marxy's musing on technology

I purchased a small (26cm) active loop antenna called a GA-800.  So far quite impressed.  The bottom part has a re-chargeable battery with U...

The re-branding of the BOM to The Bureau of Meteorology, hereinafter to be referred to The Bureau is reported to be costing $220,000. But w...

I was a guest again this week on Marc Fennell's "Download This Show" on ABC RN.  As I no longer live in Sydney I'm a remot...

This radio promises very wide coverage and while it is disappointing as an HF receiver, it is a passable receiver of narrow band FM on the 2...

A GDO is a useful little test instrument for finding the resonance of a tuned circuit. These tuned circuits might be in a VFO or perhaps a t...

To get a line over high branches here I've been using a cheap but decent drone out of China called a Flyhal FX1. They are about AU$300 b...

One of the most impressive recent bits of SDR software is the open source SDR++ (often spelt sdrpp). It's very responsive when used loc...

Recently I've been tinkering with antennas here and one of the resonant dipoles I put up is for 20m. I normally run digital modes on the...

There is significant solar activity at the moment. This activity changes radio propagation quite a bit for bad and good. One of the measures...

I'm a big fan of the Off Centre Fed Dipole . With a 4:1 balun and two lengths of wire you get multiple bands with good resonance. Recent...

David, VK3DKR, brought along the compact home built mcHF transceiver to the latest Macedon Ranges Amateur Radio club meeting today. The radi...

My view is that in this age of people getting their news from sites that optimise for engagement over facts, a source like the ABC is more v...

For prototyping new projects where an Arduino is to be connected with common peripherals, the Dr Duino Explorer board looks very useful. It...

My wife had to install Adobe Acrobat on a shared Mac for her Uni work and I'm astonished at all of the processes this has added to the s...

I wrote recently about a little ESP32 board with a tiny LCD display from Lilygo that worked "out of the box" for me. Another boar...

My sister Jane once asked for a horse because "everyone in her class has a horse".  Sometimes it feels that way with 3D printers. ...

Little "Arduino" projects around here often require a display and connection to the internet. ESP32 based boards are an obvious ch...

I founds some wonderful macOS SwiftUI code by Mark Erbaugh that implements the Icom remote access code. He's got the basics going and I...

I've been following the progress of an open source SDR transceiver, the T41-EP , from Albert Peter and Jack Purdum for some time. It...

The QDX works brilliantly with WSJT-X but I have struggled to get it working with Fldigi on Linux. I'm pleased to report that I just h...