Bailey's Comet at Moorgate

A London Underground Engineering train has been parked up at Moorgate station recently. As I'm a self-confessed train nerd I got off to take some photos - alas I'm not much of a photographer. 

The Roundels on the side says "Bailey's Comet" And I'm reliably informed it's a rail grinding train for smoothing out irregularities in the tracks. 

This engineer train is powered by electricity from the rails like a standard tube train, however some exist that are battery powered for when the current is off for maintenance. 

Using a Cisco 887 Router as a VDSL Modem

I've had a Cisco 887 Router lying around gathering dust for a while and thought I'd put it to use as a VDSL Modem, replacing the existing Openreach box. In theory this will give me more visibility on line stats allowing me to do more logging and troubleshooting.

I tried it a while ago but had some MTU issues so it was banished back into storage. My ISP, Plusnet support 'Baby Jumbos' of 1508 Bytes which allows for a 1500 Byte frame + 8 Bytes of PPPoE overhead, so this time I configured the relelvant interfaces with a 1508 Byte MTU and its working nicely.

The configuration is pretty basic, partly due to limitations of the router. Ethernet0 (The DSL port) has a subinterface for Vlan 101 which is required by the VDSL infrastructure supplied by Plusnet / BT. Vlans 1 and 101 are transparently bridged to allow PPPoE passthrough, and I've added an IP on the bridge for management with some access lists for security.

The configuration is below. I can't make any guarantees it will work or it's secure, and I've redacted some of the sensitive information. Hopefully someone will find it useful or make suggestions for improvements.

Flat CAT6 Cable

I recently purchased some Flat CAT6 Cable for a grand total of £4.64 for 15M from Ebay with the intention of passing it through some double glazed window seals. When it arrived I was slightly taken aback at just how thin the cable was, around 6mm wide and 1.5mm thick. Great for squeezing through a tight window seal, but perhaps not so great for pushing packets.

2p for scale

To see if my scepticism was warranted I ran some iperf tests, and at 925 Mb/s I can't fault it-

C:\Users\matthew\Documents\iperf-3.1.3-win64>iperf3.exe -c 192.168.22.1 -b 1G
Connecting to host 192.168.22.1, port 5201
[  4] local 192.168.22.2 port 57144 connected to 192.168.22.1 port 5201
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec   100 MBytes   843 Mbits/sec
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec   101 MBytes   846 Mbits/sec
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec   112 MBytes   941 Mbits/sec
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec   113 MBytes   947 Mbits/sec
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec   112 MBytes   944 Mbits/sec
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec   113 MBytes   946 Mbits/sec
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec   113 MBytes   947 Mbits/sec
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec   113 MBytes   946 Mbits/sec
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec   113 MBytes   947 Mbits/sec
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec   113 MBytes   945 Mbits/sec
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.08 GBytes   925 Mbits/sec                  sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.08 GBytes   925 Mbits/sec                  receiver

M6IJY

Ofcom completed their maintenance on Monday morning and I was able to login and swap my RSGB candidate number for a foundation level call sign.

The website is relatively limited and will only let you search for 3 letter suffixes rather than begins with / contains / starts with etc. In the end I gave up and let them allocate me a random call sign. I ended up with M6IJY (Mike 6 India Juliet Yankee).

I plan on doing some operating at the weekend at my local club, so hopefully I will make my first contact then.

Amateur Radio Foundation Licence

Last weekend I attended a two day amateur radio foundation licence training course at the Loughton & Epping Forest Amateur Radio Society (LEFARS) which culminated in an exam. The instructors made everything clear and easy to understand and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. After completing the exam I was told my 'indicative' mark suggested that I had passed, but today I received my official certificate from the Radio Society of Great Britain.

PoE to Micro USB Converter

Someone recently showed me their latest cheapo Chinese import gadget - a PoE to Micro USB Converter that they were using to power a non-PoE enabled device.  As I'm never too far away from a PoE enabled port and they've reached a reasonable price point (£5.19 inc P+P) I thought it was worth picking one up on Ebay. I ordered one on the 12th January and it arrived on the 26th which puts shipping bang on 2 weeks - not bad from China.

I've done some testing and it seems to be a little picky about its power source. The converter works fine with a 'proper' HP Procurve managed switch, but with a Netgear Prosafe switch the power light pulses on and off and the USB cable doesn't power up.

The converter is also lacking the molded tab to prevent the RJ45 from snagging shown in the picture above, so I'm not too optimistic about how long it will last before it needs re-crimping. I'm considering opening it up and placing it in a new enclosure with a proper USB A female socket to aid compatibility with other devices such as iPhones.

Overall for £5.19 I can't complain too much. I will use it a little more 'in the field' and do some load testing and follow up in another post. 

First Post

I've dabbled with starting a blog in the past and thought it was about time I grabbed the bull by the horns so to speak. If anything it's aimed at documenting some of my trials and tribulations for myself, but if anyone happens to stumble across it and find it interesting / useful then all the better.