Over the past seven years (the age of this blog) I started writing several articles that I never finished. It’s time to trash them completely or just add them to a list for future afterthoughts. Who knows ? So, from older to newer: “Weller WD 1000 M Review – Part III – Software”, January 18, 2013 — […]
This is a beacon project started by my friend YO5VAE. He faced some issues while programming of the Si4463-based module and I thought I might give a hand. I resoldered the entire project on an empty Arduino shield to allow expansion of the project with some additional modules. Below are some pics, but probably the […]
I twenty dollars for this superb cassette deck. The playback and recording heads were in excellent shape and I used this deck for some years, playing and recording on NOS (new old stock) tapes, mostly chrome type II and metal – type IV, that I purchased on eBay. However, one day the entire head block […]
There is nothing better than marrying several hobbies and have fun from it. I have had the intention to be part of this expedition at least since I heard about this contest for the first time. My good friends from Năsăud planned this thoroughly. All our equipment was carried by three 4×4, manned by a […]
This old reel-to-reel was the joy of my teenager days, Back in eighties I was listening to VOA and Radio Kuweit and I was recording mostly on east-german OR-WO tapes (that were quite decent) because the BASF and Agfa were in shortage. Western music reached the black market usually by pilots that were operating civil […]
I ordered some ferrite beads for a RF circulator project I currently work on but these might also be very handy for the SWR bridge project. These are extremely efficient for RF supression, or at least this is what they say.
For low frequency projects, a fast way to prototype is using a bare PCB and scratch some dividers that allow “manhattan” style prototyping. I am especially very fond of this prototyping technique and I believe that PCB design should be avoided in the early stages of prototyping. Jim Williams was an artist in such designs. […]
A couple of months passed since I purchased two 10 MHz OCXO modules from eBay. And, to my shame, I didn’t even tried these. Yesterday I did a quick test and the devices are spot on. Both measured on my TTi TF930 3GHz frequency counter: The OCXO needs apx 10 minutes for proper warm up […]
Today: I am cleaning my old and very dirty Panasonic corded phone. I kept this relic because, being powered from the provider, it does not need batteries and it very reliable. I also own an older rotary phone (kept for the very same reasons).
My friends from YO5KUC Ham Radio Club embarked on a very ambitious project: they want to participate in the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) program. Now, for those of you that are not familiar with ARISS, this is a awesome educational project run by NASA: “ARISS lets students worldwide experience the excitement of […]
I bought my first Kindle in 2012. Since then, I read more than 400 ebooks. Not too much, not too few, but certainly a lot more than I would have read without the opportunity to carry a whole library with me at all time. Although a great device, my Kindle Keyboard v3.0 was a bit […]
The international amateur radio exhibition is the platform for ham enthusiasts from all over the world.
Power supply: DC 9v – 12v Antenna: 50 ohms, is not balanced, 7MHZ band, standing wave ratio below 1.8 Receive the static current: 10 mA @ 9 v Transmission power: 0.8W @ 9 v, 1.2W @ 12 v Frequency range: 7.023 MHz launch, receive 7.023-7.026 MHz (7.023 MHz crystals) Stray (harmonic) inhibition: – 20 db […]
I am pretty pleased by the outcome of my commercial endeavours on eBay. Purchasing seems to be a pleasure; until now — with just one exception — I was spared from any nasty experiences. After several small items that I ordered in part for my curiosity to evaluate speed and quality of shipments from chinese suppliers, I […]
Not much to say today. For some time I wanted to tear down and clean my old Panasonic radio casette player. I am very fond of this device. A small and relaxing weekend project.
My old Mac died in a very unfortunate way — the GPU of my previous Mac succombed. It was the last model with DVD drive provided and I really miss having the possiblity to play CDs. Anyway… I did some due dilligence about the costs of repair and the figure was higher that what I […]
For starters, I have to be very clear that I have absolutely no affiliation with this company or another of its kind. This is just about a personal opinion and I wanted to write such posts for some time, but did not find enough momentum to do it. While browsing for some information from their […]
While in a new project (trying to get my Fluke 289 communicate with my PC), I ran into an interesting C# trickie that I thought it might be interesting to share. Here’s the UseCase: getting to have a parent MDI form and several child forms, you want to run selected parent methods from child forms. […]
Again, this time of the year. Got this beautiful fountain pen from my wife. 🙂
Today, while I went over all my posts, I noticed that I have a large list of 43 draft posts. These are articles that I started writing, thought to be interesting, but I had limited bandwidth to finish. I need some planning with these, thus I put them down, maybe getting some input from you […]
Some time ago I did a very short introduction about enabling zombies when debugging in XCode. As a refresher, zombies is a Cocoa feature that turns any object going to be deallocated into a NSZombie instance. This will not prevent your application from crashing, but instead of getting a stack dump from Xcode that is a […]
I had a lot to do these days and did not manage to keep up with the blog. Very busy time at the office before Christmas. Luckily, I’ll get my vacation soon by I swear I will not spend it on much anything else than reading paper books. And books which are not about programming, […]
One situation when a debugger might not be the first option is when you are not sure where does a program has a bug. One way you can check whether your assumptions are truly what is happening in your code is by using assertions. What assertions let you do is express one particular assumption and […]
Endpoints are essentially the USB addresses that USB data is sent to or from. Now, here is the trick. The transfer direction naming convention is a bit unintuitive. Contrary to — at least — what I imagined, an IN Endpoint will transfer USB data from the USB device to the host PC, while an OUT Endpoint […]
Some more days passed and some more finishing touches added to my MacSCPI app. It is entirely dependent on hooking the device via the USBTMC driver, but it works fine and is stable: I had some problems with buffer padding and the output it is still not 100% gibberish–free , but I assume I have to play with […]
After some head banging, I finally managed to send SCPI commands from my Mac to my Agilent (Keysight) DSOX2002A. I’ve worked on this since december last year. Almost a year, but I did not spent a sustained amount of effort. I did it just during my free time. I still have a day job that […]
As one of the goodies launched during current WWDC 2013, Apple has released a developer preview of Xcode 5 and detailed some of the new features it offers such as Automatic Configuration, Test Navigator, Bots, Auto Layout, Asset Management, Debug Gauges, Source Control, and more. Looking over some of the videos of the WWDC Sessions Videos, […]
At least one thing can be improved on Mac Dev Center: the code sample repository. I am not talking about documentation. In this particular case, there’s not much new to write about. The I/O Kit documentation (grab the pdf while it is stil there) is sufficient. On the shelves are tons on books about C and […]
I took a break for almost two months and it was so good ! Away from any disturbance, just us, the Sea and some books. The first couple of weeks slipped away almost unnoticed. There’s something special about Mediterranean… exerts an irresistible charm. Laying on that sea’s shore I can just close my eyes and […]
I’ve kept drooling for this for several years. Today I finally got it ! Moreover, it seems it is fully-option enabled, which is kinda weird because I haven’t ordered for such. However, here it is: the Rigol DSA 815 TG Spectrum Analyzer with tracking generator. This will enhance my lab’s capabilities in RF electronics and […]