NG0R QTH early Dec 2010

Here is a picture of the QTH from early December... probably about 4 or 5 storms ago. We have quite a bit more snow on the ground now. This was a quick  picture from the DroidX as I drove away from the house.

Homebrew CNC

I really enjoy reading about people that are designing homebrew CNCs.  I would like to have something similar for cranking out prototype circuit boards for projects.


Click on the image to go read more about it.

Here are some other links:
http://buildyouridea.com/cnc.html

Incident

http://xkcd.com/838/

A white December in MN

It has been blowing and snow here for the better part of 24 hours. We had no plans so we stayed home and did stuff in side of the house.

The map above is pretty interesting because all of the state highways in our area are either closed or listed with danger warnings. The wind is blowing pretty hard so it has been largely white-out conditions all day. Now that it has gotten dark I suspect the plows will largely shut down till morning since they will not be able to keep up.

This is the third storm in about 3 week weeks. Winter 2010-2011 is turning into a classic Minnesota Winter. (The estimated high temp for tomorrow is +1F.)

Cool codec conversion utilities on Linux

I needed to convert some video clips from format A to format B.  (The video clip started as an OGG format)

• I tried to upload the whole clip unedited but YouTube could not handle the OGG format and conversion.
  
  
• I ended up using some video editing software (and trimmed it down a bit.) When I tried exporting the final product so that I could upload it to YouTube I was not happy with the file size to quality trade-offs.  (Yeah, I am bandwidth limited here in the middle of now where.)  I ended up exporting to a couple of different formats and uploaded one of large files (H264, MOV, MPEG4)
  

I was not completely happy with the experience and decided to do some more research. I discovered (no surprise) that the current flavors of Linux have some powerful utilities assuming that you are willing to work from the command line.

I have a many of the audio and video codecs loaded so I did not actually need to install anything new... your mileage may very.

Here are a couple of examples:
ffmpeg -i fileA.ogg fileA.avi
ffmpeg -i fileA.ogg fileA.mov

The file size and quality were very good. I am sure that with some additional tweaking I could improve upon the results of tonight's exercise.

Take a look at:  man ffmpeg   for more details

SO-67 Sunday night

A rare one....

I got an email from Chris KC0YBM indicating that he was going to try to work SO-67 tonight. I am not a huge satellite guy so I was not really aware of SO-67 until I went out to the AMSAT page.

I was working some 80m PSK and participating in the Sunday night QRP/homebrew net at the same time. So I figured that I might as well record the satellite pass for Chris and maybe try to work a couple of folks. I ended up getting in the log prior to losing the bird.

73 de NG0R

AA5PK on SO-50

I worked AA5PK on the tail end of another SO-50 pass.


I actually missed most of the pass and looked up from doing something else. I decided to swing the beam and see if I could try to work any someone.

I went out to QRZ to look up the info about the callsign. Glenn has a nice looking shack. He has some AZ/EL control of his antennas which is a semi-rare thing for most folks.

73 de NG0R

Working some birds

I typically don't spend a lot of working satellite QSOs. I was curious to see if I could record the downlink audio on top of video from the prediction & tracking software that I use. I am trying to capture some audio and video for a presentation that I am working.

Here are two quick clips:

It is a good starting point. (The native resolution prior to going to YouTube is quite a bit higher.)

Kingston Sleet

Winter is coming....

Here is a little weather video that I shot yesterday on my cell phone. The sleet sounds like hail. About 5 minutes after the sleet stopped the heavy snow started.

QSO with the ISS (NA1SS)

I was able to work the International Space Station on Friday evening and again on Sunday morning.

Image courtesy of NASA

Col. Douglas Wheelock operating NA1SS aboard the International Space Station.

Col Wheelock is scheduled to fly back to earth on Thanksgiving day around 10:45pm central time. He has been very active during his free time making contacts on the radio.  The ISS has an excellent signal when it is active.

Now I need to figure out how to get a QSL card from them.  :-)

73 de NG0R