FON

I'm going be jumping on the Fon bandwagon. My equipment should arrive soon and I plan on putting up an antenna (got one like this) on the roof so I can access it while I'm out and about.

UPS waveform article

Saw this article about waveforms from UPS units today and since all 16 of the APC-650 units I have are exactly what is shown in this article, I thought I'd link over to it. I have experienced problems with running UPS units from my small portable generator before, so now I want to go check it out a little and see if I can determine why. Just need to find someone with a scope and some time...

Jesse (the author of the article I mentioned) has also written about a UPS modification he did.

I have a couple of power conditioners from someone who didn't want to bother trying to surplus them. Never had a use for them before, but perhaps now I do! These are the type that claim to create clean power from dirty. They are quite heavy. I want to see if putting them between the generator and the UPS units clears up the problems I have seen in the past. I'll update this article with a model number and a link when I can.

FWIW, I have one of these 110 <-> 220 Step Up / Step Down Transformer / Voltage Conversion units too but I have absolutly no use for it that I can fathom right now. I'm pretty sure it's a model UDC-1500. If anybody locally needs one, you know who to ask!

Moto-M3U playlist fixer utility

I thought I'd share a new utility I wrote for my phone. I got tired of editing the playlists manually so they would work and just wrote a program to do it. It's available from my home page. It works with MediaMonkey and my Mototola V360 phone. It may work with other phones and applications, I don't know.

More UPS units

Since the power outage I blogged about a while back the power has gone out a couple more times and I have inherited (for a small fee an IT auction last month :) several UPS units that are no longer welcome at the company. I need to get them home, remove the batteries, test them, and modify the good ones like I described earlier. Any good ones will be available to the amateur radio community here in Utah County.

These are all 650VA units like this only black. I would be willing to bet that most of them are perfectly operational and that the batteries are just worn out.

If anyone local knows of small personal UPS units like these (I'm not interested in large data center units) that are no longer welcome in their present homes, add a comment here to let me know and I'll do my best to give them a new lease on life.