brainwagon

I’ve previously mentioned David Rowe’s excellent work on a patent free codec for amateur radio, Codec2, but today is the first time I actually downloaded the code and gave it a shot. You can find the code and the quickstart here: Codec 2 « Rowetel My own voice has some fairly low frequencies in it, […]

Okay, simulating the analog parts of the actual physical ring oscillator last night made me ask some questions, so I thought it might be useful to try a very simple discrete simulation. If you looked at the schematic I posted yesterday, you’ll note that the ring is really just made up of single transistor inverters. […]

Crap, the original entry I made for this got screwed up somehow. Oh well. Alan, VK2ZAY, was experimenting with ring oscillators, which make some very nice blinking light displays indeed. YouTube – Ring Oscillator Das Blinkenlights Before this post got mangled, I was experimenting with putting the circuit into LTSpice and analyzing it. My brain […]

I want one. I tried to get one, but the last batch sold out in 1 minute, which made me about 3 minutes too late. AMSAT-UK FUNcube SDR video | Southgate Amateur Radio News. httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFZGlqKPPQo They are currently in short supply, as they are being built by hand. Here’s hoping they introduce some extra capacity […]

Here is a nice little receiver project which has many features that are similar to the ones I noted as desireable in my post earlier today. Cascode 7 Experimental Receiver Noted for future examination.

Some chatting on the #hamradio IRC channel on irc.freenode.net have made me think about D-Star a bit more, and I thought I’d write them down to see what other people thought. If you don’t know what D-Star is, it’s a digital voice and data technology for amateur radio which can currently be found in radios […]

Hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday. I must admit that my own vacation wasn’t productive in the sense of completing projects: I spent far too much time sleeping in, relaxing and playing far too much Epic Mickey on my Wii. But I have also spent some time thinking about the past year and year […]

Well, I found a BNC connector, hooked up my antenna, and voila! Before testing it, I tried listening up on my FT-817, and the band seemed pretty dead. But the DC40B had signals! First powerup of my DC40B I can hear a bit of hum, which I suspect will only get better once I use […]

Back in October of last year, I was eagerly putting together one of Doug Hendrick’s DC40b kits, a nifty little transceiver, complete with a nice metal case. Here’s where the assembly got to prior to today: brainwagon » Blog Archive » DC40B, Day 4, and stupidity on my part…. Yes, I didn’t install a chip […]

Phil Plait dug out these amazing pictures taken by Damian Peach. If you go to your local library and look at astronomy books that were published when I was a kid, you’ll see no pictures like any of this. The combination of both computer algorithms and video hardware has put the ability to take astonishingly […]

Well, it’s just after midnight, and with it is time for me and Carmen to don kerchief and cap and then to settle our brains for a long winter’s nap. To all my family, friends, and readers, I’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday. Tomorrow, there will be prime rib […]

I tweeted this earlier, but in case you aren’t subscribed to my twitter feed (user brainwagon) then you should check it out: some Google engineers sent one of their mascots to over 100K feet altitude along with several Android phones to record the experience. The video is awesome. Android In Spaaaace! – Official Google Mobile […]

It took me an embarrassingly long time to write a program to generate this fractal known as the Apollonian Gasket: More information here: Apollonian gasket – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Each circle is labelled with its curvature (which is simple the reciprocal of the radius). In this particular instance, all the curvatures turn out to […]

On Monday, December 20th, we’ll have an opportunity to view a total lunar eclipse. Huzzah! It’s been quite a while since I’ve had the opportunity to view one. According to this NASA eclipse calculator, the moon should enter the penumbra of the earth at 9:29PM Pacific time, with the partial eclipse beginning at 10:33 and […]

Or can you? Courtesy of the Make Blog, here’s an interesting little musical instrument called a “canjo”, a two string banjo that uses an old 4″ tuna fish can as the resonating cavity. Perhaps I should take a break from my plinky string sounds generated with software, and instead do it the old fashioned way. […]