marxy's musing on technology

There seems to be increasing interest in Olivia. It's a keyboard chat digital mode built in to Fldigi that gets through when signal to n...

This week I was a guest on the national ABC radio program Nightlife with Philip Clark. My tech topics are: EU investigating Twitter under th...

It's now two years since I moved to country Victoria. One of the first things I did was find the local amateur radio club. For me it...

Users of my WSPR Watch app have been reporting problems over the last day. It looks like WSPRnet.org is down with a database error. "PD...

Another chat with Philip Clark last night on ABC Radio across Australia. If you like, you can listen here . I've purchased a new microph...

After a life in dense suburban settings where HF reception is poor, I am enjoying the benefits of five acres in the bush.  The radio shack i...

We have quite a few low cost Ozito (Bunnings) battery powered tools around here even though I've been transitioning to Makita. The batte...

After contributing technology commentary for many years on ABC radio, I've had a break this year but now I'm back. This week I did a...

Like 12 months ago, I joined Richard, VK3LRJ in the journey down to the Rosebud Radiofest. It seemed bigger than last year. Certainly there ...

It's been a while since I've fired up FreeDV . For some reason there isn't a pre-made build for Linux so I grabbed the source co...

With a little travel on the agenda soon, I thought I'd run up OpenWebRX on a Raspberry Pi 4 in the shack. The simplest approach is to d...

Several people have commented that the 10m (28MHz) band is very active at the moment. Compared to my 80m dipole, a little dipole for 10m was...

After the failure of my ESP32 web server to monitor battery voltage I reverted back to a simple system with an Arduino Nano reading analog v...

The radios in my shack are now powered by a 12V flooded deep cycle lead acid battery with 105Ah capacity charged from a 100W solar panel. So...

Timed to coincide with the release of iOS 17, WSPR Watch version 4 is now in the iOS App Store. It's a long overdue re-write of the app...

As part of my project to convert the shack to off-grid power I thought it might be good to replace the shack laptop (with its mains charger)...

During the beta phase of iOS 17 , which will be released in a day or two, I've been working on a re-write of my iOS app " WSPR Watc...

Visiting the emergency communications exercise a few weeks ago inspired me to make sure my radio shack can operate without mains power if r...