brainwagon

G3ZJO just posted a nice little blog entry about the use of LEDs (which are nearly ubiquitous) as varicaps (which are often harder to find). Lots of people are using these in their QRSS beacons, no doubt in part to the work of Hans Summer which was the first person to bring them to my […]

I’ve been wanting to put a ham radio into my car for quite some time. The obvious thing would have been to get a nice 2m/70cm dual bander, but I didn’t really want to invest a huge chunk of change into it at this time, so I decided to go with a simple basic 2m […]

G4ILO had much better success than me with similar equipment. His mp3’s are way more convincing than mine. G4ILO’s Blog: Arecibo success.

Or should that be maybe? Arecibo? In the world of visual astronomy, it is well known that your eye’s peak sensitivity to light doesn’t occur right when you are staring at an object directly. To detect the faintest galaxies, you must stare slightly away from where the object is, and you’ll see it pop into […]

Sigh. Not hearing anything from the Moon. Tuning into the live ustream.tv video/chat line it appears that lots of people with much larger/better setups than me are also having difficulty hearing anything, so I am not the only one. Given that under the best of circumstances, my unproven antenna would have barely enough gain, I […]

So, my barely finished antenna got just one basic operational test last night. I monitored the pass of SEEDS II, which was squawking in Digitalker mode on 437.485, which is somewhat higher than the nominal frequency this thing is tuned for (it’s centered for operation around 432). I haven’t really tried SEEDS II in a […]

Will I hear anything from the moon tomorrow? Your guess is as good as mine.

Apparently the Arecibo dish will be streaming video from their location during the Moonbounce event over the next few days. Check out the following link, or the embedded video stream: KP4AO EME on USTREAM: Earth-Moon-Earth EmE transmissions from the Arecibo Observatory, the worlds largest radio telescope.. Science. Free TV : Ustream

Okay, I’m stretching with this one: it’s a link to archive.org and their movie Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip To the Moon, or maybe A Voyage In the Moon) which is perhaps one of the very first science fiction movies, dating back to 1902. At the start of the 20th century, this was […]

A couple of weeks ago, I started working on a version of the DL6WU Yagi that I might be able to get going for this weekend’s Moonbounce activities. I cut and mounted all the elements, but frankly, the feed system is a bit more complicated than I would like so I didn’t get it finished. […]

Okay, okay. The postings about computer checkers haven’t exactly been all that popular with you guys, so I thought I’d write up something that I am currently working on. Moonbounce Day is coming up April 16, 17, and 18, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to try to hear the station operating […]

Just a couple of quick notes for future investigation: Milhouse uses a windowed search with a “soft-fail” alpha-beta search routine. If the value returned is outside a fairly narrow search range, milhouse re-searches the high region or the low region. These re-searches turn out to be incredibly slow. Not sure that I understand why that […]

The FCC has a notice of proposed rulemaking whose purpose would be to amend Part 97.113 to allow radio amateurs who are participating in government sponsored drills to be compensated by their employers. I am actually not a fan of this idea. While the Part 97 regulations acknowledge the value of radio amateurs to provide […]

A few years ago when the amateur satellite AO-51 transmitted a beacon message on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, it was enough to rekindle my interest in amateur radio (which had lain dormant for nearly a decade) and got me working amateur satellites. On April 16, 17 and 18, there is an Echoes of Apollo/Moonbounce […]

I woke up at 5:30 or so this morning, and couldn’t get back to bed, so I thought some more tinkering with Milhouse was warranted. Musing about yesterday’s reading, I realized that I had a bit more work to really try it out: I’d need to write a code to handle regression learning. That seemed […]