Wasting time effectively
Successful VHF (and higher bands) contest operating is a bit different from what you may have seen in HF contests or at Field Day . In short: Ask stations you work if they have other bands, and then let them know what frequencies and modes you have on those bands. If an operator sitting next to you asks you to tell a station to come back to them, it is probably because they didn’t get enough…
A little over five and a half years ago, I wrote about retiring Guilt . Well, I have some good news! Earlier this year, I was contacted by Frediano Ziglio about restarting guilt development. After some discussions, we concluded that Frediano should become the maintainer. In other words: Guilt is maintained again! Not wasting any time, he collected and committed a number of fixes from the various…
This is a guest post by my wife, Holly. In the software industry, some problems don't have Google-able solutions. Just like I can't Google where I left my keys, when I last got an oil change, or why I still haven't filed my taxes, I also can't Google what the race condition is in my code. To answer these questions, I must look inside myself. Usually. "I hope your trip is going awesome and I hate…
This post has been written in Markdown. This blog is running on software that I wrote a number of years ago after being inspired by David Graham who threw together his blog using a couple of shell scripts. I was using Wordpress, which was a behemoth, and I thought that writing my own would making blogging a more pleasant experience for me. (It did.) I quickly learned that I needed to support more…
A week ago, I participated in a 242 km bike ride from Bedford to the Harpoon Brewery in Windsor . This was an organized event with about 700 people registered to ride it. I’ve done a number of group rides in the past, but never a major event like this, so I’m going to brain-dump about it. (As a brain-dump, it is not as organized as it could be. Shrug.) This was not a race, so there is…
First, a little bit of history… Many years ago, I tried various phone apps for recording my bike rides. Eventually, I settled on Strava. This worked great for the recording itself, but because my phone was stowed away in my saddle bag, I didn’t get to see my current speed, etc. So, in July 2012, I splurged and got a Garmin Edge 500 cycling computer. I used the 500 until a couple of…
I had this draft around for over 5 years—since January 2019. Since I still think it is about an interesting observation, I’m publishing it now. In late December (2018), I was preparing for my next instrument rating lesson which was going to involve a couple of ILS approaches at Worcester, MA (KORH). While looking over the ILS approach to runway 29, I noticed something about the minimum…
Late last summer I decided to do a simple experiment—feed my server a PPS signal that wasn’t synchronized to any timescale. The idea was to give chrony a reference that is more stable than the crystal oscillator on the motherboard. Hardware For this PPS experiment I decided to avoid all control loop/feedback complexity and just manually set the frequency to something close enough and…
A recent upgrade of FreeBSD on my desktop resulted in just about every program (Firefox, KiCAD, but thankfully not urxvt) rendering various ligatures even for monospaced fonts. Needless to say, this is really annoying when looking at code, etc. Not having any better ideas, I asked on Mastodon if anyone knew how to turn this mis-feature off. About an hour later, @monwarez@bsd.cafe suggested…
Yesterday, I saw KM1NDY’s blog post titled Scribbled Antenna Blueprints . I wasn’t going to comment…but here I am. :) I thought I’d setup up a similar contraption (VHF instead of HF) to see what exactly happens. I have a 1 meter long RG-8X jumper with BNC connectors, a BNC T, and a NanoVNA with a 50Ω load calibration standard. But first, let’s analyze the situation!…
There is already a number of different fox hunting designs out there—both commercial and hobbyist built. Therefore there is no practical reason to make another design, but educational and entertainment reasons are valid as well. So I made one. I put together a project page which talks about the project a little bit but mostly serves to point at the source, binary files, schematic, and a…
This post is about a fox hunt organized by the Bristol County Repeater Association in September 2022. (Information about the last/next fox hunting event .) Unfortunately, I didn’t get to participate in the BCRA June fox hunt because it conflicted with the ARRL June VHF contest . As a result, I was rather excited to participate. Just like last time, Holly joined me. Our goals were: Find the…
I am a happy user of 1/4 wave verticals and hamsticks, but I’ve been thinking that I should look into another antenna type to add to my bag of tricks when I go out to do a POTA / WWFF activation. The hamsticks are easy to set up and completely avoid dealing with people tripping over wires, but they aren’t as good as full-sized antennas. On the other end of the spectrum, 1/4 wave…
In the late 90s, I messed a little bit with electronics but I stopped because I got interested in programming. This last January, I decided to revisit this hobby. I went through my collection of random components and found one 555 timer chip—specifically a TS555CN. I played with it on a breadboard and very quickly concluded that I should have more than just one. Disappointingly, sometime…
This post is about two of the fox hunts organized by the Bristol County Repeater Association in 2021. (Information about the last/next fox hunting event .) July 31st, 2021 This was my first fox hunt of any kind. To improve the chances of success I teamed up with KM1NDY and AA1F. They participated in at least one BCRA fox hunt before, so they knew what to expect. (You can read KM1NDY’s…