The past year has brought some big changes. For one, I am now known as AK4OG, having moved away from Ontario to Virginia. This site will continue under my Canadian callsign, and I will keep doing the Chatham-Kent Amateur Radio website.
In Virginia, I’m the transmitter engineer for a series of PBS transmitters located on remote mountaintops, on VHF and UHF with ERP up to 100 kW. It’s a distributed transmission system, using microwave links and synchronized on-channel transmitters to cover challenging terrain sheilded from the main sites. The scenery is amazing, and I love the job. My radio activities have been somewhat limited here as a result.
Feel free to poke around this site, and discover some of the Amateur Radio resources that are hosted here.
Faced with a major site overhaul and server transfer, I decided to migrate everything to WordPress. The old server was a Pentium 550 MHz running Windows 2000, which served me for nearly 10 years of continuous duty. It often went over a year between reboots, and the only problems in that time were a smoked power supply and lightning-damaged LPT port.
The HTTP server was my own creation, coded from scratch in Visual Basic. It turned out to be very reliable in a production environment, and had all kinds of features including PHP support, Gzip, and SSI. However, that old Pentium is on its last legs, and PHP makes it no longer as robust.
The new server is a 3.2 GHz dual-core machine running Debian Linux. The latest MySql, PHP and Apache versions are installed, which I compiled from source. While I’m sad to retire the server software that I wrote myself, Apache has been performing well. It does what I need. I do not foresee purchasing Windows again, and have been migrating all my computers to Linux.
Putting my old pages in WordPress has moved things around, so check carefully for the new locations. Old links should redirect. There is also an ability to submit comments and feedback, which I’ll post if relevant.
I hope you like the new look, and I’ll continue to post my articles and information using the new system. The theme is my own creation, and I’ll be coding more updates to the site in the future.