There have been reports recently of 20m openings so I left WSPR receiving and noticed the US was coming in. Switched over to FreeDV RADEV1 using my macOS version of the software called FreeDVNeo. Keyed down and on Reporter I could see that Dudley WA5QPZ in Austin Texas was receiving me. Not perfect copy, but not bad either.
Also, I'm running the release candidate of macOS 27 Golden Gate which will be out in a few days. So far it seems stable and fast.
It's a credit to his kids, my cousins, Tracey and Paul, that Robert was able to stay at his home (with visiting carers) until just about the end. I know he appreciated that very much.
I would visit every few months when in Melbourne to catch up with friends and he was always excited to see me and hear about the evolution of ham radio technology. Once I dropped in on the way back from the Rosebud Radiofest and gave him a copy of the 1956 ARRL Handbook. He leafed through it and exclaimed "nothing's changed!".
On another visit I brought along an IC-705 and showed him the waterfall display. He was impressed.
In later years he had a 2m radio but rarely was on air.
Robert, and his wife my dear aunt Peggy (who was an amazing person in her own right and the subject of this ABC program), were always kind and encouraging to me as a child and rather lost teenager.
I asked Robert about his ham radio history during a visit in 2025.
Robert got his amateur licence when he was seventeen. You had to have morse code which he had known from childhood. The morse test “wasn’t too much of a problem for me”. 15 words per minute. People would buy tapes, punch tapes, to learn the code.
Callsign was W6HWA “Hard working American”
An early transceiver he owned was a Hallicrafters SR-150. He may have had a Collins KWM-1.
He had a three element beam for 20, 40 and 80m.
At Albany road he had a tilt-over tower with a beam that did 20 and 10m.
At seventeen, Robert lived in California.
Robert had contacts both locally and overseas. Mostly just calling CQ rather than regular nets.
I showed Robert a QMX transceiver. He was amazed at the size and the fact that it did multiple bands including 80m.
We discussed the difficulty of soldering to enamelled wire used to wind toroids.
We discussed QST magazine and the ARRL.
Robert moved to Australia in 1950. He rattled off a series of addresses in California where he had lived.
We discussed WSPR beaconing and low power operation. There had been a large solar flare in the last few days.
Robert commented “how times have changed!”.
Henry Radio was a shop he used.
Robert asked if the ham radio license is easy to get these days. We discussed the levels and the fact that tests are now multiple choice rather than essay.
“A lot of water has gone under the bridge”.
Robert’s dad was a real estate broker in California. Mainly houses. Beverly Hills. Beachside communities.
I mentioned the Palisades where there have been fires. Robert said he lived there at one point but got out in time.
Robert’s older brother had married a girl from Melbourne and he came out to visit his brother. His brother was nine years older. He introduced Robert to Peg who he used to produce on radio. Robert just stayed in Australia after that. He can’t even recall going home for a visit (but he must have).
“Time marches on, we’re all getting older.”
Farewell dear Robert. I will always remember you. Ex W6HWA , VK3QA & VK3DRG SK.
It might be seen as nepotism except for the fact that she's much more qualified and certainly smarter than me. Here's her spot:
The UK has just taken its first step into the Robotaxi era, with Wayve's self-driving cars now available to book through the Uber app; but there'll still be a licensed human driver in the front to take over if needed.
Communications Minister Anika Wells has announced that the draft Digital Duty of Care law will be introduced into parliament this week, including a requirement that platforms offer the ability to 'opt-out' of their algorithms. What does this all mean?
Cat Marks, data scientist and Principal at Ember Advisors, joined Philip Clark and listeners to Nightlife with all the latest in tech news. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-cat-marks/107131014
On the trip north to the recent walk I was lucky enough to fly on a couple of different recent Airbus planes in the Qantas fleet. The last one was an A220 which has this USB power port on the seat back:
Having bought, and tested, a few Chinese chargers, I'm a bit sceptical of the Watt claims on USB-C ports but I'm happy to report that Airbus is telling the truth. The macOS WhatCable tool is very handy.
Yep, 20V at 3A = 60W. Great stuff.
The internet connection on the A220 tested at 18Mbps which is fine for general use. The plane I caught up to Sydney last week was a brand new Airbus A321-XLR and the internet speed was outstanding:
Malcolm Turnbul wouldn't need this speed but I thought it was great to see it.
Along the way are stunning beaches, charming bush tracks, and a bit of rather challenging rock scrambles. To mix things up there's a couple of river crossings, two of which required boats to pick us up.
You really can't do this without support and in our case the trip was supported and guided by Marcus from Home Comforts Hiking.
Walking south is certainly the best way to do it. We had the sun, and usually the wind at our backs.
I'd just left Drummond, Victoria, where it was 10C and I'd had the fire heating the house and arrived where it was 30C for much of the walk.
Happily I did not suffer from any blisters or other mishaps and felt faily fit probably due to my daily bush walks at home. Having said that, my feet were a bit sore at the end of each day but recovered by the morning.
Our guide Marcus did a wonderful job and the logistics all worked well bar a coffee shop that didn't open as advertised for breakfast one morning.
Could choosing your trusted news sources help support journalism in the age of AI summaries and algorithmic feeds?
Also, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “Value misalignment of X’s feed algorithm” found, unsurprisingly, that the site’s algorithm prioritised engagement above all else when it generates a users “For You Page”.
What’s been revealed is that rather than simply showing more of what we agree with, the algorithm is deliberately mis-aligned in that it shows us things they know we don’t agree with so that we are prompted to comment on it, often angrily.
Finally, in the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates hearing aids and last week they approved Samsung Galaxy Earbuds under a category of “over the counter” hearing aids.
This follows a similar decision in 2024 about Apple AirPods Pro. Having the two biggest manufacturers of smartphones able to sell hearing aids at a fraction of the price of prescription products: $400 rather than $4,000 is a major win for people with milder types of hearing loss.
You can listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/107077464
Beloved next door neighbour Hansen Yee aged just 82 has died.
Hansen was charming, modest and clearly intelligent. He was Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Sydney University. Aparrently a brilliant student.
After his wife Cora died, he joined us for Xmas dinners and was a lovely part of our children's lives. He tutored daughter Cat in Maths.
Vale Dr Hansen Yee BSc BE PhD, MIEEE.
The "Cheap Yellow Display" boards are a low cost board with an ESP32, a colour touch screen and a bunch of other useful I/O. I've long used them to display my solar stats (generating, using, net). I just noticed this excellent project HenrysCat esp32-cyd-ham-dashboard. There's an excellent web flash tool which works well.
It can roll through seven screens (you can turn some off if you wish). Here's a few:
The web flash tool shows this. I used the first option.
But my screen came up mirrored so I tried the second. In that case the screen was blank white so I went back to the first. When it boots up it creates a Wifi network with a captive portal. I found that the setting default to mirrored - which seems like a poor choice.
It's a great gadget to stick up in the shack. Great work to HenrysCat and claude. Source code here.
I hand down my old laptops and phones to the kids who happily use them for years. Sometimes I try to hand down an update and are met with resistance - this (old) one still works fine, why should I change? When they do, they're stunned by the performance improvement. They are still going through the Intel to Apple Silicon transition.
Recently I got an 11-inch, Mid 2013, MacBook air back, and decided to get it going. The battery was completely dead. I paid $45 for a battery on AliExpress. They are easy to install on the 11 inch Airs and the battery came with the two screwdrivers needed.
There was quite a lot of dust and fluff to remove but the fan still moves well. My daughter got very good use out of this machine. It has a few dents in the edge but the screen is good and all the keys work. (I've done a lot of cleaning with a cotton bud but more to do). What's striking is that she's typed so much on it that the most used keycaps have worn the labels off them.
Even with "just" 4GB of RAM, the machine is surprisingly usable for email and web surfing. But being stuck on macOS 11 means that there are many apps that won't run and lots of sites complain about the version of Safari.
Some apps, like my beloved BBEdit, still keep old versions available.
I love the compact size of these and the fact that I could replace it for under $200 if the need arose means that this would be a good laptop to take somewhere where it might be stolen or damaged without too much anxiety.
Apple should make a new compact laptop. I love my modern Air but would be very attracted to something smaller for my messenger bag.
Many sites that create content - be it news or analysis - are funded either by advertising or subscription. The reduction in traffic threatens their business model.
Peter Marks, software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics, joined Philip Clark and listeners to Nightlife with the latest tech news and information. Listen here and read Sue Ahearn's piece here.
Paul is an inspiring QRP home brewer. Great interview on a recent podcast. https://youtu.be/Rkd1o2PQI9M?si=gzKmEFHAueIDsdYK
Recommended.
As you might guess, I'm really getting in to using the Raspberry Pi PICO for embedded development. If I can do a job in MicroPython I will but the C/C++ tools and the library they provide is a fantastic step up from the Arduino. The official plugin for Visual Studio Code is really excellent. I purchased the official debug probe and it seems excellent.
You can compile and run with a single button but more interestingly you can single step debug and look at variables.
Claude code is a real help and just for fun I asked it to make a program that makes the PICO emulate a USB audio output device feeding the audio to a PWM DAC pin which I've added a simple low pass filter to.
It sounds great:
The debug probe makes it easy to install and run new builds. You don't need to unplug and plug while holding the Boot button, you just click the run debug button. Interestingly it loads the ELF binary rather than the UF2 binary that you'd drag to the mounted volume.
My interest in being a USB audio device stems from my interest in making an embedded version of at least bits of FreeDV RADE.
The PICO 2 is quite a powerhouse although doesn't have enough RAM for what I have in mind. I haver some 3rd party boards on the way with extra RAM so we shall see.
Before the days of FreeDV RADE (which uses multiple machine learning models to turn speech to features, transmit data over HF, and turn the demodulated features back in to speech audio; it was possible to run FreeDV with Codec2 on embedded hardware.
There was the SM1000 and the EzDV boxes.
I wondered if it might be possible to divide up the tasks and perhaps use several microcontrollers working together. I would not have attempted this before the days of AI tools like Claude Code but last night decided to give it a whirl.
This project captures audio from a MEMS PDM microphone. PDM is pulse density modulation and these little microphones have excellent sound.
LPCNet is the input side of the FARGAN vocoder. It turns speech audio into "features" which are a stream of 32bit floating point numbers. In FreeDV RADE, these features are transmitted over the air with an ML modem (but that's another story). The recovered features are turned back into speech audio with the Vocoder.
This project live encodes the audio to a stream of features which it sends over a USB serial cable to a computer which has a python program which syncs up and captures the features to a file which can be decoded using one of the test tools with FreeDV.
Here's me talking in to it followed by a decode of the features captured.
I tried to get this going on a PICO but it could not keep up. Partly because it doesn't have floating point and must emulate it. The PICO2 keeps up and even has some head room. There is some work down sampling the audio from the microphone that could be dropped if I used an A/D input instead.
Now here is a features to speech decode side. Features are streamed over USB. Audio is PWM into a simple low pass filter. (My tests indicate that this can sound very good). So far the audio is understandable but quite poor.
I'm not sure that the Radio Autoencoder can fit on one of these but you never know... Any recommendations of easy to use embedded ARM boards?
I'll share the code when it's a bit more polished. Not sure that this will be of interest to anyone but you never know.
I just saw the announcement of NetBSD 11. Software that has been around for many years. What struck me was this comment:
As you are probably aware, the number of security issues found or suspected everywhere has massively increased with the advent of AI tools. As a consequence, we can't publish a release without open issues. Instead of delaying the release further to fix them (new ones are being reported all the time), we've instead chosen to be transparent about this.
NetBSD is not alone, recently we've seen:
Nice net this morning with VK2, VK3, VK4 stations participating. A few new stations which is always good to hear.
Again I ran the net using my macOS client FreeDVNeo. On the frequency were VK5FD, VK5RA, VK5AG, VK5ABE, VK3KEZ, VK3JCO, VK3GTP, VK2KNC, VK2BLQ, VK2AOO, VK3ZTR, VK2LUI (no activity though), VK3PT (first time caller), VK3FAR, VK2KNC, VK5JPL and me VK3TPM.
See you next Sunday from 09:30 eastern time normally on 7.197 but +- depending on band usage.
We also discus AI models that hack and "sleepers" - a problem facing robotaxi firms. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/106968258
When I purchased my M4 Mac Mini I chose 512GB of SSD thinking that would be more than enough. (I'm old enough to remember running on a 200MB disk). Developer tools and video editing eats a lot of space and I ran out. I had already paid an extra A$300 to get 512GB, to go from the default of 256GB up to 1TB Apple charges A$750, so I decided to attempt a cheaper option, and puchased a new 1TB SSD from AliExpress for A$375.
There are plenty of videos showing how to pop the bottom off the computer and get to the SSD.
The board came with a spludger and a screw driver with the required bits. I was careful with the cable to the power button and fan. Unlike some upgraders I did not remove the power button and all was well.
Once the new, blank, drive is installed you need to put the machine in to DFU mode by holding the power button while plugging in the mains power. The power light blinks orange.
Next step is to plug the middle USB-C socket to another mac which detects DFU and offers to repair or restore the "faulty" mac. As this is a new drive choose Restore.
The error message isn't terribly helpful as you can see here.
In the end I located the restore image and downloaded it manually. The trick is to Option-Click the Restore button which lets you choose the restore image. This worked.
The disk seems fast and I have enough space. For now, I would say, 1TB seems to be needed for developers. AI models are also huge and I expect will be eating many people's hard disks in the next few years.
A MicroPython project that turns a CYD (Cheap Yellow Display) — an ESP32 board with an integrated 320×240 ILI9341 TFT — into a live dashboard for a home solar system. It polls an Enphase Envoy gateway on the local network and displays current generation, consumption, and net power, along with a scrolling line graph of recent history.
Along the way I ran in to a problem with HTTPS from MicroPython on ESP32 that turned out to be a known bug. To get it to work I've had to use an older version of MicroPython for ESP32.
You'll need to log in to your Enphase account and generate a token which lasts a year.
The code is here on GitHub.
My wife hasn't driven her Toyota Yaris hybrid for some weeks and today when she tried to start it was shown a series of alarming errors.
Happily as well as indicating a serious problem with the car, these can also be a side effect of a low accessory battery. I opened the bonnet but there's no battery I could see. Turns out the fuse box has a special place for jump starting.
I charged at 8A for only a few minutes and the car started just fine. We took it for a drive.
Another good FreeDV RADEV1 net on Sunday. My macOS client was acting up so I used the official client this week.
As is often the case there were comments about audio quality. Charlie, VK3ZD, had particularly crisp audio and it turned out that he had cut the bass and boosted treble in the app. I tried the same here but reports came in of clipping so care is needed.
Stations on the net were VK2BLQ, VK2DWG, VK2KNC, VK3FAR, VK3FC, VK3GTP, VK3JCO, VK3KEZ, VK3UBK, VK3ZD, VK3ZTR, VK5ABE, VK5AG, VK5RA and me VK3TPM.
In this morning's news a great piece about the Zilog Z80 CPU chip turning 50. This triggers many happy memories. I had a Tandy/Radioshack TRS80 clone called a Dick Smith System 80 that I programmed to key the cassette deck motor relay to send Baudot to a teletype. Later I had other boards and even a Sinclair ZX80.
CP/M with Wordstar was my writing environment for too many years - although I kept using it and some indexing tools I wrote using BDS-C - a fast compiler that I recall arrived on 8 inch floppy disks I had to get a friend to copy over to 5 inch.
My first paid programming work was in DBase II on CP/M. It was such a rich time in home computing with many fine alternatives and new machines on the covers of magazines every other month.
The uSDX transceivers are not great but it's amazing that they work at all. An under-powered Atmel processor being able to demodulate and modulate single sideband is incredible. Hans at QRP-Labs has turned polar modulation in to an incredibly well performing radio in the form of the QMX.
What's missing is the technology of the uSDX ported to a more capable CPU and Jon has done that. It's one of a group of amazing bits of code documented here and shared here.
I've taken just on bit of it, the transmitter example and forked it here.
Not sounding great at this point but it does work. What's incredible to me is that there's no Si5351 being rapidly phase shifted, it's all done in the PICO. The circuit is very simple, even more simple than an NE602 based qrp transmitter.
I can well understand why QRP-Labs keeps their software closed source - they'd be put out of business by clone makers in minutes. Having said that, I hope we can one day have an open source equivalent to hack on. Thanks to Jon for his great work.
My analog switch chips, the FST3253, arrived smaller than I expected. My fault! I have some carrier boards but struggle to solder the tiny chips to them. Second attempt worked today.
Once again I had to move frequency to avoid analog traffic. Not a problem with the Reporter though and we had 17 stations on the frequency today. There was some selective fading but conditions improved as we went along. This morning we were back on 7.177Mhz.
VK2BLQ, VK2KNC, VK2ZB, VK3AOK, VK3EY, VK3FAR, VK3FC, VK3GTP, VK3JCO, VK3KEZ, VK3PCC, VK3TPM, VK3UBK, VK5AG, VK5FD, VK5RA, ZL2IT. Unfortunately Error in NZ couldn't hear us.
I was using my FreeDV client for macOS. I've been adding some more fancy graphs. (Click to enlarge).
Thanks everyone who joined in.
My newsagent's penchant for placing their price stickers over the title makes this look like "Arterly Essay" which is somewhat appropriate as Anna is a music academic but is impressively well read in the AI realm including the amazing Dwarkesh podcasts.
She talks about the impact on writing, music, art, education and work "the bottom rungs of the career ladder have been knocked out".
On education she observes something that I've also thought, that the current crisis in students using AI to answer their assessments is not to be blamed on AI but rather the mass production of assessment.
Apart from her alarm at the high chance that we'll all be wiped out by artificial super intelligence in its quest to make paperclips, she celebrates the capability of AI to help us all educate ourselves.
Spelling checkers didn't make us good spellers. Grammar checkers don't improve our grammar. Will AI Chatbots dumb down our thinking or raise us up to a higher level of enquiry?
After reading this I re-watched Spike Jonze 2013 Movie "Her". If Apple ever makes a folding phone he will have been correct in pretty much everything.
Work continues on my little FreeDV RADE V1 native app for macOS. Feedback from some users bemoaned the lack of fancy visualisations so I've addressed that. The latest version also improves the operation of the Reporter window quite a bit and adds a filter by my frequency option.
More information and a download link is here.
It's great to see all the third party FreeDV RADE apps starting to appear. We have a list of known ones on the FreeDV site here. Let me know of others that I've missed.
Social media is currently awash with AI generated content designed to encourage division and presumably promote far right politics.
Finally, Apple has increased prices due to shortages and price rises of components used to build out AI server farms. Other manufacturers have signalled significant price rises as well. AI is costing us all in ways we never expected. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/ai-is-about-to-cost-us-more-than-we-anticipated/106862726
A PDM (Pulse Density Microphone) and a Raspberry Pi Pico. It appears on the computer as an audio input (I changed the name from the original).
All credit for this project to Sandeep Mistry here.
A recording of how it sounds (pretty good) is here. There's a bit of mic popping - perhaps a pop filter would help.
Applications of this technology are swirling in my mind...
