Great to see that 2W0KPF (@Powyssafety) managed to get his exam venue sorted. Looks like his plans for a mid-wales foundation course are coming along nicely.

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WSJT-X 2.0.1 to macOS was re-released due to some speed and stability issues:

https://sourceforge.net/p/wsjt/mailman/message/36605323/

#hamradio #amateurradio

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Just had a first play on 2m FT8 with my new FT818ND. Max distance so far is 138 km, not bad with 5 watts.

Of course now I want to replace my 2m feedline with something better than RG58 and check everything’s watertight.

#hamradio #amateurradio #ft8

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Just caught some of the SpaceX/NASA Dragon docking webcast. Totally mind blowing (albeit slow) action and a successful dock! In a couple of hours they should be able to open the door and go in.

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Just my shiny new µArt ( https://www.crowdsupply.com/pylo/muart) to flash some custom firmware on a couple of cheap Sonoff wifi switches ( https://www.banggood.com/DIY-Wi-Fi-Wireless-Switch-For-Smart-Home-With-ABS-Shell-p-1019971.html). They now work with Alexa without some dodgy third party cloud service.

It’s funny that the USB UART I used cost considerably more than the devices!

Of course these switches don’t have any sort of earth passthrough, so I guess I’ll need to add something if I want to use them with almost anything useful.

Also, the firmware I used was Tasmota ( https://github.com/arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota/) which supports other cool things like MQTT as well as Belkin emulation.

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WSJT-X 2.0.1 dropped earlier in the week: https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/wsjtx.html

The release notes list bug fixes rather than shiny new things: https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/Release_Notes.txt

#hamradio #amateurradio

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Absolute genius: https://medium.com/skills-matter/the-horrors-lurking-in-your-legacy-codebase-616d7d631f35

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Didn’t manage to do everything I wanted to this weekend, but I did manage to build my £3 crystal tester, and this SOTABEAMS end fed tuner, plus wire it up ready for a test a tune on 40m.

I also managed to make up some test resistors to calibrate my cheap SARK 100 antenna analyser clone.

Actually I’m pretty happy with that list of stuff!🤔

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Enjoyed watching this eevblog video on making a DIY EMC probe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xy3Hm1_ZqI

I definitely don’t need one, but it’s cool nonetheless!

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I always find https://crontab.guru/ super useful when tweaking cron entries. It’s more convenient than the man page and simpler than embedding a big comment at the top.

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