brainwagon

Nothing too exciting going on, but minor bits of code and play have been done, so I thought I’d update. First of all, there is a program for decoding SSTV on the Pi, called QSSTV. I don’t have a proper sound setup on the Pi yet, so I couldn’t test it live on the air, […]

Previously, I had written an encoder for the Robot 36 SSTV mode. I chose this for a simple reason: it appears to be the most common mode used in downlinks from satellites, such as the ARISSat-1. It’s not a bad choice, and presents reasonable quality in just 36 seconds. Today, I decided that I should […]

So, this morning I played around a bit more with my Raspberry Pi code to try to see if I could make an SSTV beacon. The idea was to use two existing bits of code, raspistill and my own SSTV encoder (robot36), and glue them together with a small bit of Python. The code uses […]

Yesterday’s musings about SSTV using the Raspberry Pi has me thinking about creating a little SSTV beacon using the super-inexpensive (less than twenty dollars with charger) BF-888S HT from Baofeng. It’s hard to imagine a cheaper HT than this: it doesn’t even have a display. It has 16 channels, and announces which channel you are […]

Today I found an interesting Instructable on running SSTV on the Raspberry Pi. It uses an interesting bit of software which uses the Pi to directly generate an FM signal. Strictly speaking, I doubt this is a great idea without some outboard harmonic filtering, but it’s cool that it could be done. I recalled that […]

A while ago, Bill Meara from Soldersmoke brought Ashar Farhan’s new design, the Minima to my attention. The Minima is a general coverage transceiver which has a lot of cool features. It’s a superhet design which is Arduino based (actually, it incorporates a bare bones Arduino, which is little more than an Atmel ATMega328 chip.) […]

I haven’t had a lot of time to operate JT65/JT9, my preferred digital mode at the moment, but I often leave my receiver hooked up and monitoring the bands for reception reports. My wet-noodle of an antenna can usually pull in signals from about 40 different counties in the span of a week of monitoring. […]

I love cheap hacks and cheap gadgets. Don’t get me wrong: I also like the expensive good stuff, but if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want and need, spending a lot of money on gadgets just isn’t in the cards. But if the gadgets are cheap enough, experimentation becomes possible for […]

For the last several days, I’ve been running the latest version of wsjtx using my RFSPACE SDRIQ software defined radio, and just logging the results. Previously, for most of my JT65 needs, I used JT65-HF, but I was interested in trying out the JT9 mode as recommended to me by numerous hams. JT9 uses a […]

It’s cool. It’s cheap. You might want to get one. Okay, for those of you who haven’t heard of them, the Google Chromecast is a little $35 gadget that plugs into the HDMI port on your TV and allows you to watch stream Netflix/YouTube/Google Play videos from your iPad/iPhone/Android/laptop device on your big screen. with […]

This is probably boring to a great number of you, but a recent FCC proposed notice of rule making has been getting a lot of play lately. RM-11699 is a proposal to allow encryption of traffic in amateur radio so that we can handle information of a sensitive nature in times of emergency, especially information […]

I didn’t get a whole lot more amateur radio done.   I spent some time running JT65, mostly on 20m, but sometimes skipping up higher to 17m and 15m.  I’m still eight states short of my WAS, and was teased by stations in NV, WY and ND, which I managed to start QSOs with, but didn’t […]

I’ve been leaving my radio monitoring JT65 frequencies for the last week, largely on 20m, with occasional diversions to 40m, 30m, and 17m. JT65HF can upload all your spots to pskreporter and from them, you can download an ADIF log file. I thought I’d see what stations I heard over the last week, and the […]

A few days ago, I wrote about the EZCAP EZTV645 dongle that I got which could be used with RTLSDR software to implement asoftware defined radio that only cost $20. I also had ordered a NooElec radio (similar, but with the R820T tuner that most people seem to favor) as well as an MCX-SMA adapter […]

Okay, I knew that my radio was acting deaf, and I thought I’d know what was wrong. I use a low doublet antenna made from speaker wire, and it has been outside, weathering the elements for quite some time. Sure enough, when I went outside, I saw that one of the connections feeding my balun […]