Picked up an RTL-SDR software-defined radio dongle. Because reasons. After an evening of driver hell, I decided today that maybe I should read the quick-start instructions. Gosh, they’re more helpful than I imagined. Finally got the SDRSharp software to recognize the dongle and start tuning and decoding radio. Unfortunately, my poor old laptop is just …
Tag Archives: radio
Vee
Experiments with operating the radio at home continue. Had a wacky idea to use the anchor in the tree over my balcony as the support for a 20m inverted-V dipole, fed with 300ohm twinlead for multi-band matching. Brainstormed a plan to use a pair of bamboo fishing poles, anchored by pole brackets on the balcony …
Balcony Into the Sky
Getting more brazen with my antenna projects at my apartment. Used a reshaped coat hanger with a pulley and a lead weight to hook over a tree limb over my balcony. Now I have an anchor point to hang my 10m vertical dipole (or any other antenna that’ll fit). The anchor is below the peak …
Heterodyne
I just had some first-hand experience with some very wideband heterodyne mixing in my radio shack. (For those not in the know, a heterodyne is where you mix a signal at one frequency with a signal at another frequency to derive a new pair of frequencies that are mathematically related.) My 2-meter radio was tuned …
Transit
Ultimately, all technological systems are mediums for human systems. As much as I love computers, networking, radio, etc., I still have to wrestle with the human factor. People are why those things exist. I can study and focus and fixate on the tech, but the tech is completely, irrevocably, in service of human communications. I …