marxy's musing on technology

Great to get back to a studio for these shows at last.. Although I look like I'm coming from a black void compared to my co-guest Meg Co...

This week it was my pleasure to be a guest again on Cassie McCullagh's ABC Sydney show called Focus. It's always easy to work with t...

The Hermes-Lite 2 continues to impress. I've now been turned on to the wonders of the cross platform SparkSDR software which open up mu...

The van has been an entertaining project over the last few years. A 2000 Toyota Hiace with 411,000km on the clock. We have travelled up and ...

I'm not a plane geek but Kevin, VK2KB, talked me in to a trip to Canberra to watch a spectacular flypast by the RAAF to celebrate 100 ye...

Old friend Nigel, VK3DZ, kindly invited me along to a meeting of the Radio Amateurs Old Timers Club . To be eligible for membership one must...

A Hermes-Lite 2 SDR transceiver arrived a few days ago. For about $300 it's an amazing piece of equipment. A 0-38MHz direct sampling SD...

This has to be the simplest Arduino project. I have been improving my password security by letting some software choose random strings that ...

The noise floor at home is S9. Happily it's a broadband noise rather than the terrible switch mode power supply hash I had at one point....

Just back from a few weeks touring north in the van. When the latest quick pandemic lockdown in Victoria ended I took the opportunity to dri...

Now that the brief pandemic lockdown in Melbourne has ended, I've hit the road in the van again and first stop was Shepparton to see Dal...

Locked down here in Melbourne it seemed like a good time to build a little antenna tuner. This is the Balanced Line Tuner Plus (BLT+) from ...

China's announcement this week that the BBC World News TV channel will be blocked  is another reminder that modern content distribution ...

Readly in browser Readly is a subscription service that gives you access to a large collection of magazines and some newspapers from around...

It's always fun to be invited to be a talking head on a radio or TV show and this week I was again on Download this Show talking about ...

Magnified headsets, magnifying glasses, a lamp with a big magnifier - I must be getting old, but trying to see surface mount components is g...

With little space in the back yard here I decided to try a cheap vertical I saw on AliExpress . The name GP4 presumably refers to the claime...

After my app WSPR Watch was mentioned in QST I've been receiving a lot more email about it and one person kindly offered to help with ...

As soon as I heard about the Pico I placed an order. These boards are more like an Arduino than a (linux capable) Raspberry Pi. Like the bl...