brainwagon

LB3RE sent me a link to this awesome HF beacon by Anthony, F4GOH and Christophe, F4GOJ that has many of the same features as my (as yet still in-progress) beacon transmitter does. And, of course, his actually exists, so it’s already infinitely more awesome than my idea. I was particularly interested in his very simple […]

Previously, I wrote about a project I called the Big Box O’ RF. I’ve shifted goals a bit, and done some experimentation, and have changed some of my goals and approach. First of all, I’ve changed the goal a bit. Instead of being a piece of test equipment, I’m actually more interested in using it […]

One of the things that I really like about the Teensy LC (besides its low price) is that it has three hardware serial ports. Hardware serial ports are just nicer than the SoftwareSerial ports that you see on the ordinary Arduino platform. While the latest support for SoftwareSerial ports on digital pins work reasonably well […]

I hooked up my new DS3231 clock module to an Arduino that was being fed with the one pulse per second input from a locked GPS, and counted the number of pulses from each. In 3170 seconds, the clock module generated 103874565 pulses, for an average pulse per second of 32768.0015773 pulses per second. That’s […]

Greetings readers. I’m hopefully wishing there is still more than one. This weekend was the Bay Area Maker Faire 2015, the 10th incarnation of an event which has become increasingly (even frighteningly) popular. I’m tempted to channel Yogi Berra, who said “Nobody goes there. It’s way too crowded.” Anyway, I got out of my house […]

Yesterday, I mentioned the idea of using the cheap ESP8266 as a clock source for a WSPR beacon transmitter. My initial idea was to basically write code for the Arduino that connected to a remote NTP server, formulate UDP packages… sounds like a pain. But then I found that there was alternative software I could […]

Yesterday I finally found a copy of the code that I wrote years ago to figure out the tone sequence for messages used by the Weak Signal Propation Reporter system. To avoid losing it again, I decided to put both the C versions and the Python versions on my github page so that even if […]

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 […]

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 […]

I haven’t been doing much work on ham radio lately. In fact, I haven’t even had my IC-735 hooked up since before Thanksgiving. But today, I decided to try to dust off the old equipment and see if I could get it powered up. After much digging around for all the right cabling, I got […]

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 […]

For the last couple of days, I’ve let my FT-817 and the WSPR software monitor 40m, 30m, and 20m (shifted as time permits, and as propagation shifts). Last night I managed to set a new distance record by hearing ZS6BIM in South Africa, at a distance of 16,941km. I also picked up a couple of […]

I was interested in the WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter) system for quite a while, but have not recently been running it from my home QTH. Yesterday, I decided to give it a whirl, and set it up to run on 30m (the classic frequency) to see what I could get. In the past, I’ve […]