I originally wrote this about 15 years ago, before I even bothered with a website. But as the pubs will be open again soon, it need reiterating.
All posts by Tony Blews
Going Straight: On the Wrong Track
The pilot episode of “Going Straight” (sequel to “Porridge“) was the show that started me off on finding errors in TV shows when it came to their depiction of railways and trains, and Stafford.
Fleetwood Street OO Model Tramway
Fleetwood Street is the 3rd of my model rail projects. It was never supposed to be operational, just a roughly 3 metre long shelf to display my collection of Corgi/Atlas trams. Then I realised that I didn’t have a 3m stretch of un-interupted wall space, so knocked it down to about 1.5m
Timetable Project
Some years ago, I decided that I wasn’t completely happy with having to carry printed timetables, or having to scroll though big PDF files while chasing Trams on my visits to the Blackpool Tramway.
I figured that it would be better to be able to access the timetables on my phone. As I was incapable of creating Apps for both the Android and iPhone platforms (seriously, have you seen what you have to do to become a developer for iOS?), I decided to do it as a mobile-friendly formatted web page. How hard could it be?
What if The Arkenstone was a Silmaril?
Right, this is going to be a long, rambling text about The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion.
The Lord of the Rings was a actually a long text about two hobbits going rambling, but that is not the point here.
If you don’t want to read my badly thought through notions about some overly long books (and a quite short book that was made into three over long films), then look away now.
Autocab Minos Power Cable
The Minos is the version of the Autocab MDT that replaced the Omicron. It is the one that isn’t rubbish.
Normally these are powered from the Radio cable, but if you want to run them without a radio, you’ll need to work something else out.
First APRS reception
Despite the SDR IGate having a crap antenna mag-mounted to my server cabinet, I picked up a signal!
Wow, I need to read about thisLinux SDR APRS IGate setup
Ok… Firstly, there are many guides to doing this already on the internet, but most of the use a Raspberry Pi. I’m not using one, for reasons that will be made clear later.
Secondly, I couldn’t find any one of the guides that did exactly what we wanted.
Before you read all this rubbish, it is important that to use it you will need an Amateur Radio License and Callsign, and and APRS-IS Passcode. If you don’t have them, then go and get them before continuing.
So, with that in mind…
Cheap Realtek SDR
I’m going to be playing about with and SDR dongle a lot, so I think it only fair to describe it.
My first steps with SSTV on 2m
I was playing about making audio cables to connect my cheap Baofeng to my PC. To test the recieve cable, I took a walk with the other Baofeng, and an Android App called SSTV Encoder.