Simple Mandelbrot MovieI was bored. I had five minutes. I wrote some C code. A few minutes later, I had this movie.
YouTube - Simple Mandelbrot Movie
This is also the first time that I have tried to use the Youtube “annotation” functionality. Works pretty well. Wish I could overlay even a static, transparent read more.. Holy Crap.I’m really, really tired of watching the economy implode.
Grid Beam Building SystemI ran across a reference to “grid beam construction”. I didn’t know what it was. Now I do, and it’s kind of neat. Like a kind of Erector set technology for grownups.
Grid Beam Building System
(Heard about it from The Citizen Scientist)
Short Book Review: Hands-On Radio ExperimentsI needed something to read on a plane trip this last weekend, and a quick stop at Ham Radio Outlet had me leaving with a copy of Hands-On Radio Experiments by Ward Silver, N0AX. Ward writes the “Hands-On” column each month in QST, and this book is nothing more than five years of his read more.. Near SpaceLast week, I had a discussion with Ryan Clarke regarding high altitude balloon experiments. He said he was preparing a Wiki, so I took some time out to poke around and see if it was online. It appears to have started at least, check out:
Main Page - Near Space
MERL – TR2003-035 – Very Low-Cost Sensing and Communication Using Bidirectional LEDsA novel microprocessor interface circuit is described which can alternately emit and detect light using only an LED, two digital I/O pins and a single current limiting resistor. This technique is first applied to create a smart illumination system that uses a single LED as both light source and sensor. We then present several devices read more.. My tussle on amsat-bbToday’s example comes from the amsat-bb mailing list. I am a member of AMSAT and a subscriber to the amsat-bb mailing list because it’s an interesting subject that I desire to learn more about and that I enjoy sharing with my fellow hams. But AMSAT is seemingly in a struggle to save itself read more.. khymos.org - blog and website dedicated to molecular gastronomyA fascinating website on food that came up in a discussion this weekend.
khymos.org - blog and website dedicated to molecular gastronomy
In my copious spare time…While awaiting a talk in an undisclosed location, by an undisclosed individual on an undisclosed subject, I found myself with time to finally work on a not-completely-unprincipled inplementation of Doppler correction in my APT weather satellite decoder. Now, completely without human intervention, I can get images like the one below by just handing the read more.. President Elect Barack ObamaEnjoy the victory tonight. Soon, the really tough work begins.
Addendum: For all the crowing that was done last night about how miraculous it was that an African American was elected president and how far we have come, in California, widely hailed as one of the greatest state of free-thinking liberals, Measure 8 looks read more.. CQSS This Weekend…I’m still working on “the code”, but this weekend is the CQ Sweep Stakes, and all the bands are alive with Morse code contacts. I recorded about 10 seconds of audio, and then converted it into a spectrogram so you could see the dozen or more simultaneous signals that are all present in a read more.. Ham RadioTwo of my current interests…
Silly Arduino Project #1: A Trivial BeaconWhile waiting for my K1EL keyer kit to show up, I was twiddling my thumbs, and remembered that I had an Arduino microcontroller board sitting around. I originally bought it for an aborted robotics project, but haven’t touched it in months. I redownloaded the development environment, and a few minutes later, read more.. Google Earth for iPhoneThere is a new Google Earth app out for the iPhone. It’s pretty cool. Grab it from the Apple App store. Nuff said.
Addendum: Okay, it wasn’t really enough said. It has a great interface, which uses the touch screen and tilt sensors in the iPhone to control the panning of the display. read more.. DF0HQ from GermanyI don’t get much from Europe with my low antenna, but DF0HQ on 40m was booming in pretty well!
E51JD from the Cook IslandsThe 15 meter band continues to be pretty strong today. I was getting mostly South America, but tuning around, I heard E51JD calling from Cook Islands tonight. I turned on the recorder and got this:
E51JD from the Cook Islands
Cheap YagiI’ve been meaning to do this for a while: toss together a cheap Yagi antenna suitable for listening to AO-51 on 70cm. If you just google for “cheap yagi”, you’ll find the link to the design. An hour, some 12 gauge aluminum (not optimal, but what I had on hand), a poplar stick, read more.. CQ World Wide DX ContestWell, this weekend is the CQ World Wide DX Contest, one of the larger contest weekends. I tuned up to 15m, around 21.259, and found HC8A booming in. Months ago, my 40m direct conversion receiver was initiated with reception of an RTTY signal from HC8N. Both are stations located on read more.. Sticky Tape X-raysThis is the craziest bit of science that I’ve seen in quite a while.
Sticky Tape X-rays
Steamboat Ed’s Shop in high resolution…Gigapan is a website which displays super high resolution panoramic images, acquired by a special panoramic camera rig. Today, I got a note from Ed Haas, mechanical tinkerer extraordinaire, that his workshop had been imaged. Check out the 1.7 gigapixel image (be sure to pan in and read some of the labels on read more.. Prime Number FunAs some of you may have noticed, I occasionally like to write small programs to compute odd little mathematical curiousities. Something I hadn’t done in a long while was to use the Sieve of Eratosthenes to compute a bunch of prime numbers. I suspect that I wrote such a program very early read more.. First Spot from over the Atlantic via WSPR…Today, on wsprnet.org, W1BW announced that Wednesdays would be “Special Activity Days”, and that today’s special activity would be to operate on 20m instead of the more common 30m. Overall, I didn’t get as many spots as I typically get during the day on 30m, but I did manage to get a read more.. Ordered a K1EL Keyer…My Ramsey 40m QRP rig needs a keyer, so I ordered this nifty one from K1EL. I should be able to install it in a Altoids tin or something similar, and have a nice, fully functional keyer. Then, all I’ll need is a key.
Probably can make a key out of an old hacksaw read more.. blog.bjrn.se: Let’s build an MP3-decoder!At various times I kind of wanted to write an mp3 decoder. Don’t ask why. Anywhoo…. here’s a link:
blog.bjrn.se: Let’s build an MP3-decoder!
I’m now KF6KYI/AEJust got back from Pacificon. Had a nice time, and managed to pass the upgrade exam. I’m now an Extra class ham. Bow down and worship me! (Just kidding.) The test was a lot closer than I thought it should have been: I seemed to get a lot of read more..
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