Playing with GPS

I must have spent too much time hearing the other Elecraft K3 owners talk about fancy precision oscillator stuff because when the idea got into my head that I could make a really ‘simple’ embedded NTP server with the bonus side-effect of a GPS disciplined oscillator, I could not get the idea out […]

Lego CW Iambic Paddle

As I read the April 2011 edition of QST, they featured a picture of a CW key made of Legos on page 20. I thought to myself that this was the kind of project I was up to. Rather than a straight key like N1LF made, I decided to go with an iambic paddle. You […]

DDRR for the car

I got bitten by a little APRS bug this week, right after I finished assembling my K3 while waiting for the power supply and coax to arrive. I wanted an antenna we could mount on the top of Lauren’s minivan for any roadtrips we might take. But because it is not MY car, there are […]

Foray into HF

I have been saving my pennies (er, dollars) for almost 18 months so I could buy myself a shiny new HF base station radio without breaking the bank. I ordered stuff this last Monday in hopes that it would get here in time for my birthday. I was pleasantly surprised at how fast Elecraft […]

A USB CW Keyboard

After getting my amateur radio license without having to pass a CW test, I felt a little bit cheated, so I vowed that I would learn CW and do my best to help keep it alive. After all, that is one of the two things that I remember about ham radio from my childhood (beeping […]

Radio Frequency Exposure (RFE) Calculator

So far in my amateur radio career, I have not been able to offer much that may be of use to other hams. That changes today. A while back, when I was dreaming about where to put my antennas safely, I did a lot of research about radio frequency exposure. I poured over OET Bulletin […]

Combating SpamBots

The war against spam is ever escalating. Two weeks ago I took my anti-spam tactics to the next level. I want people to be able to post comments to my website without registering. Anonymous comments (or rather unverified authors of comments) should be available if the webmaster sees fit. But I have found that in […]

Server Tinkering

I was born to tinker. I think this must be the opposite of the optimizer. I see a project in anything that I could tweak to make it a little better. This not only applies to computers, which are the easiest thing to tinker with, but food, DIY projects, and more. This particular post is […]

MythTV 0.23 running on Lucid

Bella, my mythbox has been overheating for the past few months when the furnace has been running. Whenever we would watch HD content, decoding (and likely resizing) the stream to our screen would take too much CPU horsepower. Watching an HD stream would use nearly 100% of one of the two 2.1GHz Athlon cores. Then […]

AVR junkie paradise

I have been pining for some shiny tiny hardware that would look good in the CW (Morse code) paddle that I am making. Arduino had been a first choice for several days. I was on the verge of buying a couple of boards when I came across PJRC’s Teensy. It really is teensy. But […]