Grandad's photos

We don't spend much on phones, just calls and text $20 or $30 a year. No constant Internet or data use except on home wireless.

First ripoff:

Bought a new phone for the missus, Samsung J2. Fitted her SIM card, the balance of $28 should last for most of a year, right?

Powered up and finding settings on an unfamiliar Android took a few minutes to turn off SIM data and set up house wireless password. Incoming text says 'your prepay balance is now $0.00'.

In the few minutes it took to turn off data in the settings the phone started updating something using the SIM card, on 4G it probably took 1 minute to download 56MB and 2 Degrees charge 50c per Mbyte so there was the $28 gone.

Complaints to 2 Degrees were met by the answer that 'your phone had data switched on and 50c/Mbyte is the rate'. Data probably costs them .01 cents per Gbyte.

Lesson: if you are setting up a new phone, do it with no SIM card, or immediately set Airplane mode.

Next ripoff: The missus was given an unwanted Vodafone branded phone to use text-only for a  church function. It had not been on for months. I charged it, checked the balance $5 good till Sept 2017 and the plan was Prepay. The phone had had no use since October 2016.

We topped it up $20 and a couple of days later got an incoming text 'your prepay balance is now $6 and your $19 call package has been renewed.' So unknown to us, this $19 call package had been waiting in the wings for 6 months and pounced when there was a better account balance. Needless to say, a MyVodafone web account has been set up and the $19 plan cancelled. The account is now Prepay which is what they told us in the first place.

$39 gone in a couple of weeks for nothing. Well done, phone companies, ripoffs are great for the bottom line.

It's an intriguing subject, creating money by having your computer carry out calculations. Most of the information on the Net is dated 2011-2013 and is now quite obsolete.

In those days you might have been able to make a small profit but now the electricity cost to run the computer will outweigh the revenue created. A Raspberry Pi (a small credit card sized computer with wireless, bluetooth, Ethernet, hdmi) only draws a few watts and is ideal to use as a controller.


You can set up litecoin mining without buying anything else by using a program called cpuminer. Set up an account at litecoinpool.org and create one worker. Use this Rpi tutorial to download and install cpuminer. It will use the 4 core cpu (in a Pi 3) to start mining at about 4 kilo hashes per second (Kh/sec). This will create about 1 cent a year in wealth, but you will learn how to compile c programs.

Clearly you need something much faster. It's called an ASIC (Application-specific integrated circuit) that has chips on board dedicated to crypto mining. Only a few years ago miners used GPU cards (graphics cards) which had fast memory and processors that did the calculations much faster than the cpu. The ASICs have dropped in price and normally use USB ports.

Here is one (LKetc USB with Zeus chips) that I have used. (Cost about $US 16 on aliexpress) It generates about 144 Kh/sec.

I am currently running it on my desktop using bfgminer 4.1.99 with windows 10. It was not happy on the Rpi together with my gridseed miners. It apparently has two chips and can process 288 Kh/sec with fan cooling but I have not managed that. The software only finds one chip.  Here is my Win10 startup command (put in your own login details). Change the clock speed and see if you get more throughput.

bfgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://us2.litecoinpool.org:3333 -u user -p password --chips-count 2 --ltc-clk 190 -S zeus:all





Then on the Rpi I hooked up a Gridseed GC3355 5-chip. They mine at about 350 Kh/sec using cpuminer-gc3355. That program auto detects and handles 5-chip and 40-chip devices simultaneously. I find the 5-chip units run OK at 850 Mhz and don't really need fan cooling.


Here is a picture of the 5-chip units (costing about $29 on aliexpress).

Two of these mine at about 700 Kh/sec and earn about 1 litecoin cent in 4 days.

Next step up is the Gridseed Blade miner with two 40-chip GC3355 cards known as blades, so a total of 80 chips.

They are rated at 5300 Kh/sec and this unit is mining away right now with the two 5-chip units at 6000 Kh/sec and earning me 0.035 litecoins in 24 hours ($NZ0.21). Trouble is they pull 100 watts at 12 volts, about 8 amps, and I use a computer power supply rated at 12 amps at 12V. So the electricity cost is at least 2.4 units per day at $NZ0.32 = $NZ 0.77.

So there it is, making money for the power company.

We have been running wireless over a month now since we closed the Fusion account at World Exchange (WxC). We had it 5 or 6 years but it was giving problems every month or two requiring Chorus to fix their system at the Whitianga end, the result of which was no phone or internet for a day. Vodafone recently bought WxC which seems to have made them inflexible. We had a 5GB broadband account with about $1 per extra GB and we were using about 20 GB per month. WxC's only upgrade was unlimited ADSL data, we are too far from the cabinet for VDSL and there are no fibre plans in Whitianga.

So, we bought Skinny broadband which just plugs in and delivers broadband from Spark's 4G cell system. It pulls in about 10-15 M per sec down and 10 upload which works just fine. It's a Huawei B315S-608 and it comes with a Skinny SIM, 100G per month for $52. That was the easy bit. It's wireless as well as Ethernet.





For the wireless phone, we needed  a cellular gateway with the landline ported to it.




I bought a 2 Degrees prepay SIM and set up $8 a month for 60 minutes carryover talk time. On TradeMe I bought an obsolete Vodafone Home Wireless Phone unit for $10 and it worked OK for about a month but about 20% of callers complained about echo, which was the reason VF withdrew that model a few years ago. It runs on the old 2G GSM network which is probably going to be shutdown in 2017. 

I used www.tnz.co.nz to port our landline to the 2 Degrees SIM. That cost $40 setup, then $10 per month plus incoming calls about 25c/min.

Looking at improving the echo, I bought a Ufone U118 from eBay which is a bluetooth to landline/cellular gateway. It didn't work, because the Americans had set it up to use '0' to select the landline and of course all our NZ calls start with '0'. There was no manufacturer support.




Then I bought an Xlink BT Bluetooth Gateway, and that works really well, as clear as the old landline. I use a Nokia E63 as the cellphone and can now also send texts. The E63 has the charger permanently plugged in. I bought the Xlink from http://onwireless.com.au/ which had the advantage of getting a power pack with an NZ/AU plug instead of US. Don't buy the BTTN model, it has a landline socket and will not be so simple as the BT (cellular only).

Monthly costs?   $8 for 2 Degrees including 60min carryover outgoing calls. $10 for TNZ plus incoming calls (say $25).  Broadband $52 flat rate for way more GB than we use. Total under $100. We are trying to encourage callers to use the 2D mobile number if they are calling from a cellphone, so no incoming call charges for us.

We could dispense with TNZ and 'bring our landline number' to 2 Degrees, but the gotcha is: you can only do that in monthly accounts ($30 per month) plus $20 per month for the landline.

Leith Jackson & Doug St George have set up donated equipment to rebroadcast NZ National Radio at Whitianga on frequency 87.8 FM in May 2015.

Tune in and enjoy. We have spent about $600 doing this and paid $130 annual licencing fee to Recorded Music. We would appreciate recovering some of this, you may want to make a credit card donation through PayMate at this link: https://www.paymate.com/PayMate/GenExpressPayment?mid=biny1

The signal is received on a satellite dish, via a Freeview decoder to a Low Power FM 1Watt transmitter on Centennial Drive. Call Doug on (07) 98 49 140 if any doubts.

We raised just under $200 from our GiveaLittle page  http://givealittle.co.nz/cause/natradiowhitianga which has now closed. A little more would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Labels: LPFM, National Radio, Whitianga

Our NZ flag, reflecting our history, is the flag that our soldiers fought and died for in two world wars.

Bill Beard took up Gary & me in the Beaver. Gary flies a scale radio model Beaver. Very interesting to fly in 1948 technology. Here are some of the views.




  Buffalo Beach



Passing the Aero Club clubhouse





South toward Hot Water Beach


Cooks Beach


Ferry Landing


On Finals, Runway 04, touch & go


Hahei


Racecourse Road




Simpsons Beach


Whitianga Town views

These pictures were taken with a Canonet camera onto slide film. As far as I can tell these were on a Friday practice day in 1966 for the opening of Auckland International Airport. Pictures are reduced to 1000 pixels, contact me if you would like the 2000 pixel higher resolution originals from the slide copying. (datsta (at) gmail.com). Click on pictures to enlarge.

Vampire aerobatics.





Bristol Freighter in RNZAF colours

Canberra bomber




Harvard lineup


RNZAF Sunderland flying boat