marxy's musing on technology

I'm so sad to mark the death of my beloved step-brother David Crooks. A wonderful man and dear friend. Last Thursday he was looking...

A new build from parts ordered from China. This time I'm using the excellent OpenPilot flight controller. Here's an early flight in ...

The weather wasn't great for the big feature of the Wyong field day, the car boot sale. The ARNSW Home Brew group had a great display a...

The tiny drones are great for indoors, but to carry cameras I needed something larger. A collection of parts and a 450mm frame was ordered a...

We are having too much fun at the office (during lunch breaks) flying tiny quadcopters. The best of them seems to be the Hubsan X4 . ...

Linuxconf this year in Aukland had a radio track where a low cost software defined radio receiver with some limited ability to transmit was...

Stephen, VK2BLQ, has suggested we try holding an HF vertical up with a drone but here's another idea for antenna installation in tall tr...

Recently there have been a constant stream of second hand Lenovo X201 laptops on ebay here. David Rowe mentioned when he visited that the X2...

Just saw this interesting gadget called a Skypi from RadWAV . It appears to be a 1W carrier transmitter for 40m that plugs in to the GP...

Inspired by the work of Peter, VK3YE , I visited the local hardware store to get bits for a 40m loop antenna. Purchased a 3m length of coppe...

This week an Ultimate3 QRSS/WSPR kit beacon kit I ordered arrived and this morning it was easily built. The display is super crisp. ...

I purchased a transistor tester kit from AliExpress a few weeks ago and it's a useful gadget for the workbench. Often when home brew ...

This week the ARNSW Home Brew Group was honoured with a visit from David Rowe, VK2DGR, who spoke about codec2, FreeDV, and the upcoming hard...

Just a note for others who might run in to the same issue. Freedv depends on libtiff4 which is not available for Ubuntu 14.10. Here's ho...

I've updated the iOS app WSPR Watch with support for iPad, iPhone 6 and 6+. The program is simpler than before but I think more us...

The easy solution Thanks to this post , from Greg, K17MT, here's what you do. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ki7mt/wspr # press enter ...

Accidentally purchased a little quadcopter and then found that the expensive ones have come down in price since I last looked. These videos ...

For the past eight months we've been living in an apartment and while I enjoyed learning about antennas on a balcony, it's good to ...

Here's a sneak peak: It updates itself every few minutes but I am concerned about loading wsprnet.org too much.

Great day at Dural today. Particularly impressed with the home brew moving coil compass built for a model boat. I didn't mean to but end...