Bloghorn

It appears that I’ve started a chapter of the 2600 organization here at Penn State. The first meeting was last month, and there were 6 or so attendees, but between Doc Gerry’s in-class advertising and my talks to his classes today, I get the feeling the next meeting will be one for the books.

so, for all those looking for more information, here’s the scoop:

The Penn State 2600 club is an organization that has no official affiliation with Penn State, but uses the HUB as its meeting place. The purpose is to provide an environment for people who are interested in anything involving technology to get together and discuss anything that’s on their minds, with a focus on security and privacy related issues.

• Time: 17:00 Local to 20:00 Local, followed by optional dinner
• Place: HUB, in the seating area above the Sushi place.

Penn State was nice enough to set up an email list for us to use, which is L-2600Club@lists.psu.edu, contact 2600@psu.edu to join.

The next meeting is next Friday, October 3 at 5 PM.

I’ve been reading through some of the back issues of the Daily Collegian and its predecessors looking for more information about the club and its founding, since the 100th anniversary is (apparently) upon us. And if we’re claiming to be 100, it would be nice to have some proof of it.

So the first place I looked was in all the State Collegian issues from 1909, which were really interesting in and of themselves. There was a new railroad being built to service the area, mail delivery was just starting in the dorms, and Penn State beat the snot out of the Franklin and Marshall team. But unfortunately, there isn’t a single mention of wireless telegraphy, radio, or any other wireless technology.

The first mention of wireless technology comes in the November 24, 1910 edition of the State Collegian, where the paper mentions that a wireless station is being built that will be “thoroughly equipped in every detail”. The paper goes on to say that the station will be better equipped than any in the nation. I believe it’s safe to assume that an undertaking of this magnitude, that needs a monstrous amount of funding, would take some time to get rolling. So, in all probability, a small group of people would have started an organization the previous year geared towards amateur radio, and they had begun construction on a physical station the following year after getting enough funding.

But the concrete proof of the club’s founding date came gift wrapped with the perfect example of the club’s utility and purpose on campus. From the February 10, 1953 edition of the Daily Collegian, where it notes that the radio club is turning 44. It also recounts the story of how, after the radio station had gone online, there had been a giant sleet storm that brought down the telegraph lines that communicated with the signal stations along the new railway line. With the the telegraph knocked out, trains couldn’t start running until someone re-established communications. And the brand new Penn State Amateur Radio Club did just that, communicating with Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, and getting the trains running again.

I keep finding more cool stories, but that’s all I have for now. For those of you noticing some posts missing, they’re still online, you just have to log in to see them. No use criticizing an organization after they’ve already agreed to mend their ways. But those articles might resurface if they start slipping again.

I was cleaning out the ham shack on top of the Wagner building this afternoon, and I came across some old QSL cards that were yellowing away in an old filing cabinet. I figured I’d post them here, just in case anyone was curious.

W3YA QLS card

As far as I can tell, this is the oldest QSL card of the group, dating to the mid 1950s. The Penn State amateur Radio Club was founded in 1909, and has held more than a few callsigns since then. This card shows two of the first callsigns issued, W3YA (which is now used by the Nittany Amateur Radio Club), and A3YA, a MARS (Military Affiliate Radio System) callsign. MARS was founded in 1948, and was intended to allow amateur radio operators to assist in military communications in the event of an invasion or other military action in the United States. The system is still active, but most operators have switched to the ARES/RACES networks.

Back of the QSL card

This is the back of the above card. I posted it because it lists the progression of callsigns up to the 1950s that PSARC held. The callsigns start in 1912 because that year, the Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic, and prompted the Radio Act of 1912, which limited the number of stations on the air and started assigning callsigns.

QSL card from the 1970s

as far as I can tell, this card is from the mid 1970s. It seems like this callsign was in use for a while, perhaps a decade or so, before the latest callsign of K3CR was adopted. There’s one or two callsigns missing from this chronology, but I get the feeling I’ll fill in the gaps before I publish the full history on the K3CR site.

Partial of the original K3CR license

In 1972, PSARC applied for, and was granted use of, the K3CR callsign for the club station. This photocopy of the original license was being used as lining in the back of the picture frame where the other QSL cards were being kept.

1999 QSL card

I know this QSL card was in use in 1999 because there are a few references to it on some websites. This would have been the 90th annaversary of the founding of the original club in 1909, so i guess the club sprang for the spiffy Nittany Lion picture on the front. This si by no means the latest QSL card I have from K3CR, but the newest one is so boring I won’t waste webspace with it. I’ll put a scanned copy on the K3CR site once I finish the “history” page, but until then, think “big table” and you’ve got a good idea about hwo it looks.

73

I just finished transferring all the files from the old hard drives, one by one, to the new server install. It took a couple of days, but definitely less than when I transferred the whole shebang from the Fedora server to the WHS over the network. I’m gunna do some more checking, but it looks like everything is in order, and even without the 3 250 GB IDE drives I pulled, I have 1.4 TB free.

Now time for more West Wing…

I’ve had enough aggrevation with this issue. It’s time to format.

The wonderful thing about WHS is that, unlike hardware RAID or JBOD, it actually stores the entire file on a disk under an NTFS partition and doesn’t split it up. So if I were to pull a single drive, the complete files stored on the drive would show up just fine; complete, readable, and in the proper hierarchy.

So here’s my idea: I’m going to slap the 200 GB SATA drive I used to use for my desktop into the server, and install WHS on that. Then, I’ll add the newest 1 TB drive I just bought and add it to the pool. It’s empty, and will bump the pool to 1.2 TB or so. Then, I’ll set up the folders and permissions again, mimicing the previous setup. After that, it’s just a matter of copying the files from a drive into the pool, formatting that drive, adding it to the pool, and repeating the process for ever drive. In theory, I should have 1-2 TB free at the end, depending on whether I want to put the 250 GB drives back in (there’s only 3 of them, and assuming that 500 GB drive won’t fail anytime soon…)

This is going to take a long time, but I think it’ll be worth it in the end.