brainwagon

I think Bill and Pete have been having way too much fun with the radio projects centered around the Arduino and the SI5351, so I decided to join them and ordered one of Adafruit’s SI5351 boards (I still have the kit from Jason’s Kickstarter which will almost certainly be better once I get up the […]

I am a big fan of Bill Meara N2CQR and Pete Juliano N6QW, hosts of the really great Soldersmoke Podcast. Together, they chat about homebrewing ham radio equipment, and what they’ve learned in their lessons along the way. Their “tribal knowledge” is of terrific help to someone like me who keeps making small forays into […]

Well, it’s not pretty, but I was just using a 17″ whip antenna on my VX-8GR, recorded it with Audacity, and then decoded it with MultiScan on my Macbook. The first bit of the recording is pretty rocky, so I had to start the sync myself. I’ve bean meaning to do some experiments with bad […]

I imagine that some of you are getting bored with this, so I won’t post another 20 minutes of hummingbird video. But I will post a couple of things. For instance, I cut a frame from the videos at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. You can clearly see […]

Note: This post was adapted by an email that I sent out to our ham radio club. If anyone is interested in a fun little ham radio related activitytonight, you can try to receive slow scan television from the International Space Station this weekend. I haven’t done this in a while,but I think I’ll give […]

Okay, I got it realigned to better center the frame, and expanded it out to 4×3 aspect ratio. Minutes later, I had got a new capture. Lots of fun! Addendum: Within the next hour, I got the following. I used cropping to give you the image of the bird at the full resolution. Addendum2: Hey, […]

Commenter Andy wanted a version of my classic code that could generate a tone instead of just blinking an LED. I mentioned that I had done this before, but frankly couldn’t find the source code, so I modified my existing program to implement the simplest possible tone: a simple square wave. Rather than using a […]

This morning, the Tweeti-verse (I can’t believe I just used that word) informed me that Thomas, LA3PNA had constructed a VHF beacon using the Si5351, and I was tagged as somehow helping: VHF beacon with the Si5351. code: https://t.co/OkgZXKFSKc , video: http://t.co/hbZl9F76Aj based on code from @brainwagon @NT7S — Thomas S Knutsen (@la3pna) March 9, […]

I like reading old books and old magazines. Luckily, the Internet is making a lot of that kind of material available online for free. A couple of quick links to some items I’ve found recently on the subject of amateur radio: Radio News was published from 1919 to 1959. PDF scans of every issue are […]

Snapped with my iPhone, held to the eyepiece of a Questar equipped with a solar filter…

Thomas’ talk about the Minima at Pacificon has got me thinking about building one of my own. I actually have quite a few of the necessary parts in my junk box, but lacked a few things, so I made a quick list and sent a quick order off to Tayda. Tayda has really good prices […]

Pacificon is the local yearly hamfest, which took place at the Santa Clara Marriot this weekend. I couldn’t go for the entire weekend, but I decided that spending at least part of my Saturday amongst my fellow hams would be good fun, so I set my alarm to an annoyingly early time (for the weekend) […]

Allright, last night’s experimentation with the RTL-SDR dongle on my Raspberry Pi Model B+ was pretty successful. Incidently, I forgot to mention that this worked fine with the dongle plugged directly into the Pi, I didn’t need a powered hub. That’s pretty cool. Previously, I had experimented with decoding ADS-B signals from airlines. I thought […]

Scott Haley mentioned my old Hellduino post on Facebook: a simple project that used an oscillator powered by an Arduino to send Hellschreiber, a kind of simple fax mode invented by Rudolf Hell in the 1920s. I did this mainly as a simple test, inspired by Steve Weber, KD1JV’s “temp2morse” project. But unfortunately, that page […]

I’ve been doing a bunch of reading about digital ATV operations lately. I was originally motivated by hearing about the HamTV project aboard the ISS. Back in 2007, I got re-energized into ham radio by learning that for the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, the amateur satellite AO-51 would broadcast a cool message that I heard […]