All posts by David

Reno Air Races 2023 – Airside photos

I took a trip to Stead Nevada, to attend the Reno National Championship Air Races Final Flag. Having attended almost every year since my first trip in 1989, it was sad to see this great event coming to a close, at least for Stead Nevada.

This time around, it was about taking in the event, the vendors, the statics and the racing, more than trying to capture it all on camera. A few photos made the cut from a small collection of photos taken over the weekend. These photos are offered here, for anyone to enjoy.

Note, if there is a photo you’d like to purchase, many sizes and materials are available. Links to be added to post once I’ve finished setting them up with my art vendor. Stay tuned!


Castle Air Museum – California

Wrapping up a bittersweet trip to Reno for the last of the Air Races, we made a stop in Atwater to visit Castle Air Museum. They have an extensive collection of aircraft at the location of former Castle Air Force Base.


Castle Air Museum – main collection

Castle Air Memorial Brick Park.

Museum Restoration Center


Castle Air Museum is located at 5050 Santa Fe Drive, Atwater, California, 95301

USS Lexington – Corpus Cristi Texas

Myself and best friend spent most of the day visiting the USS Lexington CV-16 Museum in Corpus Cristi, Texas.

On par with other fantastic Texas Museums such as the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, this was full of artifacts and information . Having visited a number of shipboard museums, I was amazed at the amount of areas open to the public, and the depth and quality of the exhibits.

The “Blue Ghost” has quite a story behind her. First named the CABOT while under construction, it was renamed the LEXINGTON after the original Lex (CV-2) was sunk at Coral Sea. This is also the carrier from on which Sen. John McCain served, before being shot down over Vietnam.

Here a a number of photos of the upper flight and hanger deck displays. Although we were able to explore some of the lower decks, we ran out of time, so there are only a couple of photos there.

This museum deserves a full day’s attention to try and get all you can from the experience. I hope you enjoy some of the snapshots.

STRATUX ADS-B Receiver – open ports inventory

While working on a service to read data published by the STRATUX open source ADS-B receiver, it became a big of a guessing game regarding which ports where open and what protocol they might support.

In the event others are interested, there is the the port inventory from a STRATUX v1.6r1 device built on 03-MAR-2021

PortProtocolServiceAnalysis
80tcphttp Golang net/http server AngularJS web interfae
8080tcphttp-proxy says Dump1090 but always returns 404 error
9977tcphttpJson Pi System Info – temp, memory, etc.
30001tcppago-services ?-TBD-
30002tcppago-services ?appears to be a string of hashstrings (e.g.: *8DAB1D28990C37BB78042B8E5676; )
30003tcpbasestationannounced as “ADS-B flight data”
30004tcplistenerThis is a binary “Beast” input port
30005tcpunknown-TBD- possibly some binary data stream (e.g.: ‘JXf#<' )
30006tcpADS JsonJson of partial ADS-B data – always seems to be missing loation and speed info
example:
{
  "Icao_addr": 11403422,
  "DF": 17,
  "CA": 5,
  "TypeCode": 4,
  "SubtypeCode": 6,
  "SBS_MsgType": 1,
  "SignalLevel": 0.000344,
  "Tail": "LEXUS05 ",
  "Squawk": null,
  "Emitter_category": 6,
  "OnGround": false,
  "Lat": null,
  "Lng": null,
  "Position_valid": false,
  "NACp": null,
  "Alt": null,
  "AltIsGNSS": false,
  "GnssDiffFromBaroAlt": null,
  "Vvel": null,
  "Speed_valid": false,
  "Speed": null,
  "Track": null,
  "Timestamp": "2021-03-05T17:16:47.203Z"
}
30104tcpunknown -TBD- possibly raw dump1090 data stream

Diving into the Port Data


Port 30002

Text stream of data, available via a tcp connection. Each message is a hash of some sort, value of which is undetermined at this point.

Here is an example of the message stream

*5DA8C3EA379B4F;
*02E195B70936B4;
*5DA21603EB2A06;
*02C60BB129C2D0;
*02C60BB129C2D0;
*8DAD21C1592DD7EF9896504E8E50;
*02E19718EEFD09;
*8DA1B52B596233C53D9901456D9D;
*8DA216035913378FE2327C198F8A;
*8DA2160399104987B8340BFCE929;
*8DA9942E585F100DBA20C5712D44;
*8DA9942E9908212C509814A6DF7A;

Port 30003

Text stream of data, available via a tcp connection. Each message is comma delimited, and appears to the the ICAO integer converted to Base16 hex.

Here is an example of the message stream

MSG,3,111,11111,A4AB64,111111,2021/03/06,17:16:35.554,2021/03/06,17:16:35.573,,8900,,,30.41666,-98.63536,,,,,,0 MSG,4,111,11111,A4AB64,111111,2021/03/06,17:16:35.554,2021/03/06,17:16:35.574,,,159,93,,,-448,,,,,0 MSG,3,111,11111,A313BF,111111,2021/03/06,17:16:35.587,2021/03/06,17:16:35.626,,36000,,,29.68039,-98.32875,,,,,,0 MSG,7,111,11111,A8DB58,111111,2021/03/06,17:16:35.602,2021/03/06,17:16:35.627,,5900,,,,,,,,,,0 MSG,3,111,11111,A2A18A,111111,2021/03/06,17:16:35.607,2021/03/06,17:16:35.627,,5625,,,29.66141,-98.47789,,,,,,0 MSG,4,111,11111,A2A18A,111111,2021/03/06,17:16:35.607,2021/03/06,17:16:35.628,,,221,248,,,128,,,,,0 MSG,7,111,11111,A8DB58,111111,2021/03/06,17:16:35.608,2021/03/06,17:16:35.628,,5900,,,,,,,,,,0 MSG,3,111,11111,A417D6,111111,2021/03/06,17:16:35.609,2021/03/06,17:16:35.628,,24000,,,30.09300,-97.62418,,,,,,0

Port 30005

Binary stream of data, available via a tcp connection.

Here is an example of the message stream

y# ??2??)k?????3]?Sx?l3??.?@?????B?xf~3??.??yRX??L?ma??3??/?8 q?!I????3??1Q???? Z?O??3??69???+(X??????-N2??6??”ᕸ?eP3??7??#??o???,???3??;W#??o#?t?l??Zg3??>?&???Y}?o? ???I3??C k??+(???P,2N?3??D????yR? ??-3?3??F,???Y??x?_??2??F6? ?8\`3??Hg???+?ȱ?/?2??I????p2??Ke`#ᕸ?eP2??P?]?+(??A2??U^ ?8\`2??Un<ᕸ???3??XWW???.X?????_?3??X????Y???{?+3??X?h%??o?B?`_?_b?2??Z?f???~?2??Z?j??p2??]- ??|+?3??_e? ??SxX??56S?J?3??_?????.@ ???2??`????2??e?F%]?o7C?3??jt??Sx?y%?`2??l/???? 3??n??????? ??-??3??q?U q? ?-0?Jc3??q?)???Y??)? T??2????7?8?}?2???γ 8إ?2????H ?FU3????|????Y??1??2???L?]?\g??2????E]??.???3??|?{??????>?0 2????]?\g??3????????!;

Port 30006

High volume text stream, available via tcp connection. Messages are in a Json format. Observation is that these always seem to lack geo-location, speed and altitude data.

Here is an example of the message stream

{“Icao_addr”:10627880,”DF”:11,”CA”:5,”TypeCode”:0,”SubtypeCode”:0,”SBS_MsgType”:8,”SignalLevel”:0.000816,”Tail”:null,”Squawk”:null,”Emitter_category”:null,”OnGround”:false,”Lat”:null,”Lng”:null,”Position_valid”:false,”NACp”:null,”Alt”:null,”AltIsGNSS”:false,”GnssDiffFromBaroAlt”:null,”Vvel”:null,”Speed_valid”:false,”Speed”:null,”Track”:null,”Timestamp”:”2021-03-06T17:34:12.129Z”} {“Icao_addr”:10645249,”DF”:11,”CA”:5,”TypeCode”:0,”SubtypeCode”:0,”SBS_MsgType”:8,”SignalLevel”:0.000846,”Tail”:null,”Squawk”:null,”Emitter_category”:null,”OnGround”:false,”Lat”:null,”Lng”:null,”Position_valid”:false,”NACp”:null,”Alt”:null,”AltIsGNSS”:false,”GnssDiffFromBaroAlt”:null,”Vvel”:null,”Speed_valid”:false,”Speed”:null,”Track”:null,”Timestamp”:”2021-03-06T17:34:12.139Z”} {“Icao_addr”:11402414,”DF”:4,”CA”:0,”TypeCode”:0,”SubtypeCode”:0,”SBS_MsgType”:5,”SignalLevel”:0.001636,”Tail”:null,”Squawk”:null,”Emitter_category”:null,”OnGround”:false,”Lat”:null,”Lng”:null,”Position_valid”:false,”NACp”:null,”Alt”:6075,”AltIsGNSS”:false,”GnssDiffFromBaroAlt”:null,”Vvel”:null,”Speed_valid”:false,”Speed”:null,”Track”:null,”Timestamp”:”2021-03-06T17:34:12.142Z”} {“Icao_addr”:10645249,”DF”:11,”CA”:5,”TypeCode”:28,”SubtypeCode”:1,”SBS_MsgType”:8,”SignalLevel”:0.000837,”Tail”:null,”Squawk”:null,”Emitter_category”:null,”OnGround”:false,”Lat”:null,”Lng”:null,”Position_valid”:false,”NACp”:null,”Alt”:null,”AltIsGNSS”:false,”GnssDiffFromBaroAlt”:null,”Vvel”:null,”Speed_valid”:false,”Speed”:null,”Track”:null,”Timestamp”:”2021-03-06T17:34:12.158Z”}

Some Favorite Moments in Pictures Years Past

Looking back at 12 years of blog posts, photographs and tech articles, today I’m pulling up some of my favorite photos from years past.

Photo descriptions include a link to the story where it originally appeared.


May 2009 – Turn 2 crash at the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona
McLaren Test Drive Day during Car Week in Monterey CA. 570 Series cars (mine is on the right).
Alan DeMartini preparing for his First Solo – October 2018 in San Marcos Texas
Fleet Week 2016 in San Francisco CA. – NAVY Blue Angels demonstrate opposing pass low over the spectator boats.
Rare Porsche 917 Le Mans cars at Rensport Reunion 2016 in Monterey, CA.
F22 Raptor at the California Air Show in Salinas.
Rafting the American River’s South Fork (class 2-4+).
Lamborghini and Ducati in my garage. What an amazing day taking in the roads of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
An evening at Los Gatos Lamborghini with Lambo’s Chief Test Driver, Valentino Balboni.
First winter in Santa Cruz CA. Attended the O’Neil Classic pro surf competition in 80 degree weather; amazing!

Canyon Lake Birds – Feb. 2021

A number of birds from the Canyon Lake area have visited since we placed a bird seed feeder in the yard. When the South Texas Polar Storm hit us a week later, the feeder became an important source of food for the avian community, which experienced 6″ of snow over a week of temps 40 degrees below average. We’re happy to have helped out the local wildlife, while enjoying their colorful antics.

Stratux – repartition to use entire sd card

The issue..

It’s been an ongoing tail of woe, when it comes to installing a new version of STRATUX on a new card; out of the box, at least in all the installs I’ve done, it fails to make use of the entire card. With any sort of logging enabled to measure performance, run tests or just keep even a short history of contacts received.. you’re out of disc space… FAST:

Here is the ‘df’ dump of a STRATUX fixed position station running the latest version (released September 2019). As you can see, it’s only allocated 2GB of the 32GB card’s total available space. That is a lot of wasted space on the card.

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       1.8G  1.6G  110M  94% /
/dev/mmcblk0p1   60M   20M   41M  34% /boot

Get total device size:

fdisk -l | grep Disk

Disk /dev/ram0: 4 MiB, 4194304 bytes, 8192 sectors
...
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 29.7 GiB, 31914983424 bytes, 62333952 sectors

Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xe6a544c8

Repartitioning the Device

With the physical partition located.. start fdisk:
fdisk -u /dev/mmcblk0

I like to increase the size of the main partition to 6G to leave room for installing more system updates and tools.

To do this you will need to know the starting and ending blocks of the partition. That is available with the ‘print’ command:

Command (m for help): p

Results:

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 29.7 GiB, 31914983424 bytes, 62333952 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe6a544c8

Device         Boot  Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1        8192  131071  122880   60M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2      131072 3887103 3756032  1.8G 83 Linux

To increase the size, the partition must first be deleted, then re-create at the exact same starting block, or the filesystem will become corrupted.

First, delete the partition with the ‘d’ command, selecting partition #2.

Next, re-create the partition with the same starting block, but now with increased filesystem size:

Command (m for help): d 

  Partition number (1,2, default 2): 2

  Partition 2 has been deleted.

Command (m for help): p
 
  Device         Boot Start    End Sectors Size Id Type
  /dev/mmcblk0p1       8192 131071  122880  60M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)


Command (m for help): n

  Partition type
     p   primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free)
     e   extended (container for logical partitions)
  Select (default p): p
  Partition number (2-4, default 2): 2

First sector (2048-62333951, default 2048): 131072

Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (131072-62333951, default 62333951): +6G

  Created a new partition 2 of type 'Linux' and of size 6 GiB.

Command (m for help): w
  
  The partition table has been altered.
  Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
  Re-reading the partition table failed.: Device or resource busy

  The kernel still uses the old table. The new table will be used
  at the next reboot or after you run partprobe(8) or kpartx(8).

The partition table will have been modified but the kernel will not be able to take that into account as some partitions are mounted.

In theory, the command ‘partx /dev/mmcblk0’ is all that is required.. however I’ve found that rebooting is the only way to really reload the partition, so that the filespace can be increased.

reboot

Once system comes back up, run ‘resize2fs‘ to expand the filesystem.

Fill up drive with current filesystem

Execute `resize2fs` and run an on-line expansion of the filesystem, and finally verify it again with ‘df -h’

resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2

  resize2fs 1.43.3 (04-Sep-2016)
  Filesystem at /dev/mmcblk0p2 is mounted on /; on-line resizing
  required
  old_desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 1
  The filesystem on /dev/mmcblk0p2 is now 1572864 (4k) blocks long.

Running df shows that it has in fact resized. STEP 1 COMPLETED

root@STRATUX-FIXED:~# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       5.9G  1.6G  4.2G  28% /
devtmpfs        459M     0  459M   0% /dev
tmpfs           463M     0  463M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           463M  6.2M  457M   2% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           463M     0  463M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1   60M   20M   41M  34% /boot

Creating a Personalized Recreation Dashboard – Installing Software (Part 2)

Rasperian Buster has a working desktop out of the box, but to run NodeJS Roosevelt and Java, some installations will need to be done first.

INSTALLING JAVA JDK / JRE

This is pretty simple. I like to install both the Dev Kit (JDK) and the Runtime (JRE) elements. To do so on Buster, simply request the default packages:

sudo apt install default-jdk default-jre

Let Apt do it’s work. Once done you should be able to verify java is installed and available:

java --version

My installed version reported openjdk 11.0.7 2020-04-14

INSTALLING NodeJS and NVM

Next, NodeJS will be installed and built from git

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo bash -

Installing NVM follows a similar process

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.34.0/install.sh | bash

Now the Pi is setup and ready to install other helper applications.

INSTALLING ROOSEVELT SCAFFOLDING

For this project, I selected Roosevelt based on successful prior experience with a complex NodeJS / Java web application built on Roosevelt. Follow the prompts to create the basic application.

I selected a directory called lakedash and an app named app .

npx mkroosevelt

SETTING UP THE BASIC APP FRAMEWORK

Change directories to the path lakedash/app (or whatever you picked).

cd  lakedash/app

Now, run the node install process to download and localize the packages used by Roosevelt. It’s easy.. just do it.

npm i

Starting up the simple little app in development mode.

npm run dev

Next phase will be setting up some swap space by re-partitioning the little Pi’s SD card.