I’m really, really tired of watching the economy implode.

I ran across a reference to “grid beam construction”. I didn’t know what it was. Now I do, and it’s kind of neat. Like a kind of Erector set technology for grownups.

Grid Beam Building System

(Heard about it from The Citizen Scientist)

Last week, I had a discussion with Ryan Clarke regarding high altitude balloon experiments. He said he was preparing a Wiki, so I took some time out to poke around and see if it was online. It appears to have started at least, check out:

Main Page – Near Space

A fascinating website on food that came up in a discussion this weekend.

khymos.org – blog and website dedicated to molecular gastronomy

While awaiting a talk in an undisclosed location, by an undisclosed individual on an undisclosed subject, I found myself with time to finally work on a not-completely-unprincipled inplementation of Doppler correction in my APT weather satellite decoder. Now, completely without human intervention, I can get images like the one below by just handing the .wav file recording to my code, and displaying the resulting image. Here’s an old recording, processed with my new code:

Enjoy the victory tonight. Soon, the really tough work begins.

Addendum: For all the crowing that was done last night about how miraculous it was that an African American was elected president and how far we have come, in California, widely hailed as one of the greatest state of free-thinking liberals, Measure 8 looks like it passed, writing an explicit ban against same-sex marriage into our state’s Constitution. As a married person with a partner of the opposite sex, I can’t imagine how denying George Takei his right to spend the rest of his life with Brad Altman defends my marriage from anything.

We have met the challenge of the future, and the challenge is us.

I’m still working on “the code”, but this weekend is the CQ Sweep Stakes, and all the bands are alive with Morse code contacts. I recorded about 10 seconds of audio, and then converted it into a spectrogram so you could see the dozen or more simultaneous signals that are all present in a small bit of the 40m band. It’s chaos!

Try clicking on the image above for a closer look.

While waiting for my K1EL keyer kit to show up, I was twiddling my thumbs, and remembered that I had an Arduino microcontroller board sitting around. I originally bought it for an aborted robotics project, but haven’t touched it in months. I redownloaded the development environment, and a few minutes later, I had it happily blinking a Morse beacon message on pin 13, as well as typing the beacon message repeatedly out on its serial port.

It’s a trivial program, and the Arduino is capable of much, much more. When I get home, I’ll solder together a simple keying circuit and try it out on my FT-817.

Addendum:

Here’s the code running while hooked to my FT-817.

There is a new Google Earth app out for the iPhone. It’s pretty cool. Grab it from the Apple App store. Nuff said.

Addendum: Okay, it wasn’t really enough said. It has a great interface, which uses the touch screen and tilt sensors in the iPhone to control the panning of the display.

I don’t get much from Europe with my low antenna, but DF0HQ on 40m was booming in pretty well!

At various times I kind of wanted to write an mp3 decoder. Don’t ask why. Anywhoo…. here’s a link:

blog.bjrn.se: Let’s build an MP3-decoder!

… languages which don’t implement tail recursion properly. You have no excuse. Seriously.

I’m looking at you, Python.

For the next week or so, Richard Garriot will be aboard the ISS. Richard’s dad was the first astronaut to use ham radio to talk to radio amateurs from orbit, and Richard will be operating ham radio during his stay, including the ability to send slow scan television images directly from the ISS. To get a bit of a head start, AMSAT configured AO-51 to transmit SSTV images, which I tried to record using my hand held yagi. As you can see, it wasn’t that great, but the ISS should have about 20x the radiated power, so I still might luck out and get some good images.

You can look at images as they are downloaded via the ARISS SSTV blog.

Still, it’s kind of cool.