Value generation at the crossroads of life and technology
I mentioned in a previous post that I ve been running AI locally on my relatively modest machine.It has definitely been an experience where I have diverged into many detours like looking at Koboldcpp rather than Ollama and the range of models available at HuggingFace, rather than the ones that Ollama knows about. I have noticed Continue reading Continued experimentation with local AI tools
A while back I posted about a Magic 8 ball that I made with Fusion 360 and a Raspberry Pico. At about Christmas time I purchased a few kits from Printkits. I was very happy with the kits and the quality of their work. I asked them if they would be interested in the Magic Continue reading Printkits has released the 8 Magic Ball
For about the last several weeks I have been experimenting with AI tools that I could run locally on my windows PC that has 64GB of RAM and a graphics card (GeForce RTX6060) with 12GB of VRAM. I have installed Ollama for Windows along with Qwen3-coder:30b as the model. Since I have Tailscale installed, I Continue reading Experimenting with locally hosted agents and LLMs
I recently purchased this filament dry box and found the manual lacking in detail about many of the devices capabilities. This is my early attempt to document the interface, as well as pull together content from a variety of sources. Hopefully, folks will find it helpful.
I hit my 200 contact goal (I actually had 201 unique contacts). I used two digital modes only across 3 bands. Band\Mode FT8 FT4 Grand Total 15m 62 24 86 20m 40 20 60 40m 55 55 Grand Total 157 44 201 Here is the hour by hour (UTZ) breakdown: 27th 28th Total Band 18 Continue reading Field day 2026 is complete
Every June, amateur radio operators across the United States and Canada gather for one of the biggest events in ham radio: ARRL Field Day. Sponsored by the American Radio Relay League, Field Day is part emergency preparedness exercise, part contest, and part community celebration. For 24 hours, hams set up temporary radio stations in parks, Continue reading It is ARRL Amateur Radio Field Day again
One of the enhancements I mentioned would be possible in the initial post was to make it so that if the Fox hunt transmitter cannot find the network, it would create its own network. This would allow the user to update the settings via a web interface. This version has that functionality: Most of the Continue reading Update to Fox Hunting Xmitter to create its own access point
In my recent posts, I’ve been diving into two interconnected projects: designing a low-pass filter to clean up the RF harmonics on my 2-meter fox hunting transmitter, and assembling a handy, sub-$10 VNA test fixture. In this entry, I’ll walk through hand-winding a tiny air-core inductor and outline a step-by-step process for validating their exact Continue reading Winding and testing an Inductor…
I’ve had a VNA for quite a while, but have really only used it for measuring antenna SWR. Since I was looking at rolling my own inductors for the low pass filter, I invested in a VNA test fixture. They are $10 so not a big investment. The fixture needs to be assembled but it Continue reading A test fixture for component measurement with the Vector Network Analyzer (VNA)
Another thing that some folks complained about was that I used MicroPython on the ESP32 rather than C++, in my previous fox hunting post. I decided to tackle this code conversion using the Gemini AI tool with the prompt: In the role of an expert ESP32 Arduino C++ developer, analyze the following MicroPython code and Continue reading Converting the MicroPython fox hunting software to C++