brainwagon

April 9th is Tom Lehrer’s birthday. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY

I was having some difficulty spotting my beacon: both on WA0UWH’s grabber, and via WSPR spots. I figured that maybe my jury rigged antenna had fallen down, or I had some kind of similar hardware failure. Oddly though, my receiver seemed to be going strong. I went over to my setup, and found that the […]

I’ve gotten a couple of additional sporadic spots from DX locations, so I thought I’d update my WSPR map again. This shows my reception from the Russian station RA6AS, Canadian VE1VDM (of Big Ears fame, and my most distant North American spot) as well as the LITCHFIELD station in Northern Australia. I’m still at 37 […]

I was dusting off some of my old code for computing pi to many decimal places, and was reminded that I’d never written similar code for computing a more basic value: the square root of two. The usual way to do this would be to use Newton’s iteration to solve x2 – 2 = 0. […]

Regardez!

For all my close friends who I’ve chatted with about today’s adventure: I’m home, and doing fine. But seriously, ouch.

I’m glad I didn’t try my hand at my second Softrock today. Instead, I decided to wire up all the programmable message buttons on my K1EL keyer (I had mounted them, but didn’t bother connecting them the last time I hooked them up). Man, my hands were jittery, I guess those two Diet Cokes really […]

Sadly, last night I was working late, and was tired, and managed to delete a chunk of my grabber recording source code. The bad news is that I didn’t have it backed up, so I have to rewrite it. The good news is that hey, I get to rewrite it! Seriously, it’s only a few […]

Well, after failing on 20m earlier in the day, I waited a bit, until I saw that Felix, DP1POL had shifted from 20m to 40m. I then flipped my beacon/grabber over to 40m, and gave it a try at the 5w power level. And… Timestamp Call MHz SNR Drift Grid Pwr Reporter RGrid km az […]

Well, I’m not sure that the Softrock I put together is working entirely well. I’m beginning to believe that the transformer that I wound might be bad. My receiver seems a bit deaf, and also seems to have only about 20db or so of opposite side rejection (I’m getting images of signals on both sides […]

While I won’t get quite as many spots with 10db less power, I think it’s more sporting. I’ve been seeing quite a bit of IMD on WA0UWH’s grabber, and stations VE7TIL have been receiving me with very large signal to noise ratios. I’ll let this go at the 250mw level for a day or two, […]

This is just a strange little story. I’ve wanted to add some time markers to the spectrum display on my grabber at http://qrss.info, but really didn’t want to link in any kind of fancy graphics code. Really, if I had the data for a simple 8×8 pixel bitmap font, I could plot the characters myself […]

I think I’ll need to borrow an oscilloscope and see what’s going on. Frankly, I think I just made too many mistakes during assembly. Since I know at least four I made and corrected, I suspect another four luck under the cover. The primary oscillator seems to be running, but I am no longer certain […]

Okay, this one requires a bit of imagination, but it looks like my sequential, multi-tone Hellscrieber ID is at least weakly making it to VK6DI. I’ve marked it with the question mark. Below is where I believe my K6HX-CM87 should be, and above, just under the legend is my simultaneous WSPR message.

This morning I was surprised by two WSPR spots from a callsign reported as BY3AKL1X, located in grid OM89ua. If you look it up on the map, you’ll find it’s Tanggu Park, near Tianjin China. I was confused, but then realized that this was the call of KL1X, who (as pointed out to me by […]