g7kse.co.uk – Blog

4m Flowerpot antenna

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A little job thats been hanging around is an antenna that is essentially portable but not necessarily tiny for the 4m band. As usual a flowerpot is my standard. So a bit of designing was done to mock up what an antenna might look like. So here is is

Its not exactly ‘fine tuned’ as there are some parts that just don’t work at the moment. I’ve used a fairly heavy GRP tube for the radiating part and its just…too heavy. Perhaps some king of rod would be better that could be broken down into smaller rucksack size lengths with a clip or some arrangement that holds the cable.

Plenty to play about with and it sort of works. So good fun to try these things out

A kindle as a TRMNL?

Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been hankering after a TRMNL for a little while but never got round to getting one. Other stuff got in the way. I also owned a Nook ereader a while ago, but that went to the great ewaste container in the sky. So here’s me search the house for an ereader because I had found a couple of ebooks to read. I found 2. A really old Kindle, the ones with the keyboards and an original kindle touch (7th generation).

So, the kindle with a keyboard and page turning buttons became the one I read the book on. The other was ripe for farting around with. What I actually mean to say is wasting hours of time on. So here’s the plan…

✅ Jailbreak it
✅ See if I can muster a crappy little application for it
✅ Spend hours ‘researching’ (see also going doing interwebrabbitnetholes)
✅ Turn it into a tighwads TRMNL

Mission accomplished! End of post ☺️

What did I do?

There are plenty of sites that tell you how to Jailbreak these things. The crucial this is to know what the serial number is so you can confirm the model, so it’ll ]give you have a chance of completing the job before you draw your pension

Kindle Modding was the guide I used
Find out your model from this webiste
The Kindles MAC address - Handy later but not crucial

Give yourself a good few hours - whilst all the steps seemed to work, when I got to one of the crucial parts something wasn’t right with my install and it all went in circles. Lots of circles. Just follow the guide and eventually it ‘should’ work.

Next up things started to go all techtastic. I have a server of sorts, its just a Raspberry Pi running Dietpi. But I’ve set it up with Docker and Portainer. I half know what I’m doing if the job is pretty painless.

So I logged into Portainer and created a new Stack abd used the Docker script thing for the LaraPaper. I tried Terminus (the TRMNL default server) but it really didn’t work for me. Maybe it was my machine but several hours were gone trying to fix stuff. Binned it!

The Docker script has a crucial extra bit. Teh site didn’t render correctly for me so the ENVIRONMENT VARIABLE FORCE_HTTPS=1 needed to be added

services:
 app:
 image: ghcr.io/usetrmnl/larapaper:latest
 ports:
 - "4567:8080"
 environment:
 # Generate the APP_KEY with `echo "base64:$(openssl rand -base64 32)"`
 - APP_KEY=base64:YOUR KEY HERE=
 # Base URL of the application
 - APP_URL=YOUR URL HERE
 - FORCE_HTTPS=1
 - PHP_OPCACHE_ENABLE=1
 - TRMNL_PROXY_REFRESH_MINUTES=15
 - DB_DATABASE=database/storage/database.sqlite
 volumes:
 - database:/var/www/html/database/storage
 - storage:/var/www/html/storage/app/public/images/generated
 restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
 database:
 storage:

Once the service is up and running you need to find your sever in the browser https//:IP ADDRESS:4567 should do it. Log yourself in and what I did was turn on “Permit Auto Join” in the top right hand corner.

Now this bit was a bit of a mystery, before I knew it there were loads of versions of my Kindle in the list. before I did anything else I turned off “Permit Auto Join” then deleted all but the last one.

So in theory your Kindle is on the Larapaper books, but your Larapaper isn’t on your kindles books. You’ve 2 options here that I tried. The first is the TRMNL kindle extension. Just couldn’t get it to work. After several hours of trying this and that I gave up. perhaps it was a simple fix but I just kept getting JSON errors. So switched my attention to KOReader (which I installed as part of the jailbreak game). There is a plugin for it

BLAMMO It worked.

So that left me with some time to muck about and work out what I wanted to see. I guess this took a lot longer than it perhaps could have but easy half day including the farting about. More competent people could take less time. But my shortcuts are…

Jailbreak
Install KOReader
Install LaraPaper in a container
Install the KOReader plugin

Enjoy - I spend too long doing stuff so you don’t have to

UKAC Antenna

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When the family was younger I had a bit more free time so used to go out on a Tuesday evening and play at being a contester on VHF. I enjoyed the contests because it was a bit of fun. I didn’t really care about the place on the leaderboard, just a bit of fun. As the kids went to more and more clubs and after school stuff my evenings were spent doing other things. Now they are pretty much grown up the demand is less and I’m not a fan of Netflix.

So, over christmas I spent an hour or so on the top of the hill at Sandwidth with the FT817 and Sotabeams SB270 antenna, this time on 70cms and it reminded me of how much I enjoyed it. So I thought I’d rekindle the idea of a better (read longer) antenna for portable use.

The DK7ZB antenna pages have given me loads of ideas in the past but only a few actual makes. This time I have planned out what I call the ‘common boom’ VHF/UHF antenna. I wanted the same idea as the SB270 i.e. a beam drilled with multiple holes for both 2m and 70cm. teh design has sort of started so its worth sharing a bit of the progress. Working idea is a 5 element 2m and 9 element 70cm beam with a common feed. All the dimensions are on the ultralight section of DK7ZB’s website so it should, in theory just be a mechanical job to design it all :-)

HF Packet radio

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A little christmas project for me has been to have ‘proper’ go at HF packet. One of the things that was seeming to make it harder that is should was the IC7300 just wouldn’t transmit consistently. One day it would work and another day it couldn’t be bothered. For posterity here are the setting on QtSoundModem that worked when it was in FT8 “mode”.

A few partial and one total reset later and checking all the settings in the connections menu (and on QtSoundModem) and its all working nicely. The only issue with HF is its a bit easily upset by the sun. This, and it is outstandingly slow has been a bit of a pain. But, leaving it for a bit and some traffic appeared.

With this all happening nicely I attempted to connected to an EI node that was pretty much un-obscured by land. And to my surprise to connected first time

And digging around I get this..an old school news thread. Nice!

So, with a bit of success I started out to specify up anode for myself. A Nino TNC has been ordered from HamServe and I’ve started building a LinBPQ based node. At some point I’ll pull all this together into a node, probably on 2m, with an attempt to make all this join up with the GI nodes across the Irish Sea. Although it’ll probably be a while before it all gets sorted out as LinBPQ seems to be messing me around quite a bit.

52 Week Challenge

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Rather than have 1 post per week, I will be posting a weekly update on my progress in the 52 Week Challenge.

✅ is done 🚧 is work in progress ❌ is not started

End of Year Totals

✅ 43 🚧 3 ❌ 6

Not too bad, perhaps missed a few opportunities but i wouldn’t have done half the stuff I might have done if it wasn’t for the challenge.

Week 1 - Design a QSL card ✅

Job done. The QSL card on the front page is mine…ordered some and so I’ll have to use them now. The JoyPlot is the bit I’m keen on as it comes from the Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures which was done by Peter Saville. There’s a subtle red dot for the QTH and the font is Acid and the logo’s were just turned into single colour ones as opposed to multiple colours.

Week 2 - NCDXF Beacon Listening ✅

Another successful week. I hooked up the IC7300 to Mrs G7KSE’s laptop (she wasn’t impressed) to Faros and let it do it’s thing with the attic antennas. None of which are ideal for beacon monitoring. However the results were really surprising. Stuff that I thought I wouldn’t hear came through quite clear. A typical plot is below.

Week 3 - Make a contact with a different continent on 80m or 160m 🚧

This is going to be hard. Not because of anything weird, just I don’t have an 80m or 160m antenna. But, this did coincide with our fortnightly radio club meet up and a decent bit of propagation and a contact in European Russia at 1285km. Not quite intercontinental but closer than I’ve been before.

Week 4 - Research the history of your callsign ✅

Pretty boring this one for me. I’m the only owner and I’ll be keeping it for life. The only interesting part is that there aren’t that many G7’s. That part was reserved for those who didn’t sit the morse test and were confined to above 30MHz. Fine by me at the time. Packet was more interesting as was SWL’ing.

Week 5 - Update your profile on QRZ.com, HamQTH.com, etc. ✅

So I keep QSL pretty much up to date. But this website is another thing altogether. So the plan is to do a minor edit to QRZ and a focus on moving all the content that sits in all sorts of places onto this. thats a bit more useful I think.

Week 6 - Enter a contest ✅

I do this infrequently, not because I’m keen to score points but for short ones of an hour or so I kind of enjoy it. I’ve dipped in and out of CWT for a while but really wanted to give UKAC another go. I did it quite a bit when the kids were younger but I’ve not done it for a while….so close to a CW contact. Might have to go and do it again if kid transport isn’t on.

Week 7 - Where are the DXpeditions ✅

Probably not one to tax many people. DXWorld has the list. I just never really get to contact them . Can’t be bothered with the bear garden antics for this kind of contact. We’ll have this one as is I think.

Week 8 - Encourage someone to take their ham radio license exam ✅

I might have to come back to this. Whilst i’ve done it in the past and to be honest I don’t know if that person is active at all, I have been more effective in introducing people to extra parts of the hobby. Like APRS, CW and stuff like SOTA. I still want to do the challenge but I’ll need to find the right person. GD4OFB now back in the game! Well done Richard…

Week 9 - Try to work an FM repeater on 10m ✅

Lucky me, on the first attempt when I was at home I tuned into the VE3MMX repeater. Not really expecting to work anyone, but it came in very strong and I made a couple of east coast contacts with it. I checked back a day or so later, having posted my boast on Mastodon only to find that it was inaudible. Just lucky I guess and I’ve not heard it since!

Week 10 - Listen to an amateur radio satellite ✅

Another straightforward one for me. SO-50 is an absolute bear garden at times so I listened rather than tried to transmit. Over the last few years I’ve tried to TX on it only to find it a bit of a pain, so give up quickly. So to expand this a little I assembled the Satellite dish I have in the garage and tried to listen to Oscar-100 with the LNB and RTL-SDR i have. Not a peep, so went round a friends to test it all on his permanent setup. Well it all worked fine. Just can’t seem to get it to work at home. Which is a shame. More to come on that I’m sure.

Week 11 - Receive a weather satellite image ✅

All this a satellite stuff. Dead easy, especially with SatNOGS giving easy access to the APT satellites. To progress this a bit further I looked to improve my Wefax setup and failed at that. Although I have picked it up again and had some much better images using different software.

Week 12 - Make a contact with an “unusual” antenna ❌

Going to come back to this one. I don’t have a suitable tuner at the moment and don’t want to kill off any PA, even if it is a rubbish rig. So will come back to this when I get a new toy.

Week 13 - Make a QSO from an unusual location and post a picture! ✅

I’ve done this a few times but need to to make this really unusual.The weather hasn’t been ideal so I will probably need to figure something out as a SOTA summit or something that I call /p isn’t quite unusual enough.

Week 14 - Implement and describe a backup solution for your ham radio log ✅

I’m not overly fussed about my log book. I use QLog for logging when at home and mixture of paper and phone logging apps for when out xOTA. In the end the logs end up back in QLog. This programme does the backup for me and the adif is also syncronised to a NAS. If I lose it all I won’t worry too much. There’s plenty of opportunity to look to the future rather than the past.

Week 15 - Monitor a transmission and take notes of the field strength ✅

Still need to do this formally, however the simple response would be that I look ast MSF and DCF VLF transmissions regularly to see how things are going, which antenna works best and to basically listen to the beeps. Caught up and made some sensible measurements using a data mode (FreeDV)

Week 16 - Make a contact with a xOTA station ✅

I’ve been ‘doing’ SOTA and WOTA for a long time now. Over a decade, so I have a few contacts to draw on. But for this I did a microwave activation on High Stile and managed 5 QSO’s before moving to other bands. 13cm was the band I used to qualify the summit and I found out that these QSO’s need to be first in the log for the SOTA database to recognise them as a ‘microwave’ activation. Something I’d not done in the past.

Week 17 - Which VHF/UHF repeater is closest to your location? ✅

Closest is GM3MX, best signal is GB3GD on the IoM. Despite MX being just a few miles away we are the opposite side of a hill, so very low signal at my end. I can access through a MMDVM but don’t tend to. So maybe I should try and build a longer term solution that has a MMDVM hat running all the time.

Week 18 - Make a QSO in one digital voice mode ✅

Back to the MMDVM hat here. I do have CFM on the home VHF rig and have only had a handful of QSO’s on it, most of which were through repeaters, I don’t think these count. Alternatively I used LoRa APRS TXRX for general xOTA tracking, so that counts as well.

Week 19 - Simulate an antenna ✅

The MMGAL software takes a bit of getting used to. I simulated my favourite flowerpot antenna to test against a known result. It was a bit squiffy to say the least. Dipoles and other stuff was a basic ask, some of the more complicated ones must have geometries that this software isn’t keen on.

Week 20 - Decode the RTTY transmission of DWD on 10101 kHz ✅

I need to remember this…FLdigi settings are 450Hz shift, 50 bd, 5N1. Simple reception.

Week 21 - Create a GNU Radio flowgraph ✅

Wow, I think I’ve done this in the past but really couldn’t remember doing it. I ended up following a tutorial and in about 15 minutes and not quite adding in the right value in one block (Ooops - The output was OoOoOoOoOoO etc) it all worked. An RTL-SDR is now playing a local FM radio station. amazing!

Week 22 - Simulate an electric circuit 🚧

Ok so this one will be a bit of work in progress. I think I want to build a bandpass filter for either my APRS LoRa station or my Meshtastic one, just to see if it improves things. But this will need a bit more research I think as normal HF type filtering probably isn’t the right thing, so maybe its not a great one for the first circuit. Either way I’ll be using the recommended CircuitLab

Week 23 - How many language can you hear on the radio this week? ✅

TBD when I get a moment to turn the radio on properly. I suspect it’ll be local Europeans on the ham bands and all sorts of languages on teh broadcast bands, I maybe need a translator to work out what they are :-). I used the non contest weekend for this and by far the main ones were the local Europeans, French, Germans, Spanish and Italians. So I went for Broadcast bands and the number of languages was way higher, Chinese, Turkish and loads I couldn’t determine. I prefer the broadcast bands for stuff like this.

Week 24 - Make a contribution to an Open Source ham radio software package ✅

I think I’ve got this covered. In the past I’ve made contributions to the Open Source radio Wiki as well as the SatNOGS database. For non coders like me these are some of the less well loved contributions, documentation. I see these as important as the code itself. If I can’t follow it because it is in Tech Jargon, then its probably ripe for a bit of normal speak. Especially if they are wiki type things.

Week 25 - Locate local noise sources in your shack/flat/house ✅

Using GM3SEK’s advice in his Clean Up Your Shack blog I went round the house to identify noise sources. There are always a few ’new’ wall warts that are a bit noisier than others and I find that noise at my QTH is transitory around Christmas and Halloween with cheap Amazon tat that gets used for lights. 30m is always knackered compared to other bands and I guess this is ADSL but its been hard to prove it. Needless to say when we had a recent power cut it was beautifully quiet here.

Week 26 - Observe the solar data such as sunspot number, flux, K and A values over the week ✅

Well I’ve done this as part of the HamDash fun. I think I’m getting there with all of this stuff now. There are plenty of sites that have detailed breakdown including some clever WSPR and solar data dashboards on Grafana

Week 27 - Listen to the July 2025 SAQ transmission ✅

It wasn’t the July one, but the October UN day transmission I aimed for and despite there being nowt to hear at home I still managed to tune in via websdr and YouTube. Next up will be the Christmas Eve transmission with a bit of luck.

Week 28 - Receive a station on 6m via sporadic E ✅

SSB Es has eluded me for a little while. But FT8 is pretty straightforward. In fact the only transatlantic 6m QSO I’ve had was made using FT8. So lots of European stations to be heard today and the magic band was doing its magic. It would be nice to get an SSB or CW QSO, so perhaps time to check RBN

1Sporadic E

Week 29 - Make your own xOTA activation ✅

Been doing this a while. At some point I’ll make it to mountain goat but thats not the motivation for me. I enjoy being on the Fells and whilst I’m not out as much as I was 3 years or so ago, I get out. Wainwrights and Summits are my usual targets but more recently I’ve done a couple of Parks, but there are just too many of them for me.

Week 30 - Make a contact with another participant of the challenge ✅

I thought this would be simple. But is needed a sked in the end with Andreas, DJ3EI on JS8Call. An odd mode but fun, especially as Andreas did a load of work on the app

Week 31 - Try a mode you have never tried before. Hellschreiber? JT65? ✅

New to me. FT8. I’ve not really been a fan of point and click type modes. PSK31 was as close as I used to get earlier in the century. But my new zBitX has FT8 built in so I thought I’d give it a go. Whilst its not exactly my cup of tea it could be a useful mode for POTA or SOTA if I’m struggling to get contacts. I can’t see it being a primary more though. One mode I’ve fancied having a go at is Hell. I must make some time for that.

Week 32 - Listen to a broadcast station from another country ✅

Like DD1MAT, I listened to the Antarctic broadcast from Ascension island and the UAE (as well as the UK). This broadcast by the BBC send messages to those overwintering in the various Antarctic bases. Its probably not necessary nowadays but is a lovely thing to do for those who must be incredibly isolated. I’ve missed the love broadcast so many times and Cerys Matthews is a regular on 6Music for me. Will listen again!

Week 33 - Build an antenna and make a contact with it ✅

Every time I make an HF contact at home it is with a home made antenna. A W3EDP at home and various end fed or vertical antennas for HF portable. The only commercial antenna I have for ham stuff is the white stick for VHF & UHF. Its been battered by the wind and a bit wonky now but still works fine. For xOTA VHF I use a flowerpot antenna that uses a 3D print which is also my answer to HC43.

Week 34 - Match an impedance ✅

Normal business for us EFHW users. Just a standard bit of kit does that

Week 35 - Receive a weather fax transmission on HF ✅

He He…easy peasy. Love a bit of WeFax

Week 36 - Operate your whole station from battery power for one day ✅

I do this pretty regularly when on SOTA summits. Whilst there I might operate for 30 minutes to an hours, it certainly isn’t a full day on the rig (something I rarely do at the best of times to be honest). so to make up the time a bit I sat outside in the garden until I had run out of time. 3 or 4 hours passed and the 2Ah battery on my MTR 5b and (t)ruSDX seemed to only go down to about 50%

Week 37 - Work 10 DXCCs on FT8 ✅

Made it..12 in total and 3 of these were on 6M. The best was to the US with the 4 ele beam. I don’t think I’ll jump to use the mode but it definitely has its place. I heard all sorts of stations, and worked a few, that I’d never normally get to hear. I can see the appeal but once the initial interest wore off, I found it less enjoyable that others seem to. Teh zBitx manages it really well so I’ll use it as an additional mode from fell tops. My initial experience was that I couldn’t complete a QSO for some reason up on the tops. Something to work on.

Week 38 - Make a contact on Morse code ✅

Made several of these, when I do TX I tend to aim for CW and whilst my skills go up and down through lack of consistent use I can muster a rubber stamp QSO relatively easily, although I do need a bit of a run up every now and again. SOTA and more recently POTA chasing has been a thing for me. Not really fussed about clocking up loads of points or QSO’s just like to give the activator a QSO as I know it can be a frustrating thing on a summit when you have 3 out of the 4 contacts you need in the pouring rain 🏞️

Week 39 - Make a 2-way contact with an output power of 100 mW or less ✅

Does Meshtastic count? if so then its a done deal. Otherwise my UHF LoRa APRS tracker is 100mW max. I’ve used a rockmite for a 30m CW QSO but that’s nearer 300mW and hard on the ears 👂

Week 40 - Which QSLing methods do you use, physical and electronic? ✅

Physical cards, LotW and eQSL. Although I prefer the physical cards, despite them being well and truly out of fashion

Week 41 - Write a poem on your biggest ham radio pet peeve! ❌

Week 42 - Receive a SSTV image ✅

Wow what a faff Linux can be some times. Tried using QSSTV but could not get it to load up the USB audio. So used a Windows 10 VM and MMSSTV and finally got a decode. Couldn’t get it to transmit from MMSSTV so maybe something to add on to the to do list for the future (when I have a free year or so - sort out linux sound :-))

Week 43 - Create a 3D printable design related to ham radio ✅

Done a few 3D prints for ham radio. I keep the useful ones on Printables and am usually work (slowly) on something. Recently enclosures for APRS trackers or portable Meshtastic nodes have been taking up a bit of my time. These aren’t particularly complex to design or print but making a common design has been a bit more time consuming than I had thought.

Week 44 - Receive a QRSS signal on the HF bands ✅

This took a bit of setting up. I tried with QRSSPiG but couldn’t get the audio to pipe through so ended up with Argo on a windows machine. After some faffing with audio levels and dial frequencies I think it looks pretty good. Screenshot is from the 30m band.

Week 45 - Fix something that is broken ✅

My 30m QCX mini wasn’t doing it for me until I realised the AGC circuit was cutting out all the audio. So after testing all the Op Amps I found all to be working fine. It was the setting that was causing the problem! So I guess there was some fault finding and fix

Week 46 - Write a useful computer program! ✅

This is rock hard for me. I’ve no real aptitude for coding and it took a lot of effort and help from others to make it work. The goal is to make a sort of Terminal Dashboard that one day might make it onto an ePaper display. First things first. I made a nice colour terminal output for the solar data that is found at hamqsl. Then turned that into bar graphs and a table. the output is pretty basic but fun. Many hours were used in this. Many

Week 47 - Submit an idea for the Ham Challenge 2026! ❌

Week 48 - Transmit a QRSS signal on the HF bands 🚧

I didn’t get much success on this, despite transmitting I couldn’t tell if my signals were being modulated correctly and being received. I did manage to receive quite a few stations. I used the QCX mini for this and attempted the IC7300. I reckon its fun but limited in its use for me. The stations that were on a lot seem to do it all day every day

Week 49 - Clean up your shack and post the most curious item you found ❌

My shack gets tidied all the time so can’t claim this

Week 50 - Receive an APRS message or beacon ✅

This happens every day with the current VHF rigs. Too easy :-)

Week 51 - Write something about ham radio with public impact ❌

Week 52 - Create an Infographic or Webcomic! ❌

HamDash

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As part of the 52 week ham challenge I decided to try and write a basic application that displayed some common ham radio data on a terminal. the idea was that it would become a Terminal User Interface with stuff I could use. What actually happened was that writing the code was a lot harder than I thought but it still happened, sort of. The TUI bit didn’t really work and whilst I’m not going to abandon all hope, it too more than my little brain to work out what to do.

So the natural progression was to turn this into something I could use on my undesigned and totally unrealised desk module. Something to house a few of the handy boxes I have kicking about that never really manage to make it into consistent enclosures but thats another story altogether. It’s very much a work in progress with some things working sort of ok and other bits not

✅ - Basic menu
❌ - PCB to interface switches that select menu items
✅ - Layout of the screen
🚧 - Solar data - stuff just isn’t lining up right and I haven’t added in the VHF stuff
✅ - SOTA spots
✅ - SOTA alerts
❌ - Contest calendar

zBitX

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The zBitX is a software defined radio (SDR) project that comes from teh the ‘Bit’ stable of HF radio. The specs and details can be found on the link so I’m not going to repeat them here. Needless to say I’m writing about it because I bought one.

Why did I buy one when I already have a few little HF rigs?

Well, because this one is different. The rig runs off a Raspberry Pi Zero (Oh and the screen is managed with a Raspberry Pi Pico). So what? Well this means that a cheap, small and basic radio can have all sorts of additional features packed into it. Out of the box is does what you might expect, CW, SSB and AM but also FT8. I’m by no means and FT8 user but making the mode integrated into the radio makes for a totally different proposition.

Its true to say that this is a work in progress. The case is a sot mix of 3D printing and aluminium heat sink. It functions perfectly, but looks a bit like a homebrew rig (which it sort of is, albeit produced by a well known and respected designer). Stuff that I like..

CW keyer with macros
Integrated Logbook
Works with G7UFU Turret Mic
SWR meter built in

So far I’ve had a play with it at home. My plans are to use this /P but haven’t had the time to take it out in the wild. I suspect that the integrated 18650 battery compartment and small form factor will make this a handy rig to take onto summits. I’ll need a suitable padded bag to protect it. Maybe something I can design and sew at home (I’ve never done this byw :-))

Wefax

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For a few years I’ve dipped into Wefax. I like the idea of a receiver trotting along and generating images from sound. I suppose it is a bit nostalgic but there’s something nicer about investing in a result rather than jusy turning it on. Setting up a reciever and decoding software to optimise the picture, only to be presented with a fuzzy output isn’t entirely awesome either.

So, the happy medium is something that Patrick, ON4CDJ pointed me towards today. I’d been struggling to get a decent image out of the GYA and DDH/DDK Transmissions. So to improve things I’d switched to my Airspy HF+ Discovery receiver (which is amazing btw) only to be stumped with piping audio from one place to another.

The upshot of it is that I’ve now got a working setup with the GYA and DDK transmissions. I’ve also got some good images. Eventually I’ll write this up so it can be repeated though. The key to it all is JWX software. Not much to set up but the images are excellent and it works acros te eusual platforms

LoRa

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For a little while now I’ve been mucking about with LoRa devices. These modules come in all sorts of varieties but all have a few things in common. A microcontroller and at least a LoRa module. Quite a few are ESP32 based with SX… LoRa modules and other are nRF… modules. Basically they are really similar and they seem to be an offshoot of IoT devices. But….and here’s the useful bit. There are 433MHz versions as well as 868MHz versions.

So the 433MHz versions are ideal for APRS and the 868MHz for Meshtastic.

But the 100mW isn’t going to get you very far is it? Well, see for yourself. LoRa is way more effective in practical terms than your usual handheld and experience so far is that the devices are very reliable and cheap. For example, with APRS, a £15 module with a 18650 that lasts all day v a £350+ handheld means that it is also way more accessible. As I get more practical experince with the devices I’ll be able to tell how much better they are.

Adding in flexibility is the key for me. My own Meshtastic devices are connected to a local server via MQTT and also run a BBS and similar functionality is starting to come through with APRS, using the slightly less feature rich TC2-BBS. These additions are really starting to make the networks more up to date and offer other options for users.

Looking forward to seeing how all this develops.

Update to site

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is the start of a different approach to documenting my stuff. Hope it all works out. Main points are

Its still using Hugo
The ‘Digital Garden’ didn’t really work for me
This format is a better fit.