brainwagon

While looking at the hadie high altitude balloon project, I got to thinking about making a microcontroller that could send RTTY. I knew that traditional Baudot (more properly the ITA2 code) was a five bit code with codes designed to switch back and forth between “letters” and “figures”, but I had never looked at the […]

While listening to the Amateur Radio Newsline podcast this week, I was interested to hear that a group of hams from Ireland had launched a balloon which transmitted digital pictures back from the balloon while it was at altitude, using a version of dl-fldigi. While I was familiar with fldigi, I hadn’t heard of this […]

For some reason, I’m getting back into the universe of QRSS, or very slow Morse code. I goofed around with this for a while, writing some software to record audio and produce the necessary FFTs so that you can read Morse from these incredibly long Morse messages, but lately haven’t done much lately. Hopefully, that […]

I mentioned that Roger, G3XBM was shifting from the very low frequencies to much higher frequencies. His interest has already uncovered some links that I hadn’t seen before. One very cool thing was his discovery of a local 477Thz beacon (that’s red light) that is aimed roughly in his direction at a distance of around […]

I’ve mentioned Codec 2 a few times in the past, but for those who don’t rememember, David Rowe has been working on a very low bitrate codec optimized for speech applications. This is of interest in amateur radio because we don’t have a suitable speech codec which isn’t patent encumbered (if for instance, DSTAR’s AMBE […]

I’ve stopped hacking on my Arduino/Gameduino satellite tracker for now. Here’s the final video demonstrating it running: I’m currently working on the final schematic which will be posted on this permanent page. The code will be available github.com, for right now, it includes the library that I wrote that does the satellite prediction. I’ll be […]

I was looking for beacon circuits, and ran across VK3YE’s USB powered 40m transmitter. Unlike most simple beacon transmitters, this one transmits double sideband, which makes voice transmission possible. I like the basic idea! USB port powered 40 metre milliwatt transmitter on air – YouTube Very cool. He’s also got an awesome awesome YouTube channel, […]

Legendary QRP hacker Steve “Melt Solder” Weber has some awesome stuff on his website, particularly if you are interested in homebrew ham radio gear.   (Indeed, it appears he’s about ready to offer his legendary ATS-4 5 band rig kits again, experienced kit builders might want to check it out.)   But what drove me to his […]

Like nearly everyone in the Bay Area, I spend too much time in my car, and one of the ways that I endure it is by listening to a lot of podcasts. Most of these are technical in nature, and in particular, I’ve sampled most of the ham radio podcasts out there. One of the […]

I’m not much of a contester (not any kind, in fact) but this weekend is one of the biggest: the CQWW SSB Contest. Expect the bands to be completely awash with chatter from 0:00 UTC October 29th through 23:59UTC October 30th. I doubt I’ll do much, other than maybe hookup my SDR-IQ to scan around […]

This morning, I consulted the little revolving map over there in the left column, and found that I had passed 99,000 views. I reset that counter back in February, and since then nearly 100K people (or more realistically, 99K robots and maybe 1K people) have viewed a page here on brainwagon. I’d like to thank […]

A few months ago I acquired a used IC-735 from my boss, and other than getting it hooked up and using it for the occasional bit of RX, I haven’t actually powered it up and done any QSOs with it. Part of the reason is my inherent “mic-fright”, but I also know that my impossibly […]

Wow. Pretty good jolt today. I was sitting in my office when I began to feel some high frequency shaking, starting weak, but then growing sharply in intensity. I’ve been in California long enough that such things don’t usually perturb me too much, but this one was as strong as I can remember in the […]

While I’m still trying to shake a respiratory infection, I’m hoping that by the weekend I’ll be hale and hearty enough to attend this years Pacificon 2011. It’s a bit of a drive for me in the North Bay, so I suspect I might be there only for Saturday, but it’s remotely possible I’ll try […]

My cat Scrappy decided it was time to film a brief progress video of my Arduino/Gameduino satellite tracker. I completed the basic port and testing of my Plan13 implementation to C++ for the Arduino, and got it running pretty well. It doesn’t seem to be much more compact than Bruce Robertson’s qrpTracker code, but it […]