Blog Archive — Page 11

A Combined ADS-B and AIS Map: The Hacky Way

Written on Monday 12 Aug 2024

The Online Amateur Radio Community runs an instance of tar1090 to aggregate ADS-B and MLAT data received by its members. While not strictly “amateur radio”, it’s adjacent enough that it generally sits in the area of ~50 contributors at any one time, and gives us pretty good coverage of most...

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POTA Activation Report: Old Harry Rocks

Written on Sunday 21 Jul 2024

It’s another weekend, and time for another Parks on the Air adventure. Not just any weekend in fact—it’s POTA’s Summer “Support your Parks” weekend, so there’s even a certificate in it for this one. Well, a downloadable PDF of a certificate, but still. It’s also part of the Worked all...

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POTA/WWFF Activation Report: Brownsea Island

Written on Sunday 14 Jul 2024

Since my first activation gave me the “outdoor radio” bug, I had been checking out the local POTA spots to see what the local scene is like. Some spots have dozens or hundreds of QSOs from some monster activators like M0MJA and 2E0HPI, whom I could never dream of catching....

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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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