Today I might have destroyed my feet, but it was a nice day out. Ms. B and I went for a long walk, 14km, 8h walk up the Brecon mountains on very rocky paths. I had a massive 10kg+ backpack with all radio equipment, water and food. It was one of the hottest days of the year, literally in the middle of a heath wave. I love this view I also had brand new walking boots which literally destroyed my feet. After 7w they're still just healing and as I walk it hurts very badly. Another sheep wants to become a Radio Sheep, very interested in our equipment. We set up for picnic at 1 after 3h of climbing and walking. We played with the radio for an hour, made some 6m FT8 work, I yelled for CQ on 2m FM but didn't hear anyone replying although I could hear the occasional contact someone else was making. As we walked around the mountain ridge then we realised how long our path is. As we came down I realised we weren't anywhere near the end of the path but at the middle yet, and we had ru...
A while back I stumbled upon VK3YE 's excellent video about building a mag loop antenna out of a bicycle wheel. Building some type of loop like this has been in my mind for a long time so I shopped for variable capacitors that could handle this on eBay and got some junk. They weren't cheap. Overall I spent way too much money on this antenna compared to something off the shelf like a number of Am-Pro sticks could have been bought but that's not the fun (or frustration) part of it. I have had some MTB wheels in the garage for years, collected from bikes that have gone to the Rust section of the Silicon Heaven. So finally this Saturday I got off the couch and wandered down to the garage. After checking out the two front and two back spares, I picked the one that's in worst shape, a front wheel with scored rims which came out of an old Raleigh bike i had picked up from Freecycle which was beyond any meaningful repair. The rim was in a relatively good rust-free shape and t...
So, my sister had an Arm-powered Asus C201 Chromebook. This recently got de-supported by Google, it's no longer receiving any updates. It's light, the battery lasts 10h+ and still quite reasonably fast so it's a rubbish decision by Google. Soooo, I've installed PrawnOS on an SD card. PrawnOS is a distribution for this hardware, runs on Debian 11 but it's got a custom kernel. The graphics card is well supported and works fast enough, (unlike some other Arm Debian distro I had tried) but the Wifi is an utter failure. The maintainer refuses to support the binary blob required. An old USB Dell docking station was borrowed from the office IT guy so that I can at least update and work on the thing. So far I've managed to get QSSTV and FLDigi working on it. FLDigi actually works quite well - all of this is plugged into the FT-818 via ttyUSB0 and a small £4 USB Soundcard that actually works very well. But JS8Call and WSJT-X refuse to detect any sound card, nor they p...