brainwagon

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 […]

Well, it’s been quite some time since I tried to work any of the FM birds, but I dusted off my TH-D7A, my voice recorder and my Arrow antenna, and decided to give it a go. It was pretty busy, and as usual I found it a bit difficult to get in. I got myself […]

It appears that the solar sail cubesat NanoSail-D that was recently launched may not have deployed properly: they haven’t been able to track it or contact as of yet. Bummer. I’ve been intrigued by solar sail technology for quite some time. Here’s hoping they figure out what went wrong, but bummer thusfar. NanoSail-D Mission Status […]

Lost in yesterday’s thrilling launch of the SpaceX Falcon-9/Dragon launch was that during their flight, they also apparently deployed a cubesat: CAERUS (which is apparently Greek for “opportunity”). It has a 900mw FM AFSK beacon downlink on 437.600, and operates under the amateur callsign KJ6FIX. I have not as yet been able to locate TLEs […]

The legendary Phil Karn, KA9Q is apparently the brains behind the digital telemetry modem that will be used aboard the ARISSat-1, a satellite designed to be tossed off the ISS sometime next year. From his paper: ARISSat-1 will carry a new telemetry modulation and coding scheme, BPSK1000, designed to handle the severe fading often encountered […]

Earlier this year, I blogged about my acquisition of an SDR-IQ receiver, made by RFSpace. I hadn’t had it hooked up for quite some time, so I dusted it off, fired up the Spectravue software that drives it, and did some scanning around the bands. Yep, it still works. I really like Spectravue for the […]

PVC can be a useful construction material, but it comes in an annoyingly limited range of colors: white. Painting it is a pain, but it appears that there is a way to stain them virtually any color: Stain PVC Any Color You Like — DIY How-to from Make: Projects Stashed for future reference.

GPS visualizer takes all sorts of data from various GPS type hardware/applications, and can convert into bunches of other output formats, like Google Earth’s KML files, GPS files, output for Google Maps, and JPEG/PNG/SVG. It’s free. Stashed for future reference. GPS Visualizer.

On Saturday, I decided that the missus and I needed to do two things: get out of the house and get some exercise, and test my OpenTracker. So, I thought that we’d drive out to Mount Diablo, get a hike around, and then see how well the combination of my TH-D7A and the OpenTracker worked. […]