Month: March 2010

I’ve been hacked by Ghost61

Received yesterday an email from the hosting company :

Dear Customer,

This afternoon we discovered some hacked customer sites. Since then we have been looking for the reason of the issue and are logging all affected sites.  We expect to restore all original sites around 22h. We continue to investigate the cause and we will also take further action.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

But I was busy experimenting with ubuntu server on another machine, so I read the mail this morning. Surfed to my sites and yes, me too.

hacked_by_ghost61.jpg

What this guy or group did was pretty harmless : they replaced all index.php or index.html files by a custom index file. And not only my site was defaced as they called it, probably the whole server has been done. Luckely I have backups, I just have to replace all index files, sounds easy, but how many index files do you think you have ?
Lots of them 🙂
This blog contains about 13 index files. That is manual labor at the moment. And sometimes I install a plugin and don’t keep a copy offline. Lesson learned. Have to figure out how to sync an offline copy.

My 20m end fed or half wave vertical antenna

In a previous post I wrote that building a half wave antenna for 20m is on my todo list. The reason for this that my groundplane needs counterpoises or radials. For the half wave or end fed this is not needed. That is what people usually say.

A few days ago I started building one. For the radiator I took 10 meter wire, 2.5 mm thick. That was the easiest part 🙂
To support the radiator I went searching for a fishing rod on the website of a known sport- and outdoor store. The Geopole series seems to meet my expectations with a length of 9,5 m (about 30 ft). I overlooked one thing in the description : it was made from carbon fiber. But I went to the store, the price was 50 euro. Just minutes before I got to the counter I noticed a small sticker. It was barely visible, but there it was : Carbon.
This goes back into the rack. Now what ?

I started searching again and the best alternative was a 7m pole. This time I looked for all kind of descriptions, texts, stickers, etc. I didn’t found the word Carbon written somewhere. And the price was just 16 euro. For that price they can’t build a carbon fishing rod. It is made of glass fibre.

Back home I started to wind the wire around the pole like a big helical. I used papertape to fix it temporarely. The fishing rod just fitted my garage.

The next step : The matching unit.
The impedance of a half wave is rather high, so you can’t feed it directly with your coax. You can use an LC coupler or an L tuner. I have choosen for the LC method. The radiator has a dc path to ground and is isolated from the coax.

After a while I changed the capacitor by a piece of coax cable and mounted the antenna in a more suitable place.
See my other more recent blog entry here