I picked this up from the FT-817 yahoo group. It gave me a chuckle. Anyways, last friday night, Jay Leno put a champion ‘texter’ head to head with two radio hams. Credit to Wayne K6NR for the clip.
Continue reading SMS vs Morse Code
All posts by j0n
Atheros Drivers and EPIA MII 10K
I’ve been working on the MII 10K for a few different things recently, over the course of the last few days I’ve been trying to get the Dlink DWL-AG530 and then the DWL-G650 working with this motherboard.
I tried the PCI card first, thinking it would be the most straight forward, when I went to load the madwifi driver to get my (USA purchased) AG 530 I got the following error message:
ath0: unable to collect channel list from hal
ath0: possible regdomain 18 countrycode 0
Bummer, anyways, after a bit of Googling I came across this post. It didn’t work (yet!), so back to Google to find this post, and it worked like a charm, kudos guys.
That left me with the DWL-G650. After putting the card in and rebooting I got
PCI: Failed to allocate mem resource
More googling came up with this post, which worked like a charm. This solution is now summarised in here. If I get time next week I’ll investigate it a bit further.
Hopefully that information may be of use to someone and save them some time. Now that these cards are working, I can begin…
More APRS
I was up in Galway over the weekend, helping out a friend of mine in at the Galway Rally, as most of the time is spent in service not doing much, I had the radio on in the car monitoring PCsat and ISS during their Joint Operations
On sunday I left it beaconing on the 145.825, and once I got somewhat back down the country I switched to EI2WRC-2’s frequency of 144.850 which is currently being monitored by EI8JAs installation of xastir in Waterford City. As you can see from the resulting picture below, it largely covered my journey back to Waterford through Clonmel (as well as some of the journey up)
For such a simple technology (realistically), it really is quite powerful.
The Quiet Zone
Another old bookmark I found. It shows some of the extra-ordinary lengths that have to be taken to keep the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope free from RF interference.
“I’m 1 mile east of command central in the Quiet Zone, sitting in a Dodge pickup with Wesley Sizemore, Keeper of the Quiet. In a world saturated with radio waves, the Quiet Zone is a haven and an anomaly. A unique combination of geography and legislation has rendered its 13,000 square miles nearly free of electromagnetic pollution. Sizemore’s job is to keep it that way.”
Digital Sundial
I found this link in my bookmarks. It quite a neat idea.
“What in heaven is a digital sundial?” That was the title of an article in Scientific American (August 1991), which prompted a flurry of mental activity in many a smart brain. One answer is on display here: a sundial that displays the time, not by throwing a shadow on a set of lines, but in plainly readable digits. The dial functions from 8:00 to 5.55�hr, in 5�minute steps. There is a smooth transition from one reading to the next.
Nifty! Santa, you reading this?
Yaesu Manuals
Got this link from a mailing list. Paul has manuals for the FT-817/FT-857/FT-897 range of radios as well as the software to ‘Wideband’ the radios. Great resource if you happen to have any of these radios (I do :). Thanks Paul.
Managerium
Thanks for this one Shane.
Research on elementary particles has revealed that the heaviest element known to science, Administratium, exists in two forms.
The newly discovered element, Managerium, is unique in that it has no protons or electrons, which means that it has an atomic number of 0. However, it does have 1 neutron, 125 deputy neutrons, 75 assistant deputy neutrons, 11 assistants to the assistant deputy neutrons…..
Read it all here.
Skype Brings You Closer
While waiting for the uClibc Toolchain to compile, I did a quick check on my bloglines subscription, and came upon this short piece. Its worth reading the full story. Basically Mr Barlow gets ‘cold called’ on Skype and tells the interesting story about the caller and the call.
I love the bit:
“Why me?”
“Because your name is John. I think that anybody named John speaks English.”
Whatever her (the caller) motives, it does show the real power of the Internet in making the ‘Global village’ so much smaller.
Thanks for the heads up Bernie
Earth: Changed shape
An interesting article on how the Earthquake that caused the devastation around the Indian ocean has affected, amongst other things, the length of a day.
Blues & Twos
If your into that kind of thing Mr. G has just put a site live giving information on the Irish Scene. Thanks for the heads up Eddie.