brainwagon

It’s that most auspicious of holidays: National Talk Like a PIrate Day. All ye scurvy dogs, y’ed best be ex-agg-eratin’ yer ayes and arrs lest Davy Jones rise from the briny bottom and haul ye back to his locker. And now, a scene from the best pirate movie of all time: YouTube – Muppets Treasure […]

Well, I decided to tack together my Ten Tec 1056 receiver kit. It took me about three hours to assemble. It was pretty straightforward to assemble, only one thing confused me: a group of three resistors which were supposed to be 220K ohms didn’t seem to be in the package, however, a quick inventory found […]

I blame Josh for making me take this test.

Wow. This is just too cool. I got my TenTec 1056 receiver kit in the mail the other day, and was just randomly searching for links on the internet giving people’s experiences with it, when I ran across this: YASI This website describes the construction of an amateur radio interferometer using equipment that isn’t much […]

The best description that I’ve found of PSK31 decoding is actually in the WinPSK Technical Manual. Its remarkably informative. WinPSK Technical Manual

This isn’t really all that amazing, but I thought I’d place it here anyway. As part of my experiments in decoding PSK31, I recorded a minute of the 40m band and saved it out as an uncompressed 8000 samples/second WAV file. This morning, I dusted off the fftw library, and wrote a 30 line stub […]

Heh, I was following an innocuous link this morning, and found this little rant by Linus (yes, that linus) about the use of C instead of C++ in git. He could have been channelling me. [RFC] Convert builin-mailinfo.c to use The Better String Library. [tags]Rants and Raves, C++[/tags]

Rob Pike is an interesting guy. Formerly Bell Labs researcher, now at Google, Rob Pike has not only done more innovative and development in operating systems and programming languages than I can shake a stick at, he’s also built telescopes, appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, and was the 1980 Olympic Silver Medalist in […]

So called “steam punk” has been getting fairly popular lately. The idea is to take modern implements and reimplement and restyle them as if they were constructed in the Victorian era. It’s kind of silly in a way, but there are lots of opportunities for interesting craft projects and techniques. Today, I encountered this interesting […]

Yep, I’m still on my radio kick. Ran across a link to this interesting book, available for download as a bunch of PDF files that entices you to homebrew your own ham radio equipment. Cool. Book Copyright (c) 2006, Frank W. Harris / HTML and PDF assembly Copyright (c) 2006 AmSoft

In one of my previous posts, reader Jim suggested that: The use of digital modes in amateur radio really puzzles me. The beauty of radio is its technological simplicity. If I want to communicate digitally, there are wonderfully complicated and beautiful ways to do it on the Internet. But give me a few transistors and […]

Well, after listening to one of the soldersmoke podcasts which described the old Drake 2-B as one of the premier communications receivers of all time, I began eyeing mine in a slightly different light. I’ve had this little guy in storage for eight years or so, and my experience with it was that it was […]

The original Apple iPhone was released on June 29th of this year.  68 days later, Apple announces that they are cutting the price by $200. I guess we can infer from this that Apple decided the iPhones weren’t selling as well as they would like, and that the new (very good) price point will help […]

Well, not the rear panel of my Drake 2B. The markings on the back of mine have faded considerably, so much so that it is hard to read the lettering associated with each of the connectors. Luckily, I found a good picture of the rear panel on the web, which I’m archiving here for the […]

Recently, my brain has shifted back into ham radio mode. My license had expired back in May, and I decided to renew it, and as a result, my interest was also somewhat renewed. I’ll probably bore you some more with this in the future, but I was down at Ham Radio Outlet, picking up a […]