This space will be updated every so often. Various musings, and notable things that have gone one in my life. Some kayaking, a bit of mountain biking, a few astronomical items, maybe some car stuff. There may be the odd rant or two!
I hear Zurich is lovely this time of the year.. Also it’s apparently a lovely drive from Ireland via ferry to Fishguard and using the Eurotunnel onwards to the continent. I also hear that parking is fun in that city.. More to follow depending on updates.
Read this link first – https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/09/14000-words-of-blame-the-pilots-that-whitewash-boeing-of-737-max-failure.html It’s a sane critique of a recent NY Times article that appears to be from Boeing PR by proxy: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html . To be honest, I would have expected better from the likes of the New York Times. And Boeing wonder why the European flight authorities will not be certifying the 737 MAX until the Europeans have tested and certified under European testing – any FAA certification understandably won’t be transferred given the debacle.
A few weeks ago, I set up an ADS-B listener, started uploading to FlightRadar24 with the ID T-EINN18 , and I’ve watched my ranking go up and up.. As of this morning (August 20th I have the 43rd highest ranking of 130 in Ireland, 3rd highest Shannon uploader, and worldwide ranking of 6204 of 23,000, and going up by ~2000 positions a day at the moment. I’m using a RaspberriPi 2b, an RTL-SDR dongle, and RTL-SDR 22dB LNA, and the antenna is a self-built colinear coaxial cable antenna with 8 116mm segments taped to the inside of an upstairs window. …
So, I got myself a KiwiSDR. This is now connected to the random longwire I’ve strung across the rear lawn. It’s available on http://kiwisdr.swibble.com:8073 The KiwiSDR is a completely self-contained device, that consists of a Beaglebone Green micro computer, with an attached ‘cape’ that provides 30mhz of HF bandwidth to ~8 tuners. This means that (in one configuration) there are four tuners each with a waterfall available for use. Because the device is self-contained and accessible across networks without the use of a PC to host the tuning, there’s great flexibility in the device that can play and display the …
I’ve had a bit of time to try out a few different antenna ideas, and it’s been a very interesting learning curve so far. Self-build antenna fun: The first antenna attempt was a simple short randomwire of a few meters whiule sitting on the lawn with one of the laptops and the RTL-SDR dongle. I was able to get some SW stations from Saudi and Eastern Europe with that. Second antenna build attempt was that I set up about 20m of insulated copper wire across the lawn, and fed a coax cable to the receivers directly from the centre point. …
It’s been an interesting time recently, properly nerding out with the dabbling back into Software Defined Radio. Using a USB device, getting radio signals from around the world into the laptop, and doing interesting things from there. It’s pretty cool to be able, with the same device and hardware and antenna, to tune in the time signal on 60kHz, through getting shortwave radio stations from Botswana tuned in, to deciphering digital radio stations, to decoding the RTTY weather forecasts from the German weather service, to picking up faint FM radio stations from around the south of Ireland, to hearing Marine …
My lovely new 20″ scope appears to need glasses. Seems as though Skywatcher didn’t make the mirror as well as they should have, and there is somewhere around one to two waves of spherical aberration present on the mirror. This is ruining the fine contrast on planets and making the scope a little frustrating to use. Currently working with the vendor to get a replacement mirror. There is also another issue with the scope, where the primary mirror support structure has enough movement present under the change in altitude, to ensure that the scope cannot maintain collimation. My investigations so …
Just checking my phone today, I saw that there were three Facebook applications running on my phone. A Facebook app manager, a Facebook app installer, and “Facebook services”. I’ve never explicitly logged into Facebook on this phone, and I’ve had the app completely disabled (couldn’t uninstall due to Three having baked this piece of crap into the ROM) since taking delivery of the device two years ago. The Facebook service app had transferred some 8gb of data since Feb 20th. At least now those apps are denied running. Pretty piss-poor of Facebook not to take the hint on my device …
My largest scope up to buying this one was a 12″ manual Dob, with some lovely views and memories from it. I had been hankering after an upgrade for some years though with the intent of getting a scope that would satisfy my aperture fever.. I wanted the largest aperture I could handle by myself, without needing to have it stored assembled. I’ve not got the room to keep a really large scope fully assembled so I needed to make sure I could assemble and disassemble whatever scope I got in a fairly short space of time given Irish weather, …
It arrived.. It’s a Skywatcher Stargate 500p Dobsonian truss-type telescope. The primary mirror is a full half-metre wide, it has a 2 metre focal length. It’s an absolute light bucket. It comes with a computerised goto drive, and it takes me less than about 10 min to set it up and have it running. It came in 4 large boxes, with a shipping weight of about 95 kg. I updated my eyepiece collection to suit the f/3.94 focal ration, with a Paracorr, a few Ethos 100-degree eyepieces, and a widest-field Explore Scientific 25mm 100 degree eyepiece. I now understand exactly …