This weekend Dad (@Powyssafety) visited and we upgraded my antenna pole! We managed to make it a fair bit higher, so I’m hoping it won’t offend anyone enough to cause complaints, but that hasn’t happened so far!

I’m looking forward to seeing what difference having the white stick above the roof line makes, after rejigging some cables and maybe adding some surge protection.

Now I need to get back into the tree and see if I can raise things a bit on that end too!

#hamradio #amateurradio

Migrated my domain’s MX to ProtonMail. So far I’m really impressed with the look and feel and ease of setup.

Migrating away from gmail will be a gradual and probably painful process!

@feroz hi! Can you see this?

Talking of maplin. If anyone on this instance and in the UK wants any RP-crimp SMA plugs or sockets then let me know.

I’ll happily send a few (no charge!) to anyone who needs them. I think reverse polarity is generally used for WiFi gear. I have a bunch of each for RG174 and RG58.

I also have a load of other random connectors, just nothing particularly common, so if you’re looking for something odd then let me know and I’ll see what I have.

#hamradio #amateurradio

Naturally I ran out of crimp connectors so after digging through my Maplin haul I’ve ended up with a “Clamp-on” BNC plug. And it has loads of bits so I’m searching for info how to assemble it!

My Mum’s husband won an Airspy HF+ Discovery! Lucky thing.

Now I’m crimping up some cables to try an get a basic working antenna for him. He’s not licensed, so this’ll be SWL. Going to start by lending him a 40m EFHW kit from SOTABEAMS. Totally forgot I had it!

#sdr #amateurradio

Hearing good things (on the net) about the Antuino ( http://www.hfsignals.com/index.php/antuino/)

First on SolderSmoke and now Hackaday ( https://hackaday.com/2019/09/18/hackable-ham-radio-multitool-contributes-to-long-term-survival-of-the-hobby/)

Time to add one to the Christmas list!

#hamradio #amateurradio

Yay! Sprat! Always an excellent read.

Definitely worth joining the G-QRP club if you aren’t already a member.

#hamradio #amateurradio #gqrp

The release of CentOS 8 was delayed by the release of 7.7 because the project only has three engineers!

https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2019-September/017693.html

I wonder how many users there are per engineer. Probably millions!

#linux #centos

So, my geiger counter supports serial and wifi, and will report readings to this (insecure) website: http://www.gmcmap.com/ using this (super-dodgy, http only, unauthenticated) API: http://www.gmcmap.com/AutomaticallySubmitData.asp

Presumably this site isn’t intended as anything but a toy!