brainwagon

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 […]

The honor goes to Chris, WB5FKC. Chris and I exchanged signal reports occasionally back when I last was on the QRSS kick a couple of years ago, so it was nice and fitting that he was the first to spot me again. The signal is pretty rocky, but the power level here is just 100mw, […]

Sometime last week, I got my Etherkit OpenBeacon kit in the mail. Like many of my projects, it was probably destined to sit on the shelf for some time, but in a fit of personal productivity (for a loose definition of productivity) this week I cleared a few hours of my time and got it […]

Here is a snapshot from my QRSS grabber earlier today. You might want to click it to see it full size: I’m curious: what phenomenon is causing the strong line doubling of the signals near the bottom? Note: not all the signals demonstrate this phenomenon, and it’s relatively rare, and commonly just fades away. Also […]

I could of days ago, I blogged about WA0UWH’s Propeller Beacon. Over the last couple of days, I worked on fixing a few small issues with my old beacon code, and have an experimental QRSS grabber up and running on qrss.info. And, what’s totally cool is that I’m hearing Eldon’s QRSS beacon, just over 700 […]

This link will make my various Propeller loving readers happy: Eldon, WA0UWH received a Propeller microcontroller board for Christmas, and decided to try to use it to create a QRSS beacon. With other microcontrollers you generally just program it to generate a keying signal that passes into a FSK input on some other transmitter/oscillator. But […]

Well, this morning I did a bit more work on my G0UPL beacon kit. As I mentioned yesterday, I got was having difficulty with the frequency swing: despite a very tightly wound gimmick, I was getting just a little over 1Hz or frequency shift. Late last night I decided to just try a new one: […]

I ordered myself one of Hans Summers’ QRSS beacon kits before Christmas, and it arrived a few days ago. Yesterday, I started tinkering it together, and today got it hooked up and began testing. First, the good news: The oscillator is running. I was able to adjust it with the trimmer to get it into […]

For some reason, I’m getting back into the universe of QRSS, or very slow Morse code. I goofed around with this for a while, writing some software to record audio and produce the necessary FFTs so that you can read Morse from these incredibly long Morse messages, but lately haven’t done much lately. Hopefully, that […]

This morning, I see K6FIB back, this time in all caps as he said he would be, along with perennials KC7VHS and WA5DJJ. Good clean signal. Still no trace of him on WA0UWH’s grabber, but KK7CC has no trouble getting him:

Monitoring the QRSS part of 30m this morning for the first time in a while, got this new face: Addendum: A few minutes later, I tuned up the band so I could see WA5DJJ, and got this nice screen grab, along with KC7VHS:

For fun, I’ve got my new RFSPACE SDR-IQ running on my laptop using Spectrum Lab and monitoring the 30m QRSS beacon subband. I enabled its HTTP server, and now have set up a little cronscript to copy its display to my webserver once a minute. You can see an example display below (showing KC7VHS, AA5CK […]

Over the past few days, I finally got a windows box up and running so I could run the official WSPR executable from WSJT. In the short time I’ve been listening, I’ve gotten quite a few spots from stations who haven’t been able to hear me. I made a quick map of all the sites […]

A while go, I posted a link to AA5CK’s website and his use of the iduino as a QRSS keyer. He used a little oscillator/buffer from Nightfire Engineering along with a home brew, single transistor amplifier. So, I ordered two. And built one. At $7, who could resist? It works, but it obviously isn’t very […]

Well, I woke up this morning, kind of bleary eyed, and decided to see if I could reach any of the other QRSS grabbers during the morning hours. VE1VDM’s grabber is apparently only receiving his transmit signal, but W1BW was up and running… There I am, drifting up in frequency across the bottom. Copy is […]