brainwagon

Here is a link to Frederick Collins’ 1922 version of The Radio Amateurs Hand Book. Neat. Addendum: Radio telephony for amateurs also appears pretty cool. It was published in 1922, and includes a circuit for a regenerative receiver, which I recall was invented only around 1917. Addendum2: Can you tell I’m on a crystal radio […]

This week, the powers that be have enabled the second repeater on AO-51 for use. Uplink is on 145.88 and the downlink is nominally on 435.150 in addition to the 145.92 and 435.300 which are its normal frequencies. Apparently not a lot of people know about this schedule change though, because the only person I […]

This link came across the softrock mailing list. Preserved for its many cool ideas! HF SDR receiver ideas from YU1LM

I like working AO-51. It’s the easiest of the easy satellites, with strong signals, little fading, and is workable with small handheld antennas or mobile rigs of the sort that many hams already have. Unfortunately, it’s not always the most courteous place to operate. All sorts of impolite operation seems to be the norm, especially […]

It has been quite some time since I worked AO-27: the passes usually occur in the early morning and early afternoon, which isn’t all that convenient for me. But today I happened to be around for the pass, so I gave it a try: March 16, 2008 pass on AO-27 Worked W6ZQ, DM42 (which I […]

Nice high pass this evening, got a few people. Pass seemed a bit tougher than normal, I was waving the antenna around alot trying to get the best polarization. Worked: N6TWW CM98 Mike K7WJS DM41 KI6NUG Heard WB7AEA, but he seemed deaf to my appeals…. AO-51 on March 12, 2008

Got N6LY, who had apparently just assembled his own Arrow antenna. Neat! N6LY on SO-50

I was tuning around this morning, and caught WA9HCZ, Jerome in Wisconsin, sending Hellschrieber on 10.139Mhz (in the 30m band). It was actually the first “in the wild” Hellschrieber that I had heard, so I quickly fired up cocoaModem to decode it, and also recorded some of the audio in Audacity so I could experiment […]

The ARRL is the premier amateur radio organization in the United States. It’s two major purposes are to promote interest in amateur radio, and to represent amateurs in legal and legislative matters that affect amateur radio. Today, they posted a link to their view of amateur radio in the 21st Century: ARRLWeb: It Seems to […]

I decided I needed a break, so I wandered outside and caught the SO-50 pass from the parking lot using my TH-D7A and my trusty Arrow antenna. SO-50 has a reputation of being a bit finicky: I seem to always be struggling a bit with it, rotating my arrow can seem to either completely null […]

Well, I was going to try AO-16, but as it turns out, I forgot to charge my FT-817, so I only got six minutes of receive from it. Oh well, not too bad, after all, I needed the practice tracking the Doppler. This was the first time I got audio which wasn’t complete crap. 😉 […]

Several recent direct conversion receiver designs that I have been looking at use something called a Tayloe mixer. It’s an interesting way to construct a mixer. It turns out, it’s covered by a patent. Here’s a link to it. Product detector and method therefor Daniel Richard Tayloe I found the patent number while reading up […]

Sigh. Just went out to try to work AO-51, couldn’t hear anything from the satellite, nor could I raise it. It was only after I got back inside that I remembered that the powers that be had scheduled some days where the 1.2ghz uplink was active. Sadly, that means that while passing by California, not […]

Well, beneath a beautiful crescent moon and a stunning view of Orion, I set up to work AO-51 again. Sadly, on the eastern pass I suffered the usual fate of handheld users: totally dominated by users who feel that because they have more power, they don’t need to yield to others. I usually have a […]

For fun, I downloaded cocoaModem: a program that decodes many modes, including RTTY, PSK31, and SITOR-B. SITOR-B is similar to RTTY, but is used by the USCG to send out weather alerts to ships at sea. It took me a few tries, but I finally got the hang of it (it’s a little odd compared […]