So called “steam punk” has been getting fairly popular lately. The idea is to take modern implements and reimplement and restyle them as if they were constructed in the Victorian era. It’s kind of silly in a way, but there are lots of opportunities for interesting craft projects and techniques. Today, I encountered this interesting page on copper plating and salt etching, which were really quite interesting. I might have to try this.

Copper Plating and Etching Altoids Tins
[tags]Steam Punk, Arts and Crafts[/tags]

Yep, I’m still on my radio kick. Ran across a link to this interesting book, available for download as a bunch of PDF files that entices you to homebrew your own ham radio equipment. Cool.
Book Copyright (c) 2006, Frank W. Harris / HTML and PDF assembly Copyright (c) 2006 AmSoft

In one of my previous posts, reader Jim suggested that:

The use of digital modes in amateur radio really puzzles me. The beauty of radio is its technological simplicity. If I want to communicate digitally, there are wonderfully complicated and beautiful ways to do it on the Internet. But give me a few transistors and some wire, and I can communicate around the world, at least in principle.

I can understand his point, but I don’t agree.

First of all, it is simply a fact that while in principle one can build a transciever out of a couple of transistors, a crystal and some wire, that’s simply not what the vast majority of hams are doing.  To draw an analogy, if building your own transciever and running two watts into a chunk of wire is analogous to backpacking, the vast majority of hams are either picnicking (using 2m ht and mobile rigs via repeaters) or are driving enormous RVs around.   To be fair, backpacking, picknicking and driving an RV are all pretty fun things to do, and it would be a mistake to pretend that they aren’t, but they are also somewhat different.

I have a general philosophy that tells me that the only way to really understand something is to do it.  Build stuff.  Figure out why it does or doesn’t work.  Do it again.   Hence, the QRP/homebrew world of ham radio has considerable appeal.   But to me, QRP has an almost unnatural obsession with CW operation.   There is dogma in the world of radio amateur world that says that “CW gets through when nothing else will”.  It was a reasonable thing to say back when your alternatives were AM and SSB.   But it’s wrong.   Other alternatives do exist, and they really aren’t very complicated at all.   A $4 dsPic can <em>replace</em> lots of complexity in traditional transceiver design, and enable communications in situations where CW would just fall to the ground.  Yes, it converts an analog hardware problem to a digital software problem.  I don’t view that as a bad thing.

[tags]Amateur Radio[/tags]

Well, after listening to one of the soldersmoke podcasts which described the old Drake 2-B as one of the premier communications receivers of all time, I began eyeing mine in a slightly different light. I’ve had this little guy in storage for eight years or so, and my experience with it was that it was pretty deaf. But I began thinking: to be fair, I’ve never used it with anything but a chunk of random wire. Might my experience be different with a more proper antenna?

Clearly a test was in order. I stopped by HRO today and picked up a simple 40m dipole. (Yes, I’m lazy, I could have built it myself). I have 50 feet of RG58 feedline from Radio Shack but couldn’t locate it, so once again, I couldn’t hook up the antenna properly. Still, I hoped it would make some difference. I unwound only one leg of the dipole, which stretched all the way across my living room. I left the other coiled behind the receiver. Hardly optimal. I hooked up a little stub of feedline that I had.

The CW band (Morse code to most of you) was alive with signals, where previously I might have had difficulty finding one. Huzzah! Clearly it was much better. I don’t know why I was surprised, but I was. But I wasn’t ready to stop then. I remember that I had a “digipup” live CD floating around. This is a distribution of Puppy Linux especially for ham radio, including the program fldigi, which can decode many of the digital modes that are active on HF. I booted my old (slightly unreliable) laptop into it, and set about looking for PSK31 signals.

PSK31 is a relatively new (< 10 year old) digital mode based upon BPSK (binary phased shift keying). It emits a sort of warbling sound, the peaks of which are separated by a mere 31 hz. It has rapidly become very popular with hams because of its ease of use, its speed, and its very narrow bandwidth.

PSK31 activity on 40m is supposed to be centered around 7.035 megahertz. I suspect that my calibration is off, because I found signals mostly near 7.050 khz on my band, but several were active. I clicked on one… and voila! Digital decoding! Click on the thumbnail at the right for a closer look. This wasn’t even the strongest signal, and I was receiving 100% copy.

I was psyched. I am psyched. I have a little PSK80 kit (a dedicated transciever for PSK31 on 80m) that I hope to get on the air soon, but this taste was fun!

Addendum: A closeup of fldigi can be seen in this picture.

[tags]Amateur Radio, PSK31[/tags]

The original Apple iPhone was released on June 29th of this year.  68 days later, Apple announces that they are cutting the price by $200.

I guess we can infer from this that Apple decided the iPhones weren’t selling as well as they would like, and that the new (very good) price point will help stimulate sales.  But it’s a bitter pill to swallow for those who bought at the $600 price, with some expectation that it would be the going rate for more than sixty days.

I hope you enjoy my $200 Apple.

I continue to love my iPhone incidently.  I’d just love my $200 too.

[tags]Apple,iPhone,Infuriated[/tags]

Well, not the rear panel of my Drake 2B. The markings on the back of mine have faded considerably, so much so that it is hard to read the lettering associated with each of the connectors. Luckily, I found a good picture of the rear panel on the web, which I’m archiving here for the moment.

[tags]Amateur Radio, Drake 2B[/tags]

Recently, my brain has shifted back into ham radio mode. My license had expired back in May, and I decided to renew it, and as a result, my interest was also somewhat renewed. I’ll probably bore you some more with this in the future, but I was down at Ham Radio Outlet, picking up a book, and the sales guy recommended a podcast dedicated to homebrew radio:

SolderSmoke

There have been 65 episodes thusfar, and I’ve got ’em all on my iphone. You have to be pretty hardcore to find it interesting, but if you are a radio amateur, you might find it interesting. Check it out.

[tags]Amateur Radio[/tags]