brainwagon

In my previous post about the virtues of microcontrollers in homebrew radio, I had a comment from Lee, who mentioned that he operated a LowFer beacon on 187khz. I’ve been passively interested in LF operation under Part 15 rules for a long time, but haven’t really gotten involved with it much. Lee operates from La [...]

As anyone who has followed my blog for any period of time knows, my interests straddle a lot of different disciplines and hobbies, and often find interesting bits of overlap where I find I can do cool stuff. Two of my favorite hobbies are tinkering with microcontrollers and with the low powered end of amateur [...]

Or not. I find a lot of editorializing about amateur radio to be, well, curiously off the mark. For instance try checking out Dan, KB6NU’s well meaning article about why you should upgrade to a General. I mean, that’s what the title is: Why you should upgrade to a General. The reason I find this [...]

Previously, I have read about a wireless Morse thermometer designed by Steve Weber, KD1JV. I played around with the basic idea in a YouTube video I made. It basically powers a little Colpitts oscillator from an IO pin on an Arduino. Weber’s circuit did much the same, just using a small 8 pin AVR and [...]

I’ve been busy lately, and have done almost nothing radio related. But John was kind enough to point out to me that Bill, N2CQR of Soldersmoke fame had posted a mention of me, and I surfed over to his blog to have a peek. His post that apparently uses my code to send Morse which [...]

Tap… tap… tap… Is this thing still on? Apologies to my loyal readers (reader?) for the lack of recent updates. A combination of work pressure, family visits, general lassitude and other distractions have caused the writing muse to flee, and every time I sit down to write something down, I have just felt physically tired [...]

I lost 1.8 pounds this week. I went on 2 mile walk with Carmen. I soldered some clip leads onto pennies to make a touch sensor for the Arduino. I figured out how to run the card deck on the Computer History Museum’s 1401 restoration page that computes pi on the 1401 simulator. 000000003. * [...]

I was listening to Amateur Radio Newsline to a story about a lightweight balloon payload that crossed from Great Britain to Sweden carrying a payload which weighed less than 100 grams and using just 10mw. I thought that was cool, so I googled around and located these neat instructions on building a lightweight GPS tracker. [...]

Without further ado… if you want code to implement this: You can download this this zip file. Do with it what you will.

Having written the previous FFT based implementation of Conway’s life, we can easily implement life variants with larger neighborhoods which run just as fast. This is a variant called Bugs, which has a neighborhood of radius 5, and includes the center square. If it is “alive” and has between 34 and 58 neighbors (inclusive), it [...]

For reasons which continue to escape me, Mark decided to let me try to take up another of his planes this morning. Last week, I took his EzFly up, with the net result of a mangled prop (which caused the heavy vibration in last week’s video) a cracked wing (repaired with Foam Tack, good as [...]

I have an on-again, off-again love affair with beacons. I spent many a day monitoring QRSS beacons on 30m, and have built a series of different beacon transmitters. Most of my work has been inspired by Hans Summers, G0UPL, so when I found he was selling something called the Ultimate QRSS kit for a mere [...]

Steve, K9ZW wrote an interesting post on his blog: Where are the Positive Hams? And How to Tell? – Part I « With Varying Frequency – Amateur Radio Ponderings. I understand what he’s saying, and while I don’t think it’s wrong per se, I think my own opinions are somewhat at right angles to the [...]

I’m down to 10 states remaining for a JT65 WAS: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Nevada, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. I think I have outstanding QSOs for at least one of those, so soon I hope to be down to single digits. If you are a ham who does JT65 [...]

Today would have marked the 100th birthday of Alan Turing. Turing’s contributions in artificial intelligence and computing alone would have guaranteed his place among the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, but that was only a small part of his genius. His pioneering work on cryptography at Bletchley Park allowed the British to crack the [...]