Archive for category: Amateur Radio

Mini balloon tracker…

October 26, 2012 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

I was listening to Amateur Radio Newsline to a story about a lightweight balloon payload that crossed from Great Britain to Sweden carrying a payload which weighed less than 100 grams and using just 10mw. I thought that was cool, so I googled around and located these neat instructions on building a lightweight GPS tracker. […]

Simple code implementing the SmoothLifeL cellular automata…

October 18, 2012 | Amateur Radio, Computer Graphics, Computer Science, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

Without further ado… if you want code to implement this: You can download this this zip file. Do with it what you will.

The Larger than Life variant: Bugs…

October 12, 2012 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

Having written the previous FFT based implementation of Conway’s life, we can easily implement life variants with larger neighborhoods which run just as fast. This is a variant called Bugs, which has a neighborhood of radius 5, and includes the center square. If it is “alive” and has between 34 and 58 neighbors (inclusive), it […]

Another Friday Fly Day, another crash of other people’s planes…

September 14, 2012 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

For reasons which continue to escape me, Mark decided to let me try to take up another of his planes this morning. Last week, I took his EzFly up, with the net result of a mangled prop (which caused the heavy vibration in last week’s video) a cracked wing (repaired with Foam Tack, good as […]

Ultimate QRSS kit arrives…

July 21, 2012 | Amateur Radio, WSPR | By: Mark VandeWettering

I have an on-again, off-again love affair with beacons. I spent many a day monitoring QRSS beacons on 30m, and have built a series of different beacon transmitters. Most of my work has been inspired by Hans Summers, G0UPL, so when I found he was selling something called the Ultimate QRSS kit for a mere […]

About “Where are the Positive Hams? And How to Tell?”…

July 15, 2012 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

Steve, K9ZW wrote an interesting post on his blog: Where are the Positive Hams? And How to Tell? – Part I « With Varying Frequency – Amateur Radio Ponderings. I understand what he’s saying, and while I don’t think it’s wrong per se, I think my own opinions are somewhat at right angles to the […]

Progress on my Worked All States on JT65…

July 5, 2012 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’m down to 10 states remaining for a JT65 WAS: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Nevada, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. I think I have outstanding QSOs for at least one of those, so soon I hope to be down to single digits. If you are a ham who does JT65 […]

Happy Birthday Alan Turing…

June 23, 2012 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

Today would have marked the 100th birthday of Alan Turing. Turing’s contributions in artificial intelligence and computing alone would have guaranteed his place among the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, but that was only a small part of his genius. His pioneering work on cryptography at Bletchley Park allowed the British to crack the […]

A few more notes on the OpenBeacon…

June 7, 2012 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

A few days ago I wrote about my experience building the OpenBeacon, and Jason Mildrum, NT7S, it’s creator was nice enough to happen by my blog and leave a comment. In that original article, I said that the instructions were (and I quote) “barely adequate”. Jason asked (perhaps more politely than was truly deserved) what […]

First reception report for the K6HX OpenBeacon…

June 5, 2012 | Amateur Radio, QRSS | By: Mark VandeWettering

The honor goes to Chris, WB5FKC. Chris and I exchanged signal reports occasionally back when I last was on the QRSS kick a couple of years ago, so it was nice and fitting that he was the first to spot me again. The signal is pretty rocky, but the power level here is just 100mw, […]

My OpenBeacon is on the air…

June 4, 2012 | Amateur Radio, My Projects, QRSS | By: Mark VandeWettering

Sometime last week, I got my Etherkit OpenBeacon kit in the mail. Like many of my projects, it was probably destined to sit on the shelf for some time, but in a fit of personal productivity (for a loose definition of productivity) this week I cleared a few hours of my time and got it […]

Working toward Digital JT65 WAS award…

May 30, 2012 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’m currently working toward something something which I don’t normally do: an achievement award. For about two months, I’ve been trying to log contacts via the JT65 mode on ham radio, with the eventual goal of making contacts in every state. It’s not a particularly difficult award: I suspect that it will mostly require patience […]

States heard in the last week on JT65

May 12, 2012 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’ve got something like 30 states worked via JT65 over the last month or so, but I’ve obviously heard a lot more than that. I took my listening log, extracted all the U.S. callsigns, and then wrote a simple Python/sqlite script to look up each state for the callsign, and see how many states I’ve […]

Countries heard (not worked) on JT65 in the last 7 days…

May 11, 2012 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

Not a bad list, really, given how crappy my antenna is. Most of the DX was heard on 20m. Alaska, Argentina, Asiatic Russia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, Curacao, Czech Republic, England, Estonia, European Russia, Fed. Rep. of Germany, Finland, France, Gabon, Guantanamo Bay, Hawaii, Indonesia, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Puerto […]

Beating the dead horse: the search for “quality” in radio amateurs…

May 11, 2012 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

Last night the mailbox contained the latest copy of QST magazine, which always means at least a few minutes of interesting reading. I usually read the magazine more or less front to back, flipping through. I mostly enjoy technical content, but reading about other aspects of the hobby (contesting, etc…) as an interesting diversion. Sadly, […]