brainwagon

For the first time in a couple of years, I got all my equipment back online in the WSPR mode. I used to run WSPR primarilly with my little Yaesu FT-817, but this time, I chose to go ahead and use my ICOM IC-735, which isn’t a really all that great at WSPR-ing: it is, […]

Lots of people have said that RTL-SDR dongles that they have been receiving don’t have ESD protection diodes on the antenna inputs, which makes them susceptible to damage, particularly when you hook larger, gain antennas to them. I had read many notes about the EZTV645 that I bought which indicated didn’t have the BAV99 diodes. […]

I haven’t been doing much work on ham radio lately. In fact, I haven’t even had my IC-735 hooked up since before Thanksgiving. But today, I decided to try to dust off the old equipment and see if I could get it powered up. After much digging around for all the right cabling, I got […]

Just a brief note: this website has some pretty extensive pictures of the inside and outside of the same model of RTLSDR dongle I bought. It also shows that it does not have the ESD protection diodes in place, so it’s possible you could fry the tuner input by having a static discharge directly hit […]

Readers of my blog and twitter feed know that I’m a fan of Jim Lahey’s “no-knead” bread. If you haven’t heard of it, just do some googling, or go ahead and buy Lahey’s book “My Bread”. The basic idea is to make a very wet dough with just a tiny amount of yeast, but rather […]

I’ve already got a couple of software defined radios: a nice SDR-IQ from RFSpace which covers up to 30Mhz, and an original Funcube Dongle Pro which covers from 64Mhz to 1700Mhz. I like both, but I must admit: they were fairly expensive. Still, in some ways they have spoiled me for conventional receivers in at […]

The other day I was in Ham Radio Outlet, and while strolling around I noticed a new VHF book published by the RGSB. And for some resaon, it made me think: I’ve got three different dual HTs, and an FT-817 which can work on 2m/70cm, why aren’t I doing more on VHF/UHF? I had a […]

Over on Facebook, I read a rather disturbing story about an Ohio humane officer who shot a litter of kittens within earshot of children. As someone who cohabits with an American shorthair (more later) this story is quite disturbing to me on multiple levels. But rather than dwell on this, I thought I’d use my […]

A few days ago I pointed at Mark Harrison’s Instructable on a 1 Hour Quadcopter. I thought it was cool, not so much because it could be built by him in an hour, but because it showed that quadcopters are actually not all that complex, and you might expect to be able to build one […]

I remember reading about Chris Fenton’s homebrew Cray, which was impressive enough. It was implemented on a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA board, and eventually he got a Cray assembler written. It also is neat, because it looks like a tiny Cray: But I wasn’t too interested in actually building one. But the gods of Internet surfing […]

My mentor in all things remote-control, Mark Harrison has written a pretty cool Instructable on how his flying buddy Andreas built a simple but reasonable quadcopter in only an hour. Cheap, Sturdy, 1-Hour Quadcopter Here is the cool timelapse, ending with a short flight after fifty-one minutes elapsed: Mark has more details and photos here, […]

This weekend was kind of a loss for computer/geek/rc airplane/ham radio, but it was off the charts fun for me and the missus. We did an unplanned day trip up to the Napa valley on Saturday, and then when I realized that I had left my lucky hat at restaurant, returned on Sunday to retrieve […]

Like many people, I live in a development with a fairly restrictive HOA. This means that I have to be fairly careful to use largely invisible or stealth antenna setups. Because of a lack of suitable trees on my property, this means that I’ve had fairly compromised setups: I’ve gotten the most use from a […]

If you haven’t heard of Theo Jansen and his incredible walking machines, I can’t do them justice with words. Check this out: His work is accessible from strandbeest.com. I find his creations amazingly cool. And others do as well, even hamsters (although cats seem less impressed): But while I’ve found these things fascinating, I didn’t […]

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 […]