n5xu.ece.utexas.edu

de KM5FA

A 90MHz Pentium PC was recently donated to the club by Texas Ex Tom Whiteside N5TW. Tom has been licensed just three years now, and has become very active in HF QRP CW from his home station in Georgetown. Thanks to this generous donation, and those by N5CQ and KA5WSS, as reported last month, the computer infrastructure in the club station has been radically improved.

We now have two machines running Windows 98 in the operating room, one each for the HF and VHF operating positions. We also have a server and gateway machine running RedHat Linux 5.1 in the back room. This Linux server is connected to our new ethernet connection, providing us with a good 10MB/s connection to the internet from the shack. The two Windows machines are also connected to the Linux machine, which serves as a firewall and internet gateway. The Linux machines' internet address is n5xu.ece.utexas.edu. The 'ae' stands for aerospace engineering - we are connected to their subnet.

What does this mean for the club? Having the two Windows 98 machines in the operating room is a significant improvement over the previous hardware. We can now use the widest variety of ham radio related programs and utilities, and we can now use internet applications such as Netscape for convenient access to information about current DX spots, expedition information, callbook address information and more. The server in the back room not only acts as a gateway and firewall, it can be used for any number of serious digital projects, including experimentation with spread spectrum data radios, or even just putting up a 1200 bps TCP/IP node over AX.25 on 144MHz. We can also host web pages, email reflectors, and more.

Any club members with ideas for how to better use these machines, or with projects in mind for them are highly encouraged to contact the club officers.