Ahhhhh, sweet Motorola goodness arrived in the form of a USPS Priority Mail box at my front door last Friday. I purchased, off eBay, a Motorola MT2000 commercial UHF portable for a very decent price! Came with speakermic and charger, etc. This is to replace my Kenwood TK-380 which, sadly, didn’t do the 440 ham band. I found, though, that the MT2000, while being older, has slightly more features, which is good! It’ll do 160 different modes (like channels) out of the box, and in basically unlimited zones, I believe, or groups of channels. I’ve heard, however, there’s a setting that will allow you to increase that number of modes up to 255, which I have yet to do.

Regardless, I got it all programmed up as I like it, and I’m very pleased! 4w on UHF gets places, when I’m used to having only about 1.5w on the old Icom IC-24AT. I’ve got all the area repeaters on UHF that I know programmed in (29 in total), and I’m working on adding commercial stuff for scanning, as well as FRS/GMRS. Overall, I’m very pleased. In order to program this beastie, I’ve got to use the Motorola RSS, which works ONLY in MS-DOS mode on a spare Windows 98 computer I have sitting down. Originally, I thought, “Bah, I’m going to ignore all those people who say, ‘You must use DOS to program these…’ But, anything else just plain DOESN’T WORK, not even an MS-DOS prompt window on Windows 98.

Trust me, I tried it, didn’t get anywhere.

Sooooo, if anybody has any questions about the radio or programming it, I’d be happy to help Just leave a comment here, or send me an email.

Enjoy the pictures, tho!

Well, long time since an entry, and I have to attribute the inspiration/motivation to write this one to N2QDK, Mike Wren for giving me the idea to write this entry (ok, he told me to write it..) Anyhow, this weekend was the CW Sweepstakes, a contest on the radio using CW (Morse-code, for those non-radio types). Now, I’m of the newer generation of hams, who didn’t require a morse code test to get their license, but nevertheless, I have been attempting to learn my code. This weekend, Paul Mackanos, K2DB, was operating from his station in the Adirondacks, K2NNY, and he encouraged the members of a local club, the Rochester DX Association (which I am a member of..) to contact him. So, feeling lucky, I decided to try and make a contact with Morse code with him. Without a Morse code key.

At this point, I’m sure you’re thoroughly confused, and it’s ok, you should be. But, ingenious as I am, I decided to make my own, using a paperclip and a 1/4inch mono cable (actually, my sister’s instrument cable.. shhh..). It actually worked alright, and I was able to send a relatively clean rendition of my callsign. Now, receiving.. that was a different ordeal. I am horrible at copying at the speeds that Paul was operating at (or copying at all) so I tried to use CW decoding software on the computer. I was able to decode a few of his exchanges, but a good deal of it was garbled, unfortunately, due to machine error. If I knew the code, I definitely would have been able to copy him, as he had a perfectly fine signal. So, I threw my call out there, hoping for the best. Unfortunately, the poor accuracy of the CW decoding software hindered my means of telling whether he actually heard me or not. Oh well, it was fun!

Now, in other news, I was given an ooold Toshiba laptop by Irv, AF2K, to fix, last weekend. He said, “It starts up with a [BIOS] password prompt, and won’t do anything more.” I figured, ok, I’ll open it up and use the reset jumper. “Well, one of the screws is stripped..,” he says. So, to Google I go, searching for a way to get in: backdoor passwords, special keystrokes, floppy images.. nothing of that sort. Finally, I stumbled upon a website that described a special “dongle” that shorted some pins on the parallel port, bypassing the password and putting you in the BIOS setup. So, off I went, constructing what you see above to the instructions below.

Short pins: (1,5,10) (2,11) (3,17) (4,12) (6,16) (7,13) (8,14) & (9,15)

When I was done, I checked the shorted pins for continuity, plugged it in, crossed my fingers… and voila! I was in the BIOS setup! I cleared the password, and booted up to the strangely beautiful sight of Windows XP. Irv had been telling me, “I doubt you can fix it, I’ve had so many other guys look at it, try and get it to work, but to no avail.” I call him, “When would you like to come pick up your laptop?” Needless to say, he was stunned.

That’s all for now, folks.. come back next time!

Right, well, on to the secrecies. I’ve been really excited to discover that a computer of mine from 1998 (HP Pavilion 8570C) actually has TV-out capabilities. I was cleaning out the case, and discovered a chip near the integrated video chip on the motherboard that read ImpacTV2, and became interested. I googled the name, and it turned out to be a TV encoder chip, which provided TV output capabilities to the video hardware on the motherboard. Nice! Next to it, I later discovered a set of pins labeled TVCON. Once again, I turned to Google for an answer, and I came up with this pinout:

So, I took a remainder of the IDE ribbon cable I used in the CueCat Surgery post (here), cut it to the length of the header, and clipped an RCA jack to the end of the cable. Into the TV it went, turned on the computer, and voila, I see computer on my TV! If I had wanted to, I could have used the S-Video output (Luma and Chroma) but I didn’t have enough cables to be able to sabotage one.

Conclusion: So, if you have an ASUS board with integrated ATI video, check out and see if there’s a TVCON header on the board. This weekend, I was able to snag a slightly newer (2001) HP Pavilion 510x and it had a 2 sets of headers on the board, labeled LCDTV. One was the same type of header as the TVCON header on the other Pavilion, so I will attempt to get video out from this one as well. It seems an odd decision for HP to exclude built-in jacks for this functionality. It would have cost them, at the most, a dollar more to add an RCA and SVideo jack to the back of this computer. The older pavilion even had solder pads for them on a riser card used for the sound connections.

Anyways, have fun with it, and happy hacking!

Anywho, a while back I decided to add a switch so that the CueCat isn’t on all the time, since the red LED gets annoying after a bit.. All the connections to this CueCat is in-line with the keyboard, over P/S2 cable, and on the board of the cuecat, all connections from this cable comes in on a 6-pin plastic connector which goes with a 6-pin header on the PCB.

After many bad soldering attempts, the plastic connector sorta.. melted, and the wires had to be cut and soldered to the pins. Mind you, the pins are pretty close together, and is not much fun. So, I decided to use an IDE cable, and make my own connector!

I cut the IDE cable with an X-ACTO knife heated by a blowtorch, and you can split the ribbon cable with your fingers. (Give yourself a pin’s space when cutting: so if you are cutting a 6-pin connector, cut right inbetween the 7th and 8th pins, because the heat from the X-ACTO melts plastic around it) I simply tinned the ends, and soon, I was able to begin attaching the wires that come from the PS/2 cord.

Ah, but wait, Max, where do these wonderfully coloured wires go? Well, my friends, I wrote up a nice slip of paper, detailing these.. details. Pin 1 refers to the pin near the silkscreened “1″ on the board… you’ll find it.

Found them? Good! Allow you need to do is solder the wires together!

(I apologize.. this picture was taken before I properly soldered the yellow and silver wires.. all the others were out of focus) Now, if you are like me, you have a switch planted in the top of your CueCat. Now, Max, you ask, how do I make the switch work? Well, grasshopper, given that you have soldered wires to your switch contacts, like I (if not, no biggie.. just do.), you can simply solder the brown wire to one side and the other switch contact’s wire to the first pin wire on the IDE cable.

All good? OK! Well, all there is left to do is put tape on the wires (I ran out of electrical, so I used painter’s tape)

All there’s left to do is box it back up! Make sure to put the plastic lenses back where they came from, otherwise our feline friend won’t work so well..

And the black plastic cover on that, too.. Tuck the cable in its little niche (takes some squeezing)

And box it up!

Does it work, you ask? Well of course! Anything I do is always a success! This image…

Was shortly followed by this image…

Which may lead you to make a conclusion about this project! Good luck, and happy hacking, guys!