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Dj's avatar

Nice to subtly discover another Battlestar Galactica fan... One of the few TV shows where the remake was better than the original in my opinion. :-)

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Ben Kuhn's avatar

This was a great issue. So much good stuff over the past few weeks.

HFSignals BitX40 was my first real introduction to HF (well, I had a Heath SB104 that breaks every other QSO so I don't count that). The first time I got it on the air I heard a QSO with an antarctic station during solar minimum. I own two Bitx40s, one with the analog VFO and the second with the DDS VFO using an Arduino. I also built a very early revision uBitx as a portable radio (including DIY Li-Ion battery packs) to take up to the Boundary Waters. That rig has been through several cases and many upgrades to resolve the hardware issues on the older variants. It was a great learning experience. I never bought an sBitx, mainly due to the cost and redundant functionality. The xBitx looks awesome though. With the easily changeable standard batteries it looks like it's designed exactly for what I was trying to achieve with the uBitx.

I liked your mention of hardware TNCs being good for APRS digipeaters too. I'm a fan of software TNCs for ax.25, Direwolf in particular, but there's nothing like being able to extend a network (APRS, Packet, etc...) with no more complication than pressing the power button on the TNC and radio. My local club supports a large bike race in some rough terrain and fill-in APRS digipeaters are critical for tracking. Hardware TNCs meet the KISS principal here and are the perfect solution.

You are probably aware, but you don't need to write code to use GNURadio. Most of my GNURadio experimentation has been ore of a professional (infosec) interest, but I found this blog post extremely helpful in getting started with it: https://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/how-to-replay-rf-signals-using-sdr/ There was also a more basic post earlier that covered just listening and combining multiple audio streams, but I can't seem to find it anymore. They have some other interesting GNURadio posts here: https://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/tag/gnuradio/

Thanks for mentioning wsjtx_improved. I had not seen this before and I have some small-display use cases for this. I will be trying it out!

You mentioned StarLink being the first consumer product using phased array antennas. Wifi has used this for beam forming since 802.11n.

I'm excited for the 16gb version of the RPi. You really can't beat an ARM-based SBC for power efficiency in "appliance" applications, and the GPIO ports give hardware interfacing flexibility that higher-power, similarly priced x86 machines can't match.

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