Mark VandeWettering 📡

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147 Posts
Amateur radio license K6HX (Extra), GMRS as WRWP420. Interested in #sdr, #aredn, and all sorts of other crazy technologies.
42 unique spotters of my pico-WSPRer #wspr beacon so far. Not bad for some tiny number of milliwatts.
Well, I confirmed that my apparent frequency discrepancy on my little pico-WSPRer was not that the beacon was off, but that my SDR-IQ was off by about 260 Hz. Odd. In a few days of running, I've been spotted 31 times from 6 unique stations, mostly on a N/S path up into Canada, out to a range of about 1800 km. Not bad for a $4 Pi Pico and a $4 GPS, with no additional components. #wspr
Here is the waterfall from my SDR-IQ. Running WSJT-X on this, it detects the harmonic of the signal (spaced about 120 Hz apart) which is probably caused by the square-wave bit banging signal on the GPIO pins. The main signal (which is still probably < 20mw) is outside the frequency limits, which may explain why I haven't gotten many spots.
#wspr
Anybody using the pico-WSPRer code? It appears that the frequency generated by it may be off by a couple hundred Hz, which puts it out of band, which may explain why I've gotten relatively few spots (there are definitely other possibilities). Monitoring it with RFSpace SDR-IQ definitely shows it running a bit high, which I didn't think would happen with the GPS conditioning the oscillator. Any ideas? #wspr
Bench testing a raspberry pi pico generating WSPR using the code on https://github.com/EngineerGuy314/pico-WSPRer Used a few inches of wire as an antenna, received with my old SDR-IQ without any antenna hooked up at a distance of a foot or so. The odd looking callsigns are apparently telemetry/altitude information encoded with the U4B protocol variant. Not sure how that works. Last couple decodes are the traditional form. Hope to get a real version of this up this weekend.
GitHub - EngineerGuy314/pico-WSPRer: Minimalist WSPR tracker for pico-balloons utilizing Raspberry Pi Pico (or Rp2040) as the RF generator (aka The Cheapest Tracker In The Worldâ„¢). More info: [WIKI](https://github.com/EngineerGuy314/pico-WSPRer/wiki/pico%E2%80%90WSPRer-(aka-Cheapest-Tracker-in-the-World%E2%84%A2))

Minimalist WSPR tracker for pico-balloons utilizing Raspberry Pi Pico (or Rp2040) as the RF generator (aka The Cheapest Tracker In The Worldâ„¢). More info: [WIKI](https://github.com/EngineerGuy314/p...

GitHub

Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads - because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).

Here we see surpluses being taken away from both end-users and business customers - that is, searchers and advertisers.

31/

Whenever I wear an N95 mask out in public, people always ask, "are you sick?"

Uh, no, I'm not sick.

Likewise, when I'm riding a bicycle and wearing a helmet, it is not because I have a head injury.

#Covid19

Something seems to have happened to my #tinygs station around the 6th, causing its sensitivity to drop. I'll have to dig into it sometime this weekend, and see what I can figure out. https://tinygs.com/station/K6HX_1@1733248793
tinygs-webapp

My Yaesu VX-8G took a hard fall to the concrete, and has developed a display problem (horizontal stripes of the display are blank). I'm not certain that I think it's worth fixing, but that's likely dependent on how much it costs to repair. Anyone had any similar experience? Is it worth opening myself, and trying to check the seating of the display connectors?
Ain't that the truth