. 

I hope that he can build a perfect radio station on his new home later. Looking forward to work with him later and for sure with his new callsign too. 



Monday, June 09, 2014

Load Balancing On Linux Using Nexthop

How to get faster internet connection for your workstations ? basically the more bandwidth, the low latency, the faster internet you will get. But it depends on your networking devices too. Using a gigabits ethernet adapter while using 10/100 Megabits of networking switches wont make your packet goes through faster (vise-versa)

The theory to get faster internet is to have faster networking devices, from network adapter, cables or high speed wireless router and also a fiber internet.

Load balancing is a technique to distribute packets to multiple gateways. Aim to optimize our available resources and the most important is to maximize throughput. Using multiple connections with load balancing instead of a single connections may increase reliability through redundancy.

On Linux operating systems, route command has many options. One of them are nexthop option. The next hop, or gateway, is the address of the next station to which the packet is to be sent on the way to its final destination.

If you are using both cable and wireless, operating system such as Linux or Windows will choose which one has the lowest latency to the gateway. In this case, cable will be always the winner.

How to maximize your available resources ? The command is simple, when you are connected to both cable and wireless, just type ip route del default scope global ; ip route add default scope global nexthop via 192.168.0.1 dev eth0 weight 1 nexthop via 192.168.1.1 dev wlan0 weight 1 && ip r

ip route del default scope global - to remove the default gateway that operating system has already choose for you based on the latency to the gateway.

ip route add default scope global nexthop via 192.168.0.1 dev eth0 weight 1 nexthop via 192.168.1.1 dev wlan0 weight 1 - this command will define your gateways for your selected network adapters. You will need to readjust your gateway addresses depending on your networks configuration. In my case, my gateway for my cable connection is 192.168.0.1 and my gateway for my wireless connection is 192.168.1.1. Please notice that my wireless adapter name is wlan0.

ip r - this command will show your gateways. You will see the outputs. For example,

root@linux:~# ip r
default
nexthop via 192.168.0.1  dev eth0 weight 1
nexthop via 192.168.1.1  dev wlan0 weight 1

This script will do the magic job. When i connects to my wifi, it will automatically runs the load balancing script.

#!/bin/bash

IF=$1
STATUS=$2

if [ "$IF" == "wlan0" ]
then
    case "$2" in
        up)
        ip route del default scope global ; ip route add default scope global nexthop via 192.168.0.1 dev eth0 weight 1 nexthop via 192.168.1.1 dev wlan0 weight 1
        ;;
   esac
fi

Put it on /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/ and name it as 90loadbalance.sh. This "90" in the name of the script means that this script will be executed in the last 10% of all scripts if you have a bunch of scripts to execute. Dont forget to make it executable. 

Watch this video and see the output of iptraf for my 2 network adapter which is eth0 and wlan0.





p/s - if you use desktop computer, you can install wifi usb adapter. You can try to install 3 or 5 network adapter (wifi, ethernet) to your desktop or laptop and readjust the command depending on your devices and gateways. Practically it will work, but i never tried. You also can make the script to run periodically, persistently by putting it to the crontab.








Tuesday, June 03, 2014

9M2MT - History Of Malaysian Royal Signals Regiment Amateur Radio Club Station









9M2MT was a club station for the Malaysian Signals Regiment in the late '70s. 9M2MT was stationed in Sungai Besi camp, Kuala Lumpur. As far as I know, this club station was an initiative to promote amateur radio activities among Malaysian Signals personnel and also as a medium for explorations and experimentations on radio frequencies.



My friend Jaya 9W2BUG went to Singapore and found an old QSL card. QSL card from 9M2MT sent to 9V1OD dated 21st March 1976. A person named Nicholas worked with Tan who lives in Singapore. Nicholas operated KWM-2A transceiver and using 2 element quad antenna. In the 90's when the signals school changed its name to Army's Communications and Electronics Institute, the club callsign changed again to 9M2IEC. When cellular communication being popular here, there is no continuation of this club station.

History of Royal Signals Regiment,

The Royal Signals Regiment has its roots with the formation of a “Communications Troop” at the Training Depot of the Malay Regiment in Port Dickson in 1949. The Communications Troop was formed by centralising the radiomen of the signals Platoon of 1st, 2nd and 3rd Battalions of Royal Malay Regiment (Rejimen Askar Melayu).

With the expansion of size and roles given and undertaken by the Communications Troop, the unit was renamed the Federation Signals Squadron. The squadron was tasked with the responsibility of meeting all communications requirements of all operational units of the Malay Regiment.

With the formation of the Federation Army Brigade in 1952, the Federation Brigade Signals Squadron was formed. It was later known as Malaysian Signals Regiment. The date of the formation of the Federation Brigade Signals Squadron is the official date of the formation of the Royal Signals Regiment.

For its services rendered to King and country, the Malaysian Signals Regiment was bestowed the title “Royal” on 6 June 1992 and was henceforth known as Rejimen Semboyan Diraja (Royal Signals Regiment)

All recruits do their basic military training at an Army Training Centre in Port Dickson. Special-to-arm training is carried out at the Signals School (Sekolah Semboyan) at Sungai Besi Camp. The school is now known as Institut Komunikasi dan Elektronik Tentera Darat (IKED).


Here is some information about Royal Signals amateur radio clubs callsign history is taken from the old Malaysian Amateur Radio Transmitters Society (MARTS) callbook. From '80s to 90's. Thanks to Aziz 9M2AU.


















2013 All Asian DX Contest Certificate


SP DX Contest 2013 Certificate