K4SPBlog

 In my never ending quest to continually delay my entry to the CW club, I think my nest hamateur venture will be satellite operations. Multiple satellites with ham radio capabilities orbit the earth at any given moment. One of my favorite youtube channels, saveitforparts , (my new life motto btw), does lots of satellite operations, mainly snooping on commercial, government, and even military satellites. He builds dishes with different low noise amplifiers (LNAs), low noise blockers (LNBs), software defined radios (SDRs), and a bunch of craigslist junk. He just installed a fully automated satellite tracker inside a surplus radome and I could definitely see myself wasting time on similar ventures.  The uber expensive M2 SATPACK, an example of a commercial egg beater antenna. To get my feet wet, I thought the best way would be using these ham radio focused satellites. The only equipment I would need is an antenna. Antennas must be circularly polarized due to the way satellites co...

 This has been discussed before elsewhere but HF nets are so bizarre. Archaic websites. Obscure membership structures. Shooting fish in a barrel. but simultaneously inefficient where it takes one hour to get one turn.  My main gripe though is the signal reports. If you have to ask a relay for the call sign and repeat the RST multiple times, you were not a 5-5.  I'm actually enjoying this though as it helps me work out some quirks in my home set up while I get ready for more base operations. I found a net that meets late at night so I currently have something to do other than watch youtube. I'll get WAS through them I guess then got for it through LOTW.  My set up so far is the EFHW I installed in the last post which runs through the window, I placed scrap extension cord in the window track to allow the wire to slip through without crimping it while getting an almost complete seal. That goes to my Yaesu FT991A which is hooked up to the computer via USB and my Heil hea...

 I've messed with a little AI in the past couple of years since LLMs exploded into the mainstream a couple years ago. Results initially were not promising but you just have to ask it to not lie (hallucinate) and not ask it something too obscure (something it's not trained for).  Short story long, I had an EFHW antenna that ran north-south and was long enough for 160m and went over some trees that are probably pushing 100ft. Unfortunately, I used cheap wire and it eventually snapped before I got around to replacing it with copper-clad steel(CCS). After that I put up an OFCD but that was dedicated to my Winlink station. Other than that I have a butterfly T2FD in the attic which is essentially a dummy load. TLDR, I only have one antenna and its committed full time. I just finished my master's and it's the holidays so I have time to kill. There's plenty of house projects to do and the weather's great but night owls like me can only replay COD MW3 so many times. I ha...

 I spent a few months trying to get wordpress running in a local instance to work with my ddns address but the way wordpress presents itself on just my local network, not to mention via WAN was over my head. Thus, I have decided to use blogspot which is much simpler meaning I can spend more time poasting and less time dealing with webservers. The three posts previous to this one were what I accrued on that wordpress which I have transferred here and more posts will be forthcoming.

 Power Over Ethernet (POE) is a way to run devices using one ethernet cable that utilized the normal 2 pairs for data and the remaining 2 pairs for DC power. There are several standards for this including IEEE 802.3af and 802.3atwhich you can explore in more detail elsewhere as well as passive which supplies any voltage applied all the time. Passive runs the risk of damaging equipment that is not POE compatible but for simple setups which never get unplugged it is a very reliable option. Stock image of POE wiring courtesy of Cisco. I run a PBX server at the house and have a couple IP phones that I use when I don’t want someone to have my cell number. The number is provided by voip.ms and the server is FreePBX running in a small virtual machine. The phones I use are 10+ year old Cisco SPA525G2s. These phones are great with 5 lines, a color display, a web GUI for config, and some other features I don’t use like wifi and bluetooth. When I first got into hamshack hotline (RIP) about 5 ...

 About a year ago I dipped my toes in some meshtastic. I saw an IO shield for a Heltec V3 and made an impulse buy of two boards without really knowing what they were. I got one running as a solar node early this year. I’m replacing that with a RAK wireless node soon so the heltecs are going in my vehicles as trackers. I needed a case to keep them organized, mountable, and protected.  HarukiToreda designed a shield for the Heltec V3 for use with Meshtastic that adds lots of IO like pinouts for GPS and environment sensors, a buzzer and more JST plugs for power. I got them on Tindie but they are still available here: https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/Heltec_ESP32_V3_Ultimate_Shield_28cea98a.html. I couldn’t find a case so I remixed a simple box. I built this as a tracker going permanently in my vehicle so I wasn’t too concerned with size. It’s a little deep but that just means lots of room for activities. I use a chunk of foam to keep the board pressed against the front...