Blog Archive — Page 11

My First, Easiest (and Last?) SOTA

Written on Sunday 30 Jun 2024

Wait, “Last”? Well the truth is, it might be my last, but definitely not because we had a bad time. I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first, if you spotted a couple of weirdos on a hilltop with a big antenna yesterday, this is what was going...

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New Callsign Day!

Written on Wednesday 19 Jun 2024

I’m happy to say that for the third, and possibly final time, it’s New Ham Radio Callsign day for me! Over the weekend I finally got around to sitting my Full amateur radio licence exam, thanks to the great help I received from the Online Amateur Radio Community (OARC). In...

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A Brief History of my Early Tech

Written on Saturday 25 May 2024

As a teenager I was somewhat obsessed with early “Personal Electronic Organisers”, ancestors I suppose of today’s smartphones. For a while I’ve been trying to pull together a list of exactly what devices I owned, from the earliest devices up until the point everyone had a flat black rectangle in...

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Meshtastic!

Written on Friday 1 Mar 2024

Meshtastic really seems to be taking off at the moment—certainly at work, and it seems in the wider world as well. If you’ve not heard of it before, it’s software designed to run on cheap LoRa radio boards like these, and provide an “off-grid” messaging and tracking capability. It fills...

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Setting up Proxmox on the Home Lab

Written on Sunday 18 Feb 2024

I have spent the last couple of days moving my two “home lab” servers over to using Proxmox Virtual Environment as their base operating system. This is the latest step in my attempt to separate out and containerise the tasks that run on our home network. Starting from one very...

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A New Project: Plane/Sailing Portable

Written on Saturday 18 Nov 2023

As I lamented a few years back while first putting the Plane/Sailing system together, my location down in a “dip” prevents me having line of sight to any AIS-equipped vessels or APRS transponders. While AIS coverage is surprisingly workable, APRS tends to only get a few packets in if someone...

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First Steps with Winlink

Written on Sunday 20 Aug 2023

Just in time for this week, I saw a post from W0RMT advertising a Friday Winlink net, and figured I should take part! Winlink is a digital radio system that I’d not really considered using before. In terms of digital ham radio modes I’ve mostly played with the likes of...

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Spring, Year Four

Written on Friday 5 May 2023

Spring, year four. Just like each of the last thirty-something years, the blooming of the lilac trees brings with it May Day, my birthday, and the acceleration of Spring into the coming Summer. For the first time since I was three years old, one of those lilacs is in my...

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Making Meteograms in Python

Written on Sunday 9 Apr 2023

I have a couple of Raspberry Pi computers sitting around, and given the recent situation I figured I ought to at least use one for something. I thought I would have a go at some kind of passive information display, and discovered these ultra-widescreen displays which look pretty cool. At...

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Getting the Boat Back Together

Written on Sunday 26 Mar 2023

After seven years sat in storage, I have finally decided to dig my old RC boat out and have another go at it. I last touched it seven years ago, when I got it working as a remote control toy, but stopped short of getting it fully autonomous. There were...

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