Iranian man on the train

Today I caught a train from Southern Cross bound for Bendigo. At Footscray a man got on. He looked confused and clearly had almost no English. He was asking if this train went somewhere but we couldn't work out where he meant.

Several passengers tried to figure out what he wanted and when we finally figured out that he wanted to go to Melbourne it was too late, the doors had locked and we were under way north.

Unfortunately for him, this was an express and the next stop was Sunbury, about 40km away.

He slumped into the seat next to me and I showed him on the map where we were headed. He said he had just arrived from Iran and was going to meet his boss. I said I was sorry to hear what is happening over there. Talking to the boss on speakerphone, he explained he'd caught the wrong train. The guy on the other side offered to pick him up! I explained that that might not be the best approach, better to catch the train back at Sunbury.

He asked if I was a technician? I said yes and he told me he was working for someone who worked for someone who was a technician.

The conductor came through checking MyKi cards and my new friend pulled out an infringement notice he'd been given earlier for not having a ticket. (He seemed to think that was a ticket). I spoke with the conductor on his behalf and explained the situation. He kindly let it pass.

When we got to Sunbury a bunch of fellow passengers got up and pointed to where he should go and explained what colour train he should catch to get back to Southern Cross. It was heartwarming to see.

Our train system is confusing, even for me, I can't imagine how hard it would be for a visitor with little or no English. Signs are poor, trains leave Southern Cross on different platforms and you can't find out from within the ticketed area. 

I was proud of my fellow Australians today and their open and helpful attitude to a new Australian.

Tech Talk on ABC Radio - Israel's use of technology for war

As the world watches tensions and conflicts swell in the Middle East, what stands out is the use of technology in the military.

From hacking, to the iron dome, it is a new era of defence.

To take stock, Peter Marks, software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics, joins Chris Taylor to discuss Israeli military technology.

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/techstuff-peter-marks/105429550

Remembering Bill Atkinson

Very sad to hear this week that Bill Atkinson has died. 

I vividly remember seeing a Macintosh computer for the first time. 

At the time I was heavily into CP/M and WordStar. At work we produced a newsletter by printing text columns on a daisy wheel printer. Headings were made by rubbing letters from Letraset. Photos were turned to dots with a high contrast process camera with a transparent dot screen. The pieces were cut up and pasted together.

When I saw a Macintosh with a graphical screen that showed the fonts and graphics as they would appear I was stunned.

Later I learned that it was a programmer called Bill Atkinson who was one of the very clever people who managed to make all this work in the constrained environment of those early machines. Bill wrote low level graphics code that was incredibly efficient. "QuickDraw" doesn't fully capture the achievement. He wrote MacPaint, with its box of tools including the pencil and "FatBits" which influenced all the bit map editors that followed including Photoshop and friends.

Even later, Bill created HyperCard, a user friendly development environment that could be used by almost any computer user. I loved it.

I went to a MacWorld expo in the early 90s. (This is before Apple withdrew to have their own events). To get a seat in the front row for Bill's talk I attended the session before and claimed my seat. He walked in clutching a bunch of gear strung together with SCSI cables.

He told stories about his work including the ImageWriter printer but also talked about the work he'd done to improve the dot pattern that could turn a greyscale image into a pattern of dots that smoothly simulated it. "Atkinson Dithering" it came to be known. He said that one day, when he was working on it, a colleague came to the door of his office and, seeing a nice greyscale image on his Mac's screen - commented that it was great that Apple was going to release a greyscale screen Mac! (Of course, they weren't but the dithering looked very real from a short distance away).

Bill was a visual person. I have a beautiful book of photographs of textures from nature that he published.

Thank you Bill.

Tech Stuff on ABC Radio

Do you feel that AI is advancing faster than anything else you've seen in history? And the pace at which AI is developing is overwhelming? 

New analysis from Mary Meeker finds that we are in the AI boom. 

Also a look at the merger between OpenAI and ex-Apple head of design Jony Ive's io.

GUEST: Peter Marks, a software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics.  Listen here.

Built the QMX kit - watch out for enamelled wire joints

Like many people I was very excited by QRP-Labs work to bring sideband to the excellent, compact, high performance, digital rig, the QMX. I ordered a built version and have been using it in the field.

My setup, in a small waterproof box is quite compact but I plan to put together a portable radio with a QMX, rechargeable battery and some sort of antenna tuner. For this project I ordered the kit version and have now completed construction. It's a dense six layer board. The surface mount components are all pre-soldered so most of the work is toroids and connectors.

The QMX has built-in diagnostics, including RF bandpass and low pass filters. After my build I could see some problems all of which were due to me not managing to solder to enamelled wire. At times, inspection under high magnification revealed a solder joint where the solder seems strongly repelled by the wire. After a bit of debugging the radio is working well.

On the bench I run it from 12.0V via a linear regulator (I built the 12 not 9V version). (My bench supply of 13.8V is too high. I get 5W out on 80m and about 4W on 40 and 20m. Performance as a WSPR transceiver is really excellent.

If you run in to trouble there's some great resources including Hans' troubleshooting guide which includes a faultfinding log of fixes he's needed. 

Also there is an active QRPlabs discussion group where people help each other.  I've enjoyed this kit very much and it's a really wonderful radio.

I've been running it receiving and transmitting WSPR almost continuously for about a week. Rock solid. Sometimes reception of my signal is amazing (when there aren't solar flares that kill the bands). Here's a single transmission on 40m reported by 94 stations:

It also receives exceptionally well.

On the media's "The divided dial" series about shortwave

A friend alerted me to an interesting series of programs about shortwave from WNYC Studios.

"Season Two of On the Media’s Peabody-winning series The Divided Dial is the untold story of shortwave radio: the way-less-listened to but way-farther-reaching cousin of AM and FM radio. The medium was once heralded as a utopian, international, and instantaneous mass communication tool — a sort of internet-before-the-internet. But like the internet, it also took a turn for the chaotic. And like AM and FM talk radio, it also went hard to the right, with extremists and cults still finding a home on the shortwaves".

THE DIVIDED DIAL EPISODE 1: Fishing In The Night

THE DIVIDED DIAL EPISODE 2: You Must Form Your Militia Units

THE DIVIDED DIAL EPISODE 3: World's Last Chance Radio

THE DIVIDED DIAL EPISODE 4: Wall St. Wants Your Airwaves

First I've heard of The Shortwave Modernisation Coalition which proposes to use shortwave for high speed trading.

I think there is a role for shortwave broadcasting but today I think it should broadcast a hard to jam, easy to receive digital data format.

The silencing of Voice of America - ABC RN program

Thanks to Thomas at The SWLing Post for drawing this to my attention. ABC Radio National, of which I'm a past contributor, has a documentary program called Rear Vision and this week they have a program about the demise of VOA which most of us will be familiar with from our lifetime of shortwave listening.

It's a really well done program with archival material that triggered great nostalgia as a long term listener.

You can listen here. 

"The US funded international news network Voice of America started broadcasting into Germany in 1942. 

It now broadcasts in nearly 50 languages to  more than 350 million people around the world. 

But in March this year,  US President Donald Trump signed an executive order dismantling the US Agency for Global Media - the independent government body that oversees Voice of America.

Now, Voice of America has been silenced for the first time in 83 years. 

Guests:

Patsy Widakuswara is Voice of America's White House Bureau Chief and lead plaintiff in VOA's legal case against the Trump Administration.

Dr Nick Cull is Professor of Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, Annenberg, and he specialises in the historic role of communication in foreign policy. 

Dr Kate Wright is Associate Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America by Kate Wright, Martin Scott & Mel Bunce

Produced and presented by Kirsti Melville".

Great work!

Sideband receiver project in Silicon Chip magazine

Fantastic to see a serious ham radio construction project in the June edition of Silicon Chip magazine.  The project by Charles Kosina, VK3BAR, is a general coverage sideband shortwave receiver covering 3-30MHz.

The VFO is an Arduino nano and Si5351. IF is at 9Mhz and uses a crystal filter board sourced from AliExpress. Interestingly there is RF preselection using electronically switched capacitors and a varactor diode.

Audio output is an LM386. There's AGC and the radio even has squelch.

What is, perhaps, missing is AM reception. 

It is wonderful to see such a project in Silicon Chip. 

Tech talk on ABC Radio

The competition for our smartphone dollars is about to enter a new round. Google is previewing Android 16 this week and Apple will preview iOS 19 next month. 

Peter Marks, a software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics, joined Chris Taylor on Nightlife to discuss the latest news in technology. 

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/105315754 

It was good to meet Chris Taylor who's filling in while Philip Clark is on leave. Chris was one of the Chaser gang and I fondly remember watching VHS cassettes of CNNNN when I worked at CNN 25 years ago.