marxy's musing on technology

There was a time when Sony ruled my portable short wave listening world. In recent years Tecsun has brought out a series of decent radios ...

My cloud hosting needs are modest. A couple of Wordpress blogs , an OpenVPN server, and a Tiny tiny RSS server. I use Amazon’s AWS serv...

Although it sounds disturbingly like a new rig from Yaesu, FT8 is actually a weak signal QSO mode from K1JT, Joe Taylor, and the folks who g...

It's  GovHack time again! This year it will be held over the weekend from Friday 28th to Sunday 30th July 2017. Back in 2015 I joined...

Thanks Lo-Key for featuring QRP by the harbour on the cover and in a feature article. It's a great newsletter of general interest beyo...

Last Friday the Senate Committee hearings into a bill by Senator Xenophon to compel the ABC to resume short wave broadcasting began. The...

We've been receiving letters for months from ISPs offering to be the ones to connect us to the NBN which has just arrived in our a...

There are very low cost laptops around but they're often unsatisfying in the end. The family is down one Mac laptop at the moment ...

YouKits is getting a good reputation for low cost amateur radio gear. Their antenna analyser is well regarded. When I saw a new mono-band...

For the ham who has everything... a lovely 500 acre vacant site at Shepparton, Victoria, Australia complete with short wave antennas (I as...

There's a nicely put together rtf-sdr receiver box available on Ebay from China for about AU$45 with the direct sampling modification...

I still miss Google Reader which went away in 2013. It was an efficient way to catch up on all the RSS/Atom news feeds I subscribe to in a...

The QRPver is a US$80 1W QRP transceiver that is perfect for running digital modes such as PSK31. It connects to a computer via analog au...

Ubuntu has been great for me over about the last ten years. Prior to that I was a RedHat/Fedora user but when I joined a company that was ...

Fantastic to see Chinese ham radio gear for HF increasingly appearing. This one " RS-918SSB HF SDR Transceiver " caught my eye b...

Just for fun I tried receiving WSPR on 6m. I'm using a half G5RV but at the end of a long run of RG58 so losses at 50MHz are likely to...

This works. $ rtl_fm -o 4 -A lut -s 22050 -f 148.137M - | multimon-ng -t raw -a POCSAG512 -a POCSAG1200 -a POCSAG2400 -f alpha /dev/stdin ...

USB-C is clearly the future of desktop peripheral connection and it's great to see products appearing that leverage this new plug. I p...