brainwagon

I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog, but I’m trying to get some projects going. This week marks a rather rare event: the Tuesday (for us in North America) transit of Venus across the front of the sun. According to this transit calculator, the transit will occur between 3:06 and 9:47 (well after sunset). Back […]

I’m currently working toward something something which I don’t normally do: an achievement award. For about two months, I’ve been trying to log contacts via the JT65 mode on ham radio, with the eventual goal of making contacts in every state. It’s not a particularly difficult award: I suspect that it will mostly require patience […]

At the Maker Faire, I splurged for a little bit of computing hardware called the Beaglebone. It’s an $89 ARM based computer that runs at 700Mhz, and includes a MicroSD card slot and Ethernet, as well as a USB connector. I wasn’t sure what I was going to use it for, but I frankly can’t […]

Okay, these are the best of the photos that I snapped during yesterdays annular solar eclipse (well, it was really only a partial eclipse here). We had just left the Maker Faire, and were in the parking lot of Oracle on 10 Twin Dolphin Drive in Redwood City, CA. I took out my 4″ Meade […]

Phew. My legs are sore, and my voice is just returning to normal after a whirlwind two days at the Maker Faire in San Mateo. Thanks to everyone I bumped into and chatted with: I had a very nice time, and the partial solar eclipse was an added bonus (some pictures to come in a […]

I’ve got something like 30 states worked via JT65 over the last month or so, but I’ve obviously heard a lot more than that. I took my listening log, extracted all the U.S. callsigns, and then wrote a simple Python/sqlite script to look up each state for the callsign, and see how many states I’ve […]

Not a bad list, really, given how crappy my antenna is. Most of the DX was heard on 20m. Alaska, Argentina, Asiatic Russia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, Curacao, Czech Republic, England, Estonia, European Russia, Fed. Rep. of Germany, Finland, France, Gabon, Guantanamo Bay, Hawaii, Indonesia, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Puerto […]

Last night the mailbox contained the latest copy of QST magazine, which always means at least a few minutes of interesting reading. I usually read the magazine more or less front to back, flipping through. I mostly enjoy technical content, but reading about other aspects of the hobby (contesting, etc…) as an interesting diversion. Sadly, […]

I’ve often thought that the various ham radio podcasts that I like don’t really cater to the technical side of the hobby. Sure, you can get news from the Amateur Radio Newsline, and some nice introductory material on Ham Nation or the ICQ Podcast, but on the whole these podcasts don’t address technical issues very […]

On the last day of March, I started using the JT65-HF program to do some digital operation on the HF bands. In the roughly month since then, I’ve logged contacts with 30 states, and 13 DXCC entities, using my ICOM IC-735 and a crappy 40m dipole that’s mounted far too low. In the last week […]

On this past Saturday, April 14th, I was tuning around to see if I could pick up one of the stations which was activated to celebrate (is that the right word) the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster. I quickly found K3MGY in Baltimore, and recorded an hour of their operation on twenty meters. Not […]

Last night I got home from a day spent with new-baby-relatives, and decided to power up the ham radio setup and see if I could snag any good QSOs via JT65. The bands weren’t really all that good for me, but heck: it’s JT65, and it always seems to present something. A few minutes later, […]

Okay, nothing really more to say: fldigi now has WEFAX reception. I decided to try it out on transmissions from Norfolk, VA tonight. Not bad (although I think my own receiver works a bit better). Still, it’s nice to have them in one place. Now, all that fldigi needs is JT65A, and life would be […]

I’ve been pretty interested in codes of all sort, both the cryptographic codes and the codes that are used to provide error detection and correction. While I’ve played around quite a bit with convolutional codes, I haven’t really every bothered to develop more than a cursory understanding of the Reed-Solomon error correcting codes which have […]

Over the last week, I started playing around with JT65-HF. JT65-HF is a digital mode, which is good for only the most basic of information exchanges: grid square, signal levels, and perhaps a very short 73 message. But it’s got some cool features. It operates on low power, and can automatically log any callsigns you […]