marxy's musing on technology

Japan has the world's highest number of ham radio licensees per capita, 0.343% of the population. This means that there are a good numbe...

American Radio History is a fantastic archive of early electronics, technology, sound recording and broadcast magazines. Mostly UK and US...

What a pleasure it is to tune the 40m band at a location where the only noise is the occasional "tick tick" of electric fences. He...

This week I'm spending a few days at a very low noise location in northern New South Wales near Dorrigo. Yesterday I tuned around 4...

A milestone today, the page views on this little blog has just hit one million. This blog is really a personal notebook where I write litt...

The new end fed antenna has obviously higher signals but also higher noise. The question is.. which antenna is better? I now have thr...

At QRP by the harbour I put up a dipole for 40m and John VK2ASU put up an end fed antenna which seemed to work better. My dipole was held ...

My thanks to Peter, VK2EMU, who manufactured a few J-Pole antennas for 6m. A beautiful addition to the shed. Thanks also to Stephen, VK...

There's quite a few excellent remote receivers running WebSDR  but unfortunately the author has decided only to give the software to ...

Under threatening skies we had a second " QRP by the Harbour " event in Sydney today. Facebook worked well to coordinate and p...

After a few days I'm well in to the new world, for me, of Android Oreo on a Pixel 2. I've kept a list of observations (in Google Kee...

Our family is very much in the Apple eco-system. We iMessage, FaceTime, iPhoto, and watch AppleTV. The family uses Find my Friends and we ...

Tiny houses are fascinating examples of efficient, frugal, tidy living and I was excited that the Tesla Tiny House was coming to Lane Cove ...

Talking with Ross, VK1UN, the other day we stumbled on the simple idea of using figure 8 speaker wire as the feed line up to an "inv...

Brian, VK2AAF, just alerted me to a fantastic map of current lightning. LightningMaps . Were were talking on 80m and there was quite a lot...

If you can install python (which you can pretty much anywhere) here's a little script to get started with logging from Fronius inverter...

The ham shed has been solar powered for many years. Finally it was time to install PV panels on the roof of the house. The panels are in...