brainwagon

If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that it wasn’t always about ham radio. It’s really about whatever I happen to be thinking about and doing that I wish to share and talk about. Tonight’s topic was simply this: applesauce. I was watching America’s Test Kitchen, where they were making [...]

If you haven’t had a chance yet, try checking out Jack Dunigan’s HAMRADIOSAFARI.COM blog. He’s (from his sidebar) the Senior Management Leader of Aidchild Inc., a project which provides homes for children for orphans living with AIDS in Uganda. While that’s important far in excess of anything having to do with ham radio, he is [...]

This 40m transceiver only has around 16 parts, and only a single active device: the ubiquitous IRF510 power transistor which you can even get at Radio Shack. Okay, it’s not exactly a complete receiver: they wired it to a PC sound card, and run an SDR application to get receive audio, but still, impressive! ea3ghs [...]

If you go back through lots of amateur radio designs, you’ll find many, many circuits that use the nearly uniquitous 365pf air spaced variale capacitors that were nearly ubiquitous up until about 25 years ago. In the last couple of decades however, they have become like Avatar’s unobtanium, seemingly impossible (or at least expensive) to [...]

The other day I was in HRO and scanning for some reading material for the long weekend. I ran across Brian Cake’s new book, The ARRL Antenna Designer’s Notebook. A brief skim of it showed that it actually covered a couple of interesting antenna types which I had never heard of: the Box Kite Yagi [...]

There has been a lot of work in recent years toward making amateur level UAVs. This one is a tricopter, and is completely open source. They claim that it can fly for “under $100 in parts, not including the airframe”. Sounds like a very cool project. It splits the computational load between an onboard pic [...]

Another one of those nifty amateur balloon launches is scheduled for next Saturday, February 6: The vehicle will be a 1200g helium-filled latex balloon. The expected burst altitude will be 90,000 feet or higher. The flight is anticipated to last about 2.5 hours from launch to touchdown. Payload: In addition to ANSR flight computer/cross-band repeater [...]

I’ve got the RFSPACE SDR-IQ hooked up as a receiver again, and using it to feed WSPR. There is a ton of loud RTTY signals swamping the 40m band in the vicinity of the WSPR signals, but I’m still getting some signals. Here is the reports thusfar this evening: Excerpt Addendum: Picked up CX2ABP in [...]

I admit it: I’m an old timer. When I first was learning about Unix and C programming, I was sitting in front of a TVI 912 terminal (if I was lucky) or an ADM-3A (if I wasn’t lucky) that was connected to a VAX-750. I’m not overly nostalgic, but I do continue to work in [...]

I subscribe to quite a few mailing lists relating to ham radio. A few months back, I decided to give the QRP-L a whirl. Unlike many lists like the EMRFD list, QRP-L had a fairly high NSR (noise to signal ratio), but hey, it’s a mailing list. It doesn’t take long to skip over stuff [...]

Anyone who is subscribed to the QRP-L has likely been subjected to a long string of complaints against WSPR in the past week or so. This began with a generic complaint against a “consistent carrier” on 7.040. This rapidly decayed into a long series of rants against WSPR. Since I’m rather more fond of WSPR [...]

I was waiting for sleep to come, and surfed over to the American Checker Federation website. As long-time readers of this blog might remember, I’ve been tinkering a checkers program together, which I tentatively named “Milhouse” to play checkers. This week’s problem challenge was a classic 2 on 3 battle where White is to move [...]

Roger, G3XBM has a terrific blog and website, and is always tinkering things together that I find interesting and inspiring. This morning, I see that he’s got a small 2 transistor transceiver for 80m that looks like it could be really fun, and constructed from bits you’d probably find in your junkbox. I like the [...]

I was bored, tuning around when someone on the #hamradio IRC channel mentioned that the “Cuban lady” numbers station was audible around 5.883Mhz. I was bored. I recorded 10 minutes of her. Now you can be bored too. The Cuban Lady, V2A recorded 1/22/2010, around 11:15PM PST

For fun, I’ve got my new RFSPACE SDR-IQ running on my laptop using Spectrum Lab and monitoring the 30m QRSS beacon subband. I enabled its HTTP server, and now have set up a little cronscript to copy its display to my webserver once a minute. You can see an example display below (showing KC7VHS, AA5CK [...]