Spinning & GrinningI’ve been looking around for good ideas for a portable HF antenna and finally settled on Robert Johns’ (W3JIP) plan from a QST article (Aug 88). The antenna design is a vertical dipole (6M to 40M), using a loading coil at the base of the vertical with a tap and the other half the dipole [...]
On Sunday I headed out to Fort Monroe and activated the Old Point Comfort Lighthouse with limited success. About 4 hours on the air and two contacts. The first contact was Colorado, a loud, booming 59. The next was Virginia Beach…. about 5 miles across the water. I need to come up with a better [...]
Just added some more memory to the Linux tower (aka garage box)… dropped in an additional 512MB SDRAM SIMM and after a reboot it is now operating much quicker. Also made an adjustment to the xorg.conf to fix the video card. It’s an old VooDoo 3Dfx card and although recognized, it defaulted to a screen [...]
I was able to get the tower up and the wireless card working. I’m also able to access the box via ssh sessions. Learning alot and having fun.
I pulled out all my junkbox computer parts, gathered the two desktop towers that had gone south some time back, and hauled it all in to the family room along with a huge monitor. The mission – setup a desktop tower running Ubuntu Linux in the garage and attach it to the network with a [...]
I got all the various multimedia files to play nice with my Ubuntu installation. To include streaming media… I really enjoy listening to NPR using streaming audio and I’m glad I got that working. I’m reading a new book called Beginning Ubuntu Linux, which is helping quite a bit. I think the next stage is [...]
World Amateur Radio Day, Tuesday, April 18, commemorates the founding of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU) in Paris in 1925. The 2006 theme is “Amateur Radio: A gateway to information and communications technologies (ICT) for today’s youth.” With support from PZK, the Polish Amateur Radio Union, MK QTC, the Polish radio amateurs’ journal again [...]
Click on a digital mode to hear a brief (most
My latest dabblings in Linux prompted me to dig out my copy of Neal Stephenson’s “In the Beginning… was the Command Line” – it’s a wonderful read: “So when I got home I began messing around with Linux, which is one of many, many different concrete implementations of the abstract, Platonic ideal called Unix. I [...]
Today is the Chesapeake Amateur Radio Service’s SpringFest – a hamfest! I should be heading over later today to see the sights. I don’t plan on buying anything, but you never know.