brainwagon

Jeff, KE9V pointed at the following article via Twitter: Are ‘ham’ operators going the way of 8-tracks and VCRs? The author actually meanders a bit (into the why we call it “ham radio”, for some odd reason, but his main point seems to be this: As National Public Radio found last March, amateur radio is […]

Roger has found another real gem of a link: a great book called The Boy’s Book of Crystal Sets. Flipping through it, it seems awesome, and Roger recommends it as an influential book of his youth. Worth checking out. Roger G3XBM’s Amateur Radio Blog: Boy’s Book of Crystal Sets.

Got a short recording of ARISSat-1 this evening. Not 100% sure, but it may have transitioned into low power mode at the end of this recording, I seemed to lose carrier and couldn’t reacquire the satellite. In any case, here’s the recording, and the one decoded SSTV image (not too exciting, but pretty clear). ARISSat-1 […]

I got a tweet from twisst, the ISS pass prediction robot yesterday indicating that I’d have a good pass around 8:25PM. While I am fighting off a cold, the weather was beautiful and nice, and so I ran some path predictions to see what the path looked like, and also checked on ARISSat-1’s path to […]

I didn’t get a chance to record any more ARISSAT-1 data this weekend, but I did catch up on some reading. Apparently, it’s batteries are giving out quicker than expected: the voltage is dropping low enough to cause a reset when the satellite goes into eclipse each orbit. If you were thinking of grabbing some […]

A couple of weeks ago, I programmed an Arduino to take digitized sound stored in its rom, and send it out via PWM of an LED. A couple days after that, I used the same code to send voice using a small 5mw laser module. Ever since then, I thought it would be good to […]

I haven’t had the chance to do any ARISSAT-1 SSTV lately, but I thought I’d snoop over to their gallery to have a peek. Some good pictures are being received, but it appears that some earlier pictures are simply being removed: two pictures that I submitted to them earlier are no longer available. Their comment: […]

Scott Harden had a very cool idea: sending Hellschreiber, an old fax-like teleprinter code invented by Rudolf Hell, using just an Atmel ATMega48 and a canned oscillator. The idea is pretty simple: the canned oscillator will produce a square wave with the same amplitude as the input voltage. So, you simply power the oscillator with […]

Success! I managed to record the pass of ARISSAT-1 from my front yard this morning. I woke up around 7:00AM, and tried quickly to get ready. I pulled on some clothes, then I dug out my handy Arrow antenna (a hand held dual band Yagi antenna for 2m and 70cm) and my tiny Yaesu VX-3 […]

Drew, KO4MA, didn’t let a little thing like the missing antenna on ARISSAT-1 keep him down. He aimed his antennas at the satellite, and recorded the following: What’s goin on here? Drew has a pretty good antenna setup, which includes an M2 CP42 for the uplink. That provides about 16.8db of gain. Since the ARISSAT-1 […]

Okay folks, I’m sorry, I promised that I’d try to stay up late enough to record some of the first passes of ARISSAT-1, but physical need for sleep outpaced my natural enthusiasm and curiosity, and the first good pass found me sound asleep. Through some perverse quirk of fate, all the best passes of the […]

First, the good news: ARISSAT-1 is floating free in space. I urge hams to listen for its 2m downlink on 145.950 to see if you can hear it. There is also a CW beacon on 145.919 and a special BPSK-1000 telemetry downlink on 145.920. Now, the bad news. It appears that the UHF antenna was […]

Ham Nation is a relatively new weekly podcast that is brought to us through the power of the TWIT network, Leo Laporte’s mighty podcast empire. Fellow blogger KE9V had some comments on it, some of which I agree with, and some of which I do not. Of Dits and Bits | KE9V’s Ham Radio Blog. […]

Over on the #savagecircuits IRC channel on irc.afternet.org, Atdiy was trying to decipher the mysteries of a mainstay of analog circuit design: the RC filter such as the one pictured on the right (diagram cribbed from Wikipedia) It dawned on me that (newbie as I am) I didn’t really have a clear understanding of them […]

Thanks to Bill at the SolderSmoke blog for posting a link to Dave Richards’ construction project. He made a slick version of the Wheatstone Bridge Receiver, a regenerative variant created by N1BYT and published in More QRP Power. I’ve looked at this receiver before, and found the design to be pretty interesting, but Dave goes […]