brainwagon

One of the Knights mentioned that Bill was now visible on WSPR. Presumably, this means his DSB beacon is actually alive. Here’s a link to his spots as reported on the WSPR net. Not bad! Bill’s WSPR Spots

I’ve been poking half-heartedly at Milhouse, my checkers program this morning. I found that a particular puzzle (puzzle 34) that I got from a puzzle book seems to behave so oddly that I must believe that there is some underlying bug in my program. But rather than dwell on that, I found a link to [...]

So, a couple of nights ago, I went ahead and assembled the OpenTracker Plus kit that I had ordered from Argent Data Systems. The kit is dead simple to assemble, taking me only about an hour, and I was going fairly slowly, checking each solder joint fairly thoroughly. The kit only uses through hole components, [...]

A year ago, I blogged that I had dusted off my old checkers program, named Milhouse, and had uncovered a bug in my transposition tables. Today, a year later, I still haven’t debugged it entirely. I tried adding routines to access the Chinook endgame database files to it, but it’s not quite there yet: it [...]

And I thought I was nerdy for having the Dr. Who theme be my ringtone… httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KRja415Iwk

It’s my usual morning ritual to go back through my WSPR spots and my grabber images, and try to see if anything new shows up. This morning, I had an amazing (and still continuing as of this moment) string of beacon spots into Australia/New Zealand and of course WA2YUN’s station on Wake Island. Heck, I [...]

I’m getting good propagation this evening out to VK land. David, VK6DI runs a grabber, and I started noting that my WSPR beaconw as getting in, so I decided to start sending my “MV” identifier. It’s making it! David’s grabber will soon be shutting down for his move across Australia, so this may be among [...]

MVI_7296 Originally uploaded by oaklandEarthGirl This is just an interesting little aside. Over the past couple of days, construction of the new building here at Pixar Animation Studios has begun in earnest, which means that we have pile drivers operating a couple hundred feet from my office. Strangely, my office appears to be very close [...]

April 9th is Tom Lehrer’s birthday. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY

Check out his nice pictures and description of his beacon and keyer: iDuino Addendum: His oscillator/buffer board is a very cheap kit produced by www.vakits.com. It seems like quite a bargain, and could easily be the start of a MEPT project.

Today is a special event day, where those of a WSPR bent move from their 30m haunts to other bands. I’ve shifted operation over to the 40m band, and quickly netted a spot from DH5RAE (my first ever spot from Germany). Who knows that other stations will hear me? Stay tuned. Update: Wow, had some [...]

First of all, starting within the next eight hours or so, my WSPR operations will shift over to 40m for a Wednesday “Special Activity Day” (check out wsprnet.org for details). During that time, my grabber will likely be imaging a part of the 40m spectrum which will likely have little/no activity, so it might not [...]

Sometimes it’s amazing how people on opposite sides of the world get to working on the same thing. Paolo has been workin on using a simple MP3 player to play back the WSPR tones. He basically is trying to measure and control the time difference in playback so that he gets a cycle time which [...]

Bill, IO/N2CQR over at Solder Smoke blog commented on one of the problems that I had with my WSPR beacon: that it had become “desynchronized” in time, and therefore the network of people who monitor the WSPR frequencies didn’t report any spots from me. Bill would like to minimize the parts count of his beacon [...]