LVB Tracker - main PC is down

It finally happened. The hard drive on my main pc started to fail Tuesday. This pc is critical to the support of building trackers. So I installed a new drive and reloaded the OS. Wednesday added to old drive and chkdsk hammered on it for about an hour and half. I was able to recover most things off it including emails and browser profiles. Pictures, documents and downloads too. More than I'll ever use on the new drive. I really need a file server but don't want to spend the money on a store bought one. And don't have the time to build one or research the do's and don'ts of doing so. But with the rash of laptop/desktop failures we've had last year we need something. Having PC's has become a second job with piss poor pay!

The TS-2000 sat on top the pc so that got taken down. No satellite ops since Wednesday. This morning Randy K7AGE was on Twitter. He's trying to work the satellites from Rochester. Thinking he might be on I went downstairs to find another place for the TS2k where it wont be disturbed so I could work satellite whenever I needed/wanted to. Eventually found a place but by the time it was finished I missed the HO68 pass and most SO67. The pileups are massive so the FM satellites are almost worthless to all but the patient and talented ops. Then there's Doppler on the linear birds. I was just tuning around on VO52. I don't think most ops understand how to properly set up for Doppler. I'm using MacDoppler and it seems to do it all automatically. Tuning adjustments are adjusted for in the program. Most stations seem to drift around the transponder. But the ops who know what they are doing, tune them once then sit back just like the low bands, awesome to see but its rare. Like everything else, folks just don't pay attention to details.

Last night I ran into some pics I wanted to look at. Actually some were negatives and some were prints. Got out the scanner and scanned them in but the rest of the family was too key'd up on new years stuff. A waste of time in my mind. I got stuff to do. Did go upstairs at 11:30 for them.

So today we'll finish the scanning and try to get the pc buttoned up. The old drive is running good but something is hitting it once every few seconds. Dunno if that is normal or not. Gave up looking yesterday but did notice a lot less network activity once Bit torrent was un-installed. So don't go there. Need to get email working again.

A tracker owner sent me his tracker for repairs. I put it on my G5500 and it seems to be ok. I did notice that the usb module seemed to be partially unplugged and noticed that if you pushed down on the usb cable you could totally unplug the usb module. I always felt we needed something... now I know we do. Nylon fishing line tied around the module and the socket with a drop of glue to hold the knot I hope will do the trick. So LVB Tracker support, now that we have over 200 in the field, is starting to ramp up. Didn't think about that when I volunteered to build these things. duh.....

Also, all the parts ordered weekend after Christmas are here now. After I get the bills ready to send in for reimbursement we'll start building, if not before. Got to get the money. My American Express balance is scary.

Think I discovered a fix for the SatPC32 SDX/virtual com port driver problem I was having. There is a utility called FTClean that will uninstall the drivers including registry remnants. I ran that then reinstalled the latest driver using the plug-n-play method where you show the computer where the driver info is. Seemed to work. So far since yesterday. This is also becoming a support issue since all the AMSAT NA trackers are built with the usb option. I will use this method for every driver upgrade.

Again we wasted precious time telling nobody who reads this stuff what's going on.

Back to work.