AmateurRadio.com

AMSAT is offering a discounted satellite antenna package to members.  The package consists of two M2 antennas, one for 2m the other for 440, both circularly polarized.  Looks like a nice package at a decent price.  I’m going get this for the new bachelor pad QTH.  If you’re a satellite aficionado and not a member of AMSAT or another organization that launches birds, you should join and support one so we can keep satellites orbiting the globe.

Make has an article on how to turn your Raspberry Pi into a “pirate radio”.  This appears to be done all in software by outputting a high frequency bit stream on a GPIO pin.  The software will frequency modulate the carrier and it’s intended mainly to be a short range (i.e. unlicensed FCC Part 15 here in the US) FM broadcast transmitter you can play your tunes through while on the beach.  A more technical article, mentions it has 1 to 250 Mhz capability.  This might make a cool little exciter for QRP CW, with appropriate filtering to clean up what undoubtedly has a lot of odd order harmonics.

There’s this cool little Kickstarter project called Tsunami.  It’s an Arduino-based audio signal generator and analyzer.  Undoubtedly this could have some amateur radio applications, like generating and decoding digital modes.

One of the original Arduino founders who ran the main firm which manufactured Arduino boards is accused of going rogue and registering the Arduino trademark in Italy.  Arduino.cc is the original, core Arduino team and the Arduino LLC entity, and Arduino.org is Arduino SRL, the rogue manufacturing company.  Arduino SRL is no longer paying Arduino LLC royalty fees and Arduino LLC is now in a legal battle.  Any Arduino board that was purchased in the last year that was made in Italy did not have royalties go to the Arduino team which has been responsible for design, creativity, and energy behind the Arduino project.