Category Archives: radio

first QSO in 22 Years

radio

I’ve got my amateur radio license when I was in high school. even though I fully understand the science behind it, being able to hear those week sounds that originate from a far away place, might be even a different continent,  walks magic on me. but for way to many years I wasn’t really active with this hobby.

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One of the main reasons is the space needed to set up an HF antenna. for most of my adult life I’ve been living in apartment buildings. a simple dipole would require hanging 10 meters of wire would mean getting permission to access to the roof and a running a long coax. putting a beam antenna was really out of the question. so I started looking for some small antenna and found out about magnetic loops. these antenna are about 1 meter in diameter and would fit nicely in my balcony. the disadvantages are the narrow bandwidth that requires you to re-tune every frequency change, and the air-gap tuning capacitor which limits the amount of power you can use. Continue reading first QSO in 22 Years →

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SDRSharp Serial Port Remote Control

make, radio

I’ve been working on receiving NOAA APT (until now with very little success). since a satellite passes only even few hours, I wanted to leave the rig unattended. since each sat uses different freq I needed a way for the software I was using to control sdrsharp. wxtoimg already have a feature to control hardware receivers using a serial port, so I wrote a plugin that implemented the protocol and connected them using com0com (a virtual null cable).
it then occurred to me that this could be usefull for many other kind of softwares, like unitrunker and other, so I added (for now) a very basic subset of the uniden scanner protocol. source code and dll download can be found at https://bitbucket.org/roseman/sdrsharp.serialportcontrol
enjoy

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