I took a few photos of my Butternut HF2V vertical antenna during my winter holidays 2010/2011. You can click on the images to get higher resolution photos. Enjoy!
Month: January 2011
ASCII art FFT with USRP and UHD
The Universal Hardware Driver (UHD) for the USRP contains a cool example program that can draw spectrum scope using simple ASCII art. This video shows reception of 8 MHz wide spectrum slices in the broadcast FM band 88 – 108 MHz.
ARISSat-1: Why is it cool and why do we care?
It looks like AMSAT is going to launch a new satellite! ARISSat-1 – the successor of SuitSat-1 – is ready to be launched on Progress-41P heading to the International Space Station on Friday, January 28, 2011. It will be deployed into its own orbit during EVA 27 currently scheduled for February 16. Once in orbit, it will slowly decay and eventually burn up in the Earth’ atmosphere. SuitSat-1 decayed after 7 months in orbit and that’s also a likely life time for ARISSat-1.
So, why is ARISSat-1 cool and why should we care?
Test driving Quisk SDR
Before getting my hands all dirty with adding UHD driver to Quisk, I decided to take it for a test drive using some pre-recorded samples. I have used a 250 ksps recording of the HO-68 / XW-1 linear transponder downlink that I have recorded on November 9, 2010 using the USRP and the RFX400 daughterboard.
Quisk – A software defined radio for Linux
Few days ago I learned about the Quisk software defined radio application for Linux. It is written by James Ahlstrom N2ADR with contributions from other radio amateurs around the world. A quick glance at the home page and the documentation suggested that it is a rather simple application where it is easy to add support for other hardware.
x264enc problem in GStreamer video switcher solved
Back in August 2010 I ran a brief experiment using GstInputSelector to switch between various video sources. You may have noticed that it was using Theora encoder while most of my other DVB experiments used H.264 encoder in MPEG-TS container. The reason for this was that I could not make x264enc work in the pipeline used for the video switcher.
Filter design and analysis in Linux
I was reading an article in the Danish hamradio magazine about a 1.8 MHz to 70 MHz SDR transceiver. In particular the RF frontend caught my attention because a set of band pass filters and a pre-amp would be a very useful companion for the USRP+LFRX, as would a power amplifier and a set of low pass filters be for the LFTX.
Arduino – The Documentary (2010)
We have been waiting for it and now it is here: An independent documentary about the Arduino project and the people behind it. You can even download the video in HD format from Vimeo. Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.