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 …

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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. …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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, …

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I got my hands on a Xeon E5-1680V2 processor last week. This is about the best CPU that I could get for my motherboard, and it’s an overclocking monster. Comfortable at 4.7Ghz at <80 degrees, currently at 4.6 and staying under 75 after extended benchmarks. Adding to this the fact that I finally jumped 4 generation of graphics cards by updating to a Zotac 2080 Amp MAXX card, gaming and GPU computations are now impressive. All games at max details at 1980×1200 (none of that tiny HD resolution) now are pretty much stable at 60 FPS, and oh *so* pretty. …

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