marxy's musing on technology

Very lucky here to have the space, and appropriately placed trees, to allow me to put up a full size dipole for 80m. By all reports it works...

After deviating from Bill's design I have come back to the fold and built the mixer as he described. Another insight is that I've co...

I built a DC receiver using the PTO VFO based on the "High School" receiver described by Bill, N2CQR , recently. It's a beaut...

Kyneton local Tim Sullivan from Sullivan Studios kindly put on a presentation about VR (Virtual Reality) at the men's shed this morning...

Like everyone I'm sure, I receive regular SMS messages and calls which are clearly scams. While I think I'm pretty good at recognisi...

While I deviated from the design, mostly due to deficiencies in my parts collection, Stephen, VK2BLQ, has built a faithful copy and it works...

Today was the Ballarat radio fest. About an hour's drive from my place at Drummond and well worth the trip. There was a big turnout and ...

Bill Meara of the wonderful  Soldersmoke blog  and podcast, recently published a nice design for a direct conversion receiver. He was looki...

My bench in the shack got very very messy. I had a desk lamp on there and all sorts of junk. Of particular note is the LED strip light I bou...

Normally I use an old Thinkpad as the shack computer. Works well, low RF noise, but takes up a lot of bench space. I've just done a fres...

This is a story of failure, but I thought it worthwhile to share it. There are reports that some of the cheap (~$40) Android TV boxes advert...

An often requested feature in WSPR Watch is to display the grey line which is the transition from sun to night. I've had a few goes at ...

AirBNB was a great idea and for years we enjoyed staying at nice, but sometimes quirky, places around the world. Our last experience, on a v...

I wear glasses, but take them off when I shower. We've been away for a few nights and stayed in hotels for a few of those nights. When I...

We've been away for a few days and I left the QDX doing WSPR on 40m. It ran for a few days, then stopped receiving any spots. It was sti...

I’m in a motel at Gundagai, there is a bar fridge that doesn’t seem very cold. There’s a control but no idea which number is the coldest so ...

The cheap Chinese drone is very sophisticated, with GPS stabilisation etc, but my current favourite is a little one I purchased second hand ...

I've owned a genuine SDRPlay in the past and liked it but have moved over to the AirSpy HF+ as it seemed superior in A/B tests. The low...