brainwagon

Anyone who is subscribed to the QRP-L has likely been subjected to a long string of complaints against WSPR in the past week or so. This began with a generic complaint against a “consistent carrier” on 7.040. This rapidly decayed into a long series of rants against WSPR. Since I’m rather more fond of WSPR […]

I was bored, tuning around when someone on the #hamradio IRC channel mentioned that the “Cuban lady” numbers station was audible around 5.883Mhz. I was bored. I recorded 10 minutes of her. Now you can be bored too. The Cuban Lady, V2A recorded 1/22/2010, around 11:15PM PST

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 […]

Paul, M1CNK, has a very nice webpage that details his QRSS beacon, constructed as several different kits assembled as modules. Very cool. qrssbeacon (wiltonpaul).

Earlier tonight, I noticed that CW traffic on 40m picked way up. You get an interesting view of the band conditions when you can tune 100Khz at a time: Even with my own wimpy antenna, it was hopping pretty good.

While scanning QRP-L today, I found an interesting link to a project which gave some details about a little WWV receiver that can serve as a frequency standard.   I haven’t had the time to work out how it all works, but it looks reasonably straightforward: Here’s the original schematic from Chuck Adams, K7QO: Nick, WA5BDU […]

This morning I got another chance at HO-68, the newest Chinese amateur satellite that was operating in FM mode. I wasn’t sure what the problem was: I had the PL tone setup right and the signals seemed strong enough. On this pass, I fought to try to find a slot to transmit, and finally at […]

Tonight the amateur satellite AO-51 made an evening pass that was almost directly overhead, and was sending a congratulatory message for Apollo 11, along with a slow scan TV image. I managed to record it, although not the greatest quality, using my little Yaesu VX-3R and my Arrow antenna. Here are links to the recording […]

This morning I was scanning my WSPR logs and my MEPT screenshots for the night. It seemed to be pretty good. I had quite a number of spots into Australia overnight: both from VK6DI (who is nearing the end of his time in VK6 land, we hope to see you again back on the eastern […]

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 […]

I am currently running my 2w beacon with the following sequential multi-tone Hellschrieber ID on 30m: As Colin, G6AVK pointed out, this is likely to be a lot less effective than my previous MV identifier, but if it does work, people might have a better chance of knowing who the beacon actually is. I’ll let […]

Well, last night, I tweaked my recording program to produce recordings in 15 minute chunks and started it running. This morning, I had a bunch of recordings, a short run of which produced the following spectrograms (never tried this WordPress functionality before hope it works out!): Addedum: Sigh. WordPress insisted on converting my nifty names […]

Yesterday, I recorded a couple of hours of signals off of 30m, and ran them through my homegrown spectrogram code for fun. I found the following FSK CW signal (click on it to get it larger): (The blank regions are the two minute intervals where I am sending a WSPR beacon message.) With a bit […]

Okay, after having read WB8ICN’s postings on QRPedia, I decided to try to measure the impedence of both of my meters. I dug a 1.5M ohm resistor out of the pile, and hooked some jumper leads to it. I then did the following: Measure the resistance of the resistor, using the DVM as an ohm […]

Steve Weber has a nice Youtube video on surface mount soldering: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah5HEjDTHUo