This is the 193rd episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, your hosts discuss ARRL Field Day, JT65 and new modes like it, the wonder of 6m and the E Layer, the NSA, patent trolls, useful command line utilities and more. We also have a great interview with Joe Ayers, AE6XE, about AREDN, the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network. This one runs a bit long, but we thought it was worth it.

73 de The LHS Crew

Ham College begins studies on the General Amateur Radio Exam. Why upgrade? What’s on the test?

01:19:46

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The other day I was pottering around Facebook and stumbled across an amusing story via BBC News I think about a young couple who had decided to set themselves the challenge of visiting every one of the over 2,500 railway stations across Britain. I later discovered it’s connected to a Kickstarter project and has a website http://allthestations.co.uk. Reading some of the comments to the video – always a risky activity – I discovered a reference to the videos made by Geoff Marshall (of the same couple) exploring the secrets of the London underground and another youtube video – via https://www.youtube.com/user/geofftech2 – where he talks about cassette tapes. He also has a website at http://geofftech.co.uk.

In the comments to this clip there were a number of pointers to another youtuber who focuses on old analogue technology called ‘Techmoan’ – https://www.youtube.com/user/Techmoan. One of the first videos of his I watched featured what Techmoan described as his holy grail of 1970s consumer electronics – something that featured both Nixie tubes and an oscilloscope to visualise the music – a bizarre old silver SAE hi fi amplifier you can see on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkCIdufSGS8.

About half way through the video he demonstrated the way the small oscilloscope worked. Normal music resulted in an animated but pretty fuzzy trace jumping about the screen. Then he put some different audio into the amp and the oscilloscope which resulted in regular geometric images appearing on the small screen. Quite amazing! I was aware of the neat regular waveforms that can be created with different frequency ratios on the X and Y plates. The Australian ABC’s logo was created by using a 3 to 1 ratio many years ago. But what I was seeing on the screen was lightyears beyond that.

He got a lot of comments pointing him to resources on oscilloscope music and a follow-up youtube video had pointers to a number of clips and sites, most notably Jerobeam Fenderson’s site at http://oscilloscopemusic.com.

You can view a number of his pieces on his Youtube channel – https://www.youtube.com/user/jerobeamfenderson1.

Techmoan also provided links to an Oscilloscope Emulator for Windows, Mac & Linux https://asdfg.me/osci/ which works on my Mac and a Reddit Oscilloscope Music Page https://www.reddit.com/r/oscilloscopemusic/ with further links and info about this bizarre art form.

Jerobeam Fenderson also offers a program to create oscilloscope music called OsciStudio via his website.

Two years ago this day we moved into our own house in Daxi and exactly two years later I can finally say that my shack is finished. Done, completed, set and sorted. After I fixed the walls and painted them bright during Chinese New Year 2016 it took more than a year before the itch of a dedicated bookshelf for all my radio stuff became too much to bear, so CNY 2017 saw this addition….

The lighting was too cold for my taste, so I made this with some old wood and LED lights I got for free from a defunct coffee house…..

Then I really got going and made shelves on top of my ham desk so I could finally stack all my rigs in one place. Heaven! The first time ever I got things organized this well. I also put in a new vent for the cables going to the outside, color coded everything et voila, we were done!

I haven’t been on air yet, but monitoring instead to see how my antennas perform reception wise. At first I used WSPR, but as there are only so many stations I switched to JT65. I have been spending quite a bit of time on pskreporter.info, which is fascinating website. Within 12 hours you can get a view of what you can receive and from where. Do it for a couple of days and you will get a feel of how good conditions are at the moment.

Even though noise on 20 meters is huge I can still hear a lot, but there is room for improvement. With the shack and antenna cables in place I can finally start working on my antennas and see if I can get the noise down a bit. Noise on 20 meters is the worst, 40 meters is fine, but I don’t have a resonant antenna for that band. The 5 meter vertical on the roof performs well for NDB DXing, but not for much else. The summer is always hot here, but I will beat the heat and make those improvements so I can work the world again this fall.