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I saw a cool project a while back using the Rust programming language to interface with Commodore disk drives from a modern PC. The project was using the rs1541 crate to access OpenCBM. To do this, you need a converter / cable to connect Commodore’s serial bus to a modern USB port. There are several methods available to do this, but the most popular seems to be the XUM1541 or ZoomFloppy.
I recently discovered Reticulum which is a cryptography-based network stack for building local and wide area networks with various hardware. While reading through the documentation and use cases for Reticulum, I found the RNode firmware that is particularly well suited for use with the Reticulum network, but can also be used for other purposes as well. The RNode firmware can be installed on the…
I’ve found some new software projects utilizing T-Beam LoRa boards that I want to try out (posts coming soon). I’ve got a handful of these boards lying around and they are quite fun to experiment with. Over the years, I’ve played around with Meshtastic and several other packages including TinyGS. The TinyGS project is a global network of groundstations that listen for LoRa…
Last week a coworker gave me a mostly complete MPCNC. The MPCNC or Mostly Printed CNC is a inexpensive open source CNC platform. My coworker was having trouble getting it working and opted to purchase a premade CNC machine instead. He offered it to me and I happily accepted. This is what it looked like when he brought it in. It was mostly working as it stood. I was able to power it on and move it…
This past weekend, while playing around with my antenna setup and my new FTDX10, I needed to do some SWR measurements. I have a few SWR meters laying around, but I also had this MFJ tuner sitting on the shelf doing nothing. It had a nice cross needle meter as well as an integrated coax switch which would be useful for switching between my antenna and a dummy load. I don’t necessarily need…
The other day on mastodon.radio, I saw a post about AREDN, or the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network. I had heard of it before, but never really looked into it, and to be honest, still haven’t really look into it too deeply, but it looked like something I’d be interested in. After a quick poke around on the AREDN website, I hopped on eBay and bought two hAP ac lites (the first device…
I am currently in the process of building an 80 meter SSB rig modeled off of a series of ZL2CTM’s homebrew videos. I’ve added in some relays for transmit/receive switching and added a multi-stage power amplifier, the schematics of which are below. I mostly copied Charlie’s work, but I substituted a handful of components for things I had on hand. The schematics below show the…
Over the weekend, I continued working on my homebrew 80 metter SSB rig, but I ran into a few issues. While working on the output amplifier, I ended up burning out multiple resistors, trimpots, diodes, and transistors. I was getting frustrated, but luckily, a package arrived that shifted my attention. My new FTDX10. I made a few contacts on FT8 and I was able to successfully decode Olivia on 20…
This past weekend, Atlanta hosted the return of the Southern Fried Gaming Expo and Vintage Computer Festival Southeast. We had fun there last year, so we loaded up the family and made the trip again. This year seemed a lot bigger than last year. I’m guessing last year was still coming off of COVID, so things were a little more calm. This year, there were tons of people and there was a lot…
Some time ago, I purchased an RF board off of ebay for a few bucks so I could repurpose the crystal filters. I figured that I’d use them someday and I guess today is that day. Below is a picture of the board as I received it. There were three German KVG filters, an XF-9 S 42, and XF-9 S 43, and an XF-9 S 44. The S 42 filter is an AM/DSB filter, the S 43 is LSB, and the S 44 is USB.