{hacking,music,electronics,radio}

Here are the toots from my Mastodon account. If you’re into ham radio and technology this is a great inclusive server with an awesome mascot called Alex.

It's Alex! A soft brown mastodon holding a handheld radio in their right hand and carrying a blue bag over their shoulder

Alex, the mastodon.radio mascot

Posted status:

WSJT-X 2.3.0-rc3 is out

This fixes some regressions and bugs “defects” and crashes and adds an improved FST4W decoder.

Release notes at: https://physics.princeton.edu//pulsar/k1jt/Release_Notes.txt

Announcement at:

https://sourceforge.net/p/wsjt/mailman/message/37190747/

#hamradio #wsjt

→ View toot on mastodon.radio

Posted status:

I realised I had missed out on following a load of cool people, so just went through the profile directory and added almost everyone on this server.

Until there’s a way to auto-follow everyone it’s worth keeping an eye on the “Local” page as well as “Home” so you don’t miss out.

→ View toot on mastodon.radio

Posted status:

Helping Dad get LoTW working (again!) with the QRZ Logbook.

It turned out he had applied for new certs and was still using the old ones in the QRZ log, and it was only possible to see the export was failing via the low site.

While I really appreciate the nerdery that went into the design of the LOTW system it could definitely be a bit more user-friendly.

Also the QRZ logbook seems a lot less fully featured than most other logging software I’ve looked at, and that’s all been free.

→ View toot on mastodon.radio

Posted status:

It will be interesting to see what happens to the CentOS project when it’s a RHEL upstream. I can see the advantages (mainly to RedHat) but it remains to be seen if it’s as stable as we currently expect. , also it definitely feels like a breach of trust.

Here’s LWN’s write-up: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/839523/c3a0c4f074799116/

#linux #centos

→ View toot on mastodon.radio

Posted status:

I’ve neglected my WSJT-X announcement duty!

WSJT-X 2.3.0-rc2 was released on 2020-11-15.

Release notes at: http://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/Release_Notes.txt

Mailing list message at: https://sourceforge.net/p/wsjt/mailman/message/37152287/

I don’t think there are any obviously visible changes here. I’m hoping it will work properly on a Pi, which the previous rc didn’t.

#hamradio #wsjt

→ View toot on mastodon.radio

Posted status:

Etherify: This is a really cool hack which uses ethtool to transmit morse which is then picked up by an SDR.

https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2020/Nov/4

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueC4SLPrtNg

#hamradio

→ View toot on mastodon.radio

Posted status:

The first release candidate for WSJT-X 2.3.0 is out.

This release adds two new modes for LF/MF, called FST4 and FST4W.

I had heard some rumours about this but not looked into them!

Release notes at:

http://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/Release_Notes.txt

Mailing list message at:

https://sourceforge.net/p/wsjt/mailman/message/37117193/

#hamradio #wsjt

I’ve not managed to install this on my Pi, despite it running the Buster version of Rasbpian, there’s no version of libgfortran that’s new enough.

But considering I’m not on 2200 and 630 m that’s no great loss!

Ahh, the deps are wrong, expecting an updated package at some point.

→ View toot on mastodon.radio

Posted status:

These new(ish) RX-888 SDRs look interesting:

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/nils-reviews-the-rx-888-a-sub-200-16-bit-32-mhz-bandwidth-sdr/

and

https://dk8ok.org/2020/09/04/rx-888-32-mhz-16bit-200-us-pricks-up-your-ears/

1 to 32 MHz via direct sampling, and streamed over USB. Nice!

→ View toot on mastodon.radio

Posted status:

http://k0lwc.com/new-ham-radio-onboard-the-iss-is-on-the-air/

The new radio on the ISS is a modified Kenwood D710G, nice.

→ View toot on mastodon.radio

Posted status:

Almost downloaded a gig of MPLAB to try to program a PIC using a pre-supplied hex file…

… only to discover there’s a tiny GUI tool for the PICkit 3 programmer I have. Win! Actually, I just used Windows as last time I tried this stuff on Linux it was really hard.

I definitely prefer AVR stuff, but I guess that’s what I’m used to.

I’m building an N7DDC ATU kit from eBay.

PICkit 3 programmer software on windows. Some device information at the top (PIC16F1938) some hex in the middle and some more hex (EEPROM data) below.

→ View toot on mastodon.radio