Amazing work by Jon Dawson and others to bring a very capable SDR to the RaspberryPi PICO.
I've forked the project here and had claude write some very useful documentation on the user interface operation.
It sounds great:
You might notice that my display is offset two pixels to the left. The solution is to select the OLED type of SH1106 instead of the default SSD1306. (It seems they are frequently substituted).
A terrific net this morning on 40m here in VK3. We had stations in VK2, VK3, VK5 and VK7. Stations were using not just FreeDV 2.3.1 but also the macOS FreeDVNeo and the Thetis SDR software. One was listening on an SDR that decodes RADE at the Nepean Men's Shed.
There was some SSB partly overlapping our normal frequency of 7.177 so I moved up 2kHz to 7.179. Most people realised but at least one didn't and when they transmitted interfered. In future I'll be careful to move at least 3kHz away. Lesson learned.
Here's some of the stations on the net, if you haven't heard RADEV1 this will give you a good idea of how it typically sounds.
Stations on the net included: VK2AWN, VK2BLQ, VK2DWG, VK3FAR, VK3FC, VK2KNC, VK3GTP, VK3JCO, VK3JF, VK3KEZ, VK3ZTR, VK5ABE, VK5FD, VK5RA, VK7HOB and me, VK3TPM.
In other AI news, after the success of the SpaceX IPO, based largely on future profit from their AI component, the other AI companies - OpenAI and Anthropic - are also planning their own IPOs. One model, "Fable 5", from Anthropic was released and then withdrawn for non-US citizens and this highlights a risk to Australians who rely on AI cloud services not controlled by us. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/106805414
A terrific net this morning in south east Australia. Amazingly there has been mobile FreeDV activity during the week! Most people are now on 2.3.1 which resolved a Windows audio issue.
Stations heard included VK2BLQ, VK3APG, VK2AWN, VK3FAR, VK3FC, VK3GTP, VK3KEZ, VK3PTR, VK3YSA, VK5ABE, VK5JPL, VK5RA, VK2DWG, VK2KNC, VK5FD, VK3JCO, and me, VK3TPM.
Several stations said that they'd like an option in the FreeDV app to auto-start the Modem at launch. This is particularly helpful when operating on headless, or small screen Raspberry Pi. I've raised a feature request here but it needs some more backers. Please add your email if you support this.
Built for my own entertainment but might be of interest to other macOS hams. FreeDV Neo is enough of an implementation of FreeDV RADE V1 to be usable on air. More info here including a download link.
This app is not officially supported and you should first use the official FreeDV app from the project.
I'm a big fan of Bill Meara's Soldersmoke podcast and blog. It's always a pleasure to hear from Bill and last week he contacted me asking for help with the website where he keeps an archive of the past editions of the podcast.
Bill has been editing the HTML of the page manually using a web editor that had hit a page size limit of 1MB and would no longer let him add new podcasts so it had fallen behind. Here's how the page looked:
At first glance I thought this was an easy little job, get in via FTP and paste in the new episodes. When I looked more closely at the HTML, and ran a validator on it, my heart sank. It's a credit to the robustness of web browsers that they managed to render this as well as they did. The podcast has been around for 20 years and while some of the HTML was obsolete, worse was that Bill's copy pasting from his blog had all sorts of errors in it. Mostly table tags that weren't balanced etc.
The HTML had ballooned out and had parts that looked like they'd been generated in Microsoft Word's export to Web - huge runs of fonts and styles repeated over and over.
I thought this would take many days of manual clean up and editing so I turned to Claude code for the project. I downloaded the various existing pages to a local folder, explained what we wanted and mentioned the blog as a place to get missing information.
Claude installed BeautifulSoup and proceeded to write python scripts to extract just the needed information from the existing broken HTML. It also looked at the blog to get missing info, looked at YouTube and even got the modification dates of the mp3 files to figure out publish dates. The result is at soldersmoke.com and now looks like this:
The HTML now validates without any complaint and it's much more efficient and compact than before.
AI will put web developers out of work to some extent. On the other hand it's fantastic at doing what would have been an incredibly time consuming menial task. This kind of job might not have been done at all except for this marvelous new technology. It's not perfect but it's amazing what can be achieved.
Thanks to Bill for all his great content, it's great to see the podcast archive remains available and up to date.
My wife unfortunately broke her arm a few weeks ago and can't drive so I've been away from home looking after her. Normally on a Sunday morning I would conduct a FreeDV RADE V1 net on 7.177.
I tuned in this morning via the excellent Ironstone Range WebSDR and was pleased to hear that stations can chat without my help ;-).
This screen recording was made by using Loopback to pipe audio from the Safari Web browser into my home brew FreeDV app for macOS called FreeDVneo.
We make a call for RCS messaging which will smooth out messaging between Android and iOS.
There have been an unusual number of security updates from both Microsoft and Apple - are these vulnerabilities being found by AI?
Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/106698692
Incidentally, I was in Melbourne this week so took the opportunity to talk to Phil in Sydney from the Southbank studio.
