3D Printing

I recently decided to invest in a 3D printer. I got myself a Velleman K8400 kit and built it over the course of a few evenings and a weekend. One thing that drove this decison was a discussion with a friend about antenna rotators and they mentioned the SatNOGS project. I didn’t think too much about it at the time as he said it was 3D printed and I didn’t own a 3D printer.

Calculating output impedance

Sometimes it’s useful to know how to find the output impedance of unknown devices such as that of my cheap Chinese signal generator (MingHe MHS-5200A) and today I saw a youtube video from W2AEW which explains how it’s done. What we need to do is take two measurements of the output voltage. In my case I set my signal generator to a 2v sine wave at 5kHz. We want a low frequency sine wave so as the coax doesn’t start to affect our measurements with reflections and such.

Securing unencrypted telecommands

Earlier this year while studying for my intermediate and advanced exams the subject came up of controlling a remote station over the ham bands. I think the specific situation was specified as controlling a remote transceiver. I think there are specific clauses for telecommand for satellite control but it was a problem that set my mind in motion. Our license permits us to do this but with two seemingly contradictory terms.

Hello World

Hello All. I decided to start a new website to document my adventures in ham radio. I’ve run a few blogs in the past on Wordpress but it’s a big slow beast especially when you start collecting plugins and the list of vulnerabilities is endless. I grew tired of running a 6 core AMD with 12GB of memory just to serve up my ramblings so decided to go back to flat HTML.