Ed W8EMV @w8emv@mastodon.radio

More evidence of a band opening here in SE Michigan - I'm hearing WMUB 88.5 Oxford OH (a relay of WVXU Cincinnati), an NPR station, here in Ann Arbor, MI - about 240 miles.

ARPSC net on the N8DUY repeater at 145.15- in Ann Arbor MI with 19 checkins in 22 minutes.

It was reported that yesterday noon was the last Washtenaw County siren test net of the season. All but 7 of 80+ sirens have been confirmed this season, and 2 new ones are reported out of service.

Some weird clipping on the output signal, with a theory put forward that the repeater is blanking the audio when it thinks it's hearing a touch tone.

I have my stepdad's old Kenwood R-2000 in the attic. It had been in a state where there was no reception, which I tracked down to a blown antenna fuse (now replaced).

The only antenna I've ever had for it is what is now a very old long wire antenna. It's shorter than it once was (chewed through by a cat), the bare wire end is a bit oxidized, etc.

Is it really just as simple as stretching out 50 or 100 feet of wire around the edge of an attic?

Listening to Florida Hurricane Ian traffic on SARnet (a statewide UHF network in Floria) and on the Hurricane Watch Net (on HF).

SARnet has local coverage throughout the state of Florida, and traffic tonight included local discussion of tornado warnings and expectations of where Ian would make landfall.

Hurricane Watch Net is running a directed net asking for emergency or priority traffic, and reading out forecasts.

A few details captured here:

https://vielmetti.typepad.com/w8emv/2022/09/listening-to-florida-hurricane-ian-traffic-via-sarnet-and-hwn.html

#hurricane #flwx

A little more about WNBI-LP New Buffalo MI from a story that came out when they launched. "Bison Radio", 100 watts.

https://www.harborcountry-news.com/features/bison-radio-is-on-the-air-new-buffalo-students-make/article_41196118-0444-11e7-8ff5-17d8b750ee10.html

The first of the low power FM (LP-FM) stations was a community radio station run from a public school. It looked like someone was having some fun.

The other was a religious broadcaster that has a network of dozens of LP-FM licenses and affiliates around the world. I couldn't tell if they had any locally originated programming.

Both "community" radio of a sort but for very different communities.

Some radio fun on an Amtrak trip.

First challenge, tune in to a KiwiSDR over cell phone tethered wifi and see if I can stream. Mixed results here, sounded great when it worked, but cell coverage in SW Michigan was spotty which ended the fun.

Next, use the FM tuner in my phone and see what I can get with a minimal headphone jack antenna. This got me two low power FM stations (100 watts) when stopped at two different small town depots, with the help of Wikipedia to know where to look.

Listening to some of the Hurricane Watch Net earlier this evening on 7268 via a KiwiSDR run by N4BUT in Orlando FL.

http://sdr.n4but.com:8173/?f=7268.000lsbz10

The net was orderly and was calling for reports from affected areas but
I did not hear any traffic from Puerto Rico.

All reports are of widespread power outages (nearly 100%) and heavy winds on the island.

Yesterday I did a brief writeup of my MacBook Air + GQRX + Airspy HF+ SDR configuration. (The key discovery was UDP streaming out of GQRX).

Here's a longer writeup of the whole configuration, since there was some interest in this, and since I'm sure I'll forget some key element of its construction and want to go back and remember what I did.

https://vielmetti.typepad.com/w8emv/2022/09/remote-access-to-gqrx-and-an-airspy-hf-sdr-on-an-old-macbook-air.html

I have an old MacBook Air running #GQRX to decode signals coming off an Airspy HF+ SDR. I've been removing into it with the Mac "Screen Sharing" application, which does video just fine but doesn't share audio.

Happily it turns out that GQRX has a "UDP" feature in the network options, to share the audio over a UDP stream to another process on the same host (or a completely different host). It's documented at

https://gqrx.dk/doc/streaming-audio-over-udp

So now I have audio too, with no appreciable lag, using VLC.

Updated my MMDVM pi-star gateway that I use for #DMR from 3.x to 4.x. A new kernel, a few minor tweaks here and there, but overall not a lot of visible differences.

I wanted to dump/restore settings, but the restore didn't take, so I edited things by hand.

I put the new install on a bigger SD card. The one task on my checklist remaining is to install Tailscale again, so that I have remote VPN access.

Only glitch: the new default disables the OLED screen saver, easy to tweak it back to normal.

Really happy to see Airspy HF+ support in two SDR tools (GQRX and SDR++) that I have running on an old MacBook Air. When I first got the Airspy the only workable software was Windows only (SDRSharp, which is very nice, but my Windows laptop is not very good).

The New York Times has a story on ships faking AIS transmissions to disguise their locations to evade trade embargoes, criminal activity, or other shenanigans.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/03/world/americas/high-seas-deception-how-shady-ships-use-gps-to-evade-international-law.html

"How Shady Ships Use GPS to Evade International Law"

They quote Matan Peled, a founder of Windward, "the leading maritime AI company". Windward says that it integrates AIS data with satellite observations to figure out where ships actually are (as opposed to where they say they are).

Listened to a portion of the Ball Smacker Radio broadcast tonight. Generally on 6960 kHz on Friday nights at 900p Eastern.

Good old fashioned pirate radio with frequent station IDs, a classic rock era music mix, and obscure origins ("somewhere in the Northeast").

https://ballsmacker.net

Thanks to Brian KG8CO for the ping in the comments on my radio blog for reminding me of this while it was happening.

https://vielmetti.typepad.com/w8emv/2020/05/ball-smacker-radio-pirate-radio-on-6960.html

Most of my #SDR time is spent with network-based SDRs like #KiwiSDR or #WebSDR .

One way to tune in elusive far-away signals is to move your receiver closer! And since there are over 600 Kiwis scattered around the world, it's been a great way to tune into local signals. Especially since there's no way that any local antenna, no matter how good, is going to pick up some of these signals from half way around the world.

I suppose the next challenge: run a KiwiSDR of my own.

If you have an Airspy HF+ and are using it with something other than Windows, what are you using and are you happy with it?

Some possible options:
* GQRX (M1 + Rosetta Mac)
* SDRPlusPlus (Android)

I'm sure there are more.

I'll try to set something up to explore the AM/FM co-channel canceller plugins that are supported by SDRSharp, but my only Windows machine is Windows-on-Arm so it's always a crap shoot whether Intel based code will run correctly + fast enough under Arm emulation.

#airspy

Joined ARRL for Field Day, just got my first issue of QST. I will report here on anything of particular interest.

If you use #DMR radios, what is your experience?

My initial (2018) hope was "cheap, digital, global", but my experience has been somewhat disappointing, mostly because of just how clumsy it is to tune to a new channel without the round trip of "updating a code plug".

On the other hand my Radioddity GD-77 HT (UHF/VHF DMR/FM) is my best HT for old-fashioned FM repeaters, easily beating out my Baofengs for sound and signal quality in A/B testing.

(Motivated by Phil KA9Q discussion on bird site).