One week with the ICOM IC-7100

After deciding on a ham radio to purchase, I bought an ICOM IC-7100 from GigaParts. I could have purchased it locally by going into Ham Radio Outlet, but I didn't want to leave the house and my first interaction with the store wasn't very helpful. In addition to purchasing the radio, I knew that I also had to purchase a power supply. I went with a TekPower TP30SWV as it got decent reviews and looked like it would meet my needs.

Last Friday the radio arrived, I opened it up and put it on my desk. Unfortunately Amazon hadn't delivered the power supply making the radio a nice looking paperweight for awhile! Looking at the connectors on the radio, I knew there was another piece I needed to solve and that was how to connect the radio power cable to the power supply. I went to Home Depot and bought some crimp connectors. Once the power supply arrived and I was able to determine the size of the posts on the back of it, I went ahead and crimped on some lugs.

I hooked up my antenna (I have it mounted outside on the deck and fed into the house), turned on the radio (I had already gone through the manual a few times), tuned it to a repeater frequency and waited. Later that evening, I decided to dive into programming some repeater frequencies using the RTSystems software I purchased to go along with the radio (I'm definitely not a Windows fan, but the choices are limited in programming the radio using a computer). After playing around with the radio for awhile, I happened to tune to the national 2m simplex calling frequency and had a nice chat with someone about 10 miles away. While this wasn't a huge distance, I was pretty impressed as the handheld I had made it hard to basically reach anyone.

The built in speaker is pretty clear and others have said that I'm clear (depending on the repeater I hit). The controls feel solid and the screen is quite readable. I really like that the controller is small and can sit just behind my keyboard; it doesn't clutter up my desk and lets me play with it while I'm working.

The radio has far too many controls to understand all of them right now, but I'm trying to learn bit by bit. It is no wonder that a company makes a simplified manual which I've put on my "to buy" list.

So far I've been playing with 2m and 70cm on both FM and D-Star. I've made a few contacts and done a bunch of listening.

Pros

• The separate controller and radio makes it easy to have the controls sit right on my desk without cluttering it.
• Touchscreen interface with context sensitive buttons helps navigate the large number of features.
• Microphone feels quite sturdy. Much more of a quality product than the microphone I have for my Baofeng.
• Ability to change transmit power makes it easy to reach repeaters. Some have said that where I live is a difficult RF area due to the hills.
• Pre-amplifier helps to bring in somewhat weak signals.
• Ability to add a name to each memory location is extremely convenient. The Baofeng lets me display a name or the frequency, but not both.
• Programming repeaters on the radio is straightforward; not as easy as using the programming software, but not really difficult.
• Ability to easily tune to weather channels.
• Can adjust various filters, though I'm not quite sure how much use those are in UHF/VHF and repeater use.

Cons

• D-Star interface (or maybe it is just D-Star) is not very intuitive. I'll write about this separately.
• The programming software is a "clone" in that it completely overwrites the radio. So I have to read from the radio, modify it and then write it back otherwise I lose anything I've done on the radio.

Summary

I think I've made the right choice with this radio. It seems to have everything I need and is performing well. We'll see what happens when I start getting into HF, but for UHF/VHF I don't know what else I need or would want. The touchscreen interface is easy to use and while my only other ham radio experience has been a Baofeng, I can see how the interface is more convenient than conventional interfaces that require repeatedly pushing buttons to cycle through options. Seasoned operators might be used to other rigs and could probably tell me the limitations of the IC-7100, but as a starter radio this fits the bill.

There is no comparison between this radio and the cheap Baofeng I have. The Baofeng is almost painful to use while this is fun and easy to use. I'm looking forward to getting a handheld radio and based on my initial impressions of this ICOM radio, the ICOM ID-51A PLUS2 will be the ready for me.

IPv6 on USG

Recently Ubiquiti released version 5.7.20 of its controller software. One of the features it added was GUI control of IPv6 for the UniFi Security Gateway. IPv6 was already available if you were willing to muck with a JSON file and configure it; I already had it setup, but my goal is to keep removing my custom configurations and use the GUI for setup. This will give me a better view of the configuration.

While some tech folks have been pushing for IPv6 support everywhere due to the lack of IPv4 addresses, IPv4 still hasn't gone away. My provider, Spectrum (formerly Time Warner Cable), has IPv6 on its network and just for learning about it, I had everything setup and working pretty well. Yesterday I upgraded my controller and started looking at how to setup IPv6 via the GUI. It is actually quite straightforward. I am NOT an IPv6 expert, so please send me corrections.

1. Find your USG in the devices tab of the controller and click on it.
2. Click on Config.
3. Under IPv6, select Using DHCPv6 and set the Prefix Delegation Size according to whatever your ISP uses. Mine is 56.
   
4. Queue Changes and then wait for the USG to be completely provisioned.
5. Go into settings, click on Network, and then click Edit next to your LAN.
6. Locate the Configure IPv6 Network section.
7. Click on Prefix Delegation next to IPv6 Interface Type (this may differ depending on your ISP).
   
   
8. The rest of the defaults seem to work fine.
9. Under DHCPv6/RDNSS DNS Control, I set it to Manual so that I can override the IPv6 DNS servers that my ISP advertises. This allows me to use Pi-Hole and the USG as DNS servers.
10. Enter the IPv6 addresses of DNS servers you want to use under DHCPv6/RDNSS Name Server. This can be tricky as the IPv6 address could change (though not likely), I entered the link local prefix of fe80:: instead of the first four groups of hex digits in the hopes that if my IPv6 address changes, I don't have to reconfigure. This appears to work, but I am not 100% sure it is correct.
11. Click Save and wait for the USG to provision.
12. Restart any devices or just wait for them to pick up the IPv6 address. You can goto IPv6 Test and see if everything works.

Why use IPv6 now? I have no idea, but figure I'd learn a little and prepare for the future. I hope this helps someone configure IPv6.

A layered approach to backups

[Update: 08 Mar 2018 - Style updates (thanks, Richard!) and added information about source code backups.]

For the last 20 years I've been pretty paranoid about backups. While my approach has changed over the years, one constant is that losing data is disastrous. I started with manual backups to floppy disks, then to Jaz disks where I'd rotate disks and store one at my parents' house, then moved to burning DVDs that I'd put in a safe deposit box.

These days my routine is more refined: I use a modified 3-2-1 strategy to protect my data. If you're not familiar with the 3-2-1 strategy, it is to have 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media, with 1 off-site backup.

Hardware

• 2017 MacBook Pro as my main machine
• 2012 MacBook Pro for my wife's machine
• 2013 Mac Pro
• Akitio Thunder2 Quad attached to the Mac Pro with four 6 TB drives; 2 are dedicated to backups. The drives are arranged in JBOD.
• 9 1 TB bare drives
• Newer Tech Voyager S3 connected to my MacBook Pro for doing backups to the bare drives
• HighPoint Dual-Bay Thunderbolt Dock that I move between the Mac Pro and my wife's MacBook Pro for backing up to the bare drives.
• Carbon Copy Cloner. I used SuperDuper! for many years, but switched last fall because CCC has more features that work in my current strategy. SuperDuper! is a great product for cloning drives and has some features that CCC doesn't have.

Procedure

1. My wife and I each have iCloud accounts with extra storage mainly to keep copies of our photos. Not only are the photos in iCloud, but they are synced to our MacBook Pros which are then backed up.
2. Each of the machines in my house backs up to Time Machine. My MacBook Pro and my wife's MacBook Pro do this over the network to my Mac Pro acting as a server. The Mac Pro does a local Time Machine backup to the Akitio. I don't consider a network Time Machine backup to be a primary backup as the disc image that Time Machine creates seems to get corrupted far too often. I have no idea why, but it is a thorn in my side. Time Machine, however, has saved data on more than one occasion.
3. Every day both of the laptops are set to backup their home directories using Carbon Copy Cloner to a disc image residing on the Mac Pro. The disc image is temporary storage, but an extra copy just in case.
4. Every day the disc images from the home directories are backed up to a folder on a different drive on the Mac Pro. This takes the files out of the disc image.
5. Every day my accounting data and my Paperless libraries are copied to iCloud Drive on my MacBook Pro. Since my Mac Pro is also connected to iCloud, this has the advantage of copying the data to the Mac Pro and keeping extra backups.
6. A full backup of the Mac Pro is done daily using Carbon Copy Cloner to a partition on one of the Akitio's drives.
7. Each week I use a bare hard drive and the hard drive dock to make a full copy of each computer. This is a manual process, but easy to do. Carbon Copy Cloner is set to backup on connect.
8. Each week I take a set of the bare drives to my safe deposit box. I have 3 sets of bare drives and rotate them weekly. The 2 sets that aren't in the safe deposit box are stored in a First Alert 2037F Fire Safe.
9. My source code for work and some of my projects is stored on github.com or bitbucket.org.

While my setup isn’t the simplest or least expensive, I don’t worry about losing data. Of course there are failure points in this setup but in general most of my data will be preserved in case of some type of data disaster.

Thinking about emergency power

Recently someone sent me a link to a video about creating a relatively inexpensive battery pack that recharges using solar panels. While I'm not sure I'd trust the way that it was made, in theory it sounds like a great way to deliver emergency power to someone in need. With more and more large scale natural disasters, being able to rapidly deploy emergency power is vital to helping people get back on their feet. While governments and companies are building ways to help a large number of people at once, I think the concept of having personal portable power for any emergency is something worth considering.

I've started looking at systems that I could use and GoalZero makes a number of systems that can provide adequate power in an emergency and recharge using solar. The systems, however, are just a tad too expensive for me to purchase right now. I could see myself getting one of the 400W units as it could power vital electronics in an emergency; vital being cell phone (if it even worked), portable radio, recharge flashlights (my flashlights pretty much all recharge via USB), and maybe a laptop to keep in touch. Of course, I'm sure I'll kick myself if I need it and I was too cheap to purchase it, but for now I'm just going to leave it on the nice to have list.