Orion Through Log Periodic
Laura went out to take some photos of the conjunction of Jupiter and the Moon. She also took a couple of shots of Orion and happened to catch my M2 8 element log periodic lit by moonlight. It turned out to be a pretty neat photo.
Fred
I don’t know how many of you have heard about the Arduino single board computers, but they make and excellent platform for developing gadgets for the ham shack. Here is a brief description of the Ardurino board.
Arduino Uno
Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physicalworld than your desktop computer. It’s an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.
Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can be communicate with software running on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP.) The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.
I have been playing with an Arduino board in order to learn the basics of interfacing it to real world objects and developing simple programs that can gather information from and control these objections. So far I have developed a simple program which reads a digital temperature sensor and display the sensor temperature on a small LCD display called a shield. The Arduino can be accessed over a LAN using a LAN Shield.
Once I get a bit more experienced with the Arduino, I am going to try using to control some things around the ham shack.
Fred
Winter View of Tower
It’s a cold windy day in Southern Indiana. At least it is not snowing. The temperatures are supposed to drop to near zero tonight. Hopefully, it won’t drop below zero!
My wife and I have to do some running around this morning, but plan to spend the rest of the day inside close to our wood burning stove. I also plan to spend some time in the ham shack catching up on QSLing and working a little DX. I briefly checked out the conditions on the bands this morning and the bands were a little noisy, but I was able to work an HZ1 (Saudi Arabia) on 15 meters. Hopefully the bands will still be in good condition this afternoon when I make it back to the shack.
Fred
