brainwagon

I’ve been trying to do a bit more Arduino programming and interfacing lately. Nothing too difficult, but just trying to expand my junkbox and my skills so that I can quickly prototype new ideas and expand the kind of projects that I can tackle in the limited time that I seem to have for playing […]

Update: Welcome Hack-a-day readers! If you are looking for the schematics for this “transmitter” (really just a simple oscillator, send some love to radio guru Steve Weber over at his website. You could really use any oscillator you like, even a canned oscillator (although the square waves would generate lots of harmonics). Yesterday’s project coupled […]

Before toddling off to bed last night, I did a bit more tinkering, and a bit of thinking, and then a bit of research. The YouTube video I made showed that the spurious radiation from just attaching a clip lead from the oscillator to my oscilloscope gave enough signal to inject itself into my RFSpace […]

My G0UPL QRSS beacon is working pretty well, but is only putting out about 40mw of power, when it probably should be putting out 100mw. I was pondering oscillators in general, and (as I do often) surf for information and inspiration. I found both on Steve “Melt Solder” Weber’s website, in the form of a […]

I’m beginning to correct some of my misunderstandings re: JFETs and for some reason, oscillators are beginning to become something that I think of as interesting, particularly at very low voltages. Without comment, and for future perusal, I just present this cool link, which shows oscillators which can run on very low voltages (just a […]

Here is a snapshot from my QRSS grabber earlier today. You might want to click it to see it full size: I’m curious: what phenomenon is causing the strong line doubling of the signals near the bottom? Note: not all the signals demonstrate this phenomenon, and it’s relatively rare, and commonly just fades away. Also […]

I’ve recently begun to try to systematically (if somewhat erratically) equip my home office (it aspires to be a lab) with the necessary parts and tools that I need to assemble projects which interest me. The reason for this is simple: if you have the tools, material and space to do a project, you will […]

I could of days ago, I blogged about WA0UWH’s Propeller Beacon. Over the last couple of days, I worked on fixing a few small issues with my old beacon code, and have an experimental QRSS grabber up and running on qrss.info. And, what’s totally cool is that I’m hearing Eldon’s QRSS beacon, just over 700 […]

My twitter intro says that I am an “enthusiast for enthusiasm”. When I wrote that, it was simply because there are some questions that I really think aren’t helpful at all. Questions like: Why didn’t you just buy X instead of building your own? Didn’t somebody do that years ago? Why are you playing with […]

This link will make my various Propeller loving readers happy: Eldon, WA0UWH received a Propeller microcontroller board for Christmas, and decided to try to use it to create a QRSS beacon. With other microcontrollers you generally just program it to generate a keying signal that passes into a FSK input on some other transmitter/oscillator. But […]

Well, this morning I did a bit more work on my G0UPL beacon kit. As I mentioned yesterday, I got was having difficulty with the frequency swing: despite a very tightly wound gimmick, I was getting just a little over 1Hz or frequency shift. Late last night I decided to just try a new one: […]

I ordered myself one of Hans Summers’ QRSS beacon kits before Christmas, and it arrived a few days ago. Yesterday, I started tinkering it together, and today got it hooked up and began testing. First, the good news: The oscillator is running. I was able to adjust it with the trimmer to get it into […]

I was intrigued by @monsonite’s challenge to extend Tiny BASIC for the Nanode. I don’t have a Nanode, but I do have some Arduinos, and extending Mike Field’s Tiny BASIC port to include some additional Arduino functionality seemed pretty straightforward. An hour or so staring at the code told me pretty much all I need […]

My experiments with generating RTTY signals yesterday made me begin to think about generating RTTY signals with an Atmel/Arduino setup. The obvious way is to use PWM and a low pass filter to approximate a sine wave. While doing a bit of research, I found the following link which seemed to be nearly ideal: it […]

So, this morning, I was trying to test my understanding of the ITA2 code used in amateur radio teletype communications. I wrote up an encoder, generated some test audio files, and tried decoding them with fldigi. It mostly worked, but I had some difficulty with certain punctuation marks. I was curious what the problem should […]