brainwagon

While reading up on the Broken Window Fallacy, I found this interesting article: Economics in One Lesson Briefly put, the Broken Window Fallacy is that when a boy tosses a ball through a window, he’s actually committing an altruistic act for society: since the shopkeeper with the broken window will have to hire a glazier […]

Earlier today, I was tuned into 30m listening for the the DXpedition to the Clipperton Atoll, transmitting using the callsign TX5C. The signals to there were really quite odd, they were characterized by deep fades, with the band going fairly quiet, then a few loud morse stations swelling up, and then suddenly a huge chorus […]

I spent a little time this morning moving my 20m dipole up a bit higher (to no noticeable effect) but then did start getting some SSTV images from 20m. Here’s the first one I received: I was using the MacRobot SSTV program.

Well, I didn’t record this off the air, but I did take the raw data from the NOAA 18 weather satellite (more on how to get this later), and converted it into a jpeg using a program of my own devising. Addendum: The NOAA data contains five different channels of data. This one looks pretty […]

I was just scanning around the bands when I got home from work, and tuned up 30m, the amateur band between 10.100Mhz and 10.150Mhz. I heard some voice on 10.126, which is odd, since the band is dedicated entirely to Morse and data transmissions. What was even odder: it consisted entirely of a woman repeating […]

VE7BPB was telling KC9MUC how to make a quickie 6m dipole out of a chunk of coax on the irc #amsat channel. I don’t think (inexperienced ham that I am) that I had ever seen this exact technique before. Digging around, I found link to the method on the web, so I won’t have to […]

I didn’t hold high hopes for the NOAA 15 pass tonight, but the combination of the late evening twilight and the nearly overhead pass made a pretty nice looking pass. Pretty nifty, I think. Addendum: The above image appears pretty dark, so I cut out just the visible light portion of it, rescaled the brightness […]

With all the pondering of satellites that I’ve been doing lately, it seems inevitable that I would have to develop some interest in rocketry. Here’s a link to get you all started down the same path: Association Of Rocket Mavericks

Got stomped. Oh well. AO-51 Pass, February 23, 2008 Addendum: N3CRT tried to record it too. His recording is here.

I’m a teeny bit confused. The strong source of HF-FAX transmissions that i’ve been recording and decoding is broadcasting at night on 8.502 Mhz. I thought (based upon some link i can no longer find) that the transmissions were coming from Australia. But this website which has a list of HF-FAX transmitters suggests that it’s […]

One of the greatest science fiction movie of all time is without doubt the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet. One of the reasons it was so successful was the oddly futuristic electronic music of Louse and Bebe Barron, true pioneers in electronic music. What’s really odd is that NASA’s latest recording of radio signals from the […]

Worked a bit more on the code. It now sets the appropriate horizontal size and aspect ratio, and I tuned it to actually have the appropriate line length to keep the orientation straight. It still doesn’t find the sync pulse yet, but it will soon. Interestingly enough, the sound card is accurate to less than […]

Got home, and didn’t feel like standing outside in the rain and wait for a satellite pass. But I did feel like doing something radio related. So, while sitting on the couch during Big Brother, and the first 10 minutes of a recorded episode of Boston Legal, I hacked together a simple program that did […]

Ditch the diet soda if you’re trying to lose weight In a study to be published today, American researchers found that rats fed yogurt sweetened with zero-calorie saccharin later consumed more calories and gained more weight and body fat than rats fed yogurt sweetened with sugar. Yep, I know, this story has nothing to do […]

On Saturday afternoon, I was tuning around with my FT-817, and heard VP6DX calling CQ on 20m SSB. He was working split, transmitting on 14.190 and listening on 14.245 (from memory, have the split frequency wrong). It turns out that he’s part of a DXpedition: a trip by a radio amateur to go to a […]