Radio, railways, stuff...

I knew this would happen. I ditched Windows some time ago because none of my kit would run Windows 11. So why, then, do I suddenly have TWO Windows 11 systems?? Ok... the first is because I really needed a laptop for travel. I have an iPad which is my daily travel thing but wanted Windows compatibility plus a keyboard. So I acquired a ThinkBook. it has yet to be out in the wild in anger but has the usual array of software including wsjt-x and it set up for the QMX+. So why two? I also need actual Excel conpatibility plus I really miss SDR Console. I tried the latter under Wine but never completely successfully. eBay to the rescue and along came a neat HP system with an 8th gen i7 and Windows 11 Pro. MS Office (for Excel) came along via Groupon of all places for GBP 11. The original Windows 10 PC hosting the TS2000X which later became a Linux box is now the server, replacing the diminutive Lenovo PC. Having this in the shack running 24/7 has the advantage that I can retire some of the various Pi systems plus the Radio4 fanless PC that…

Here it is again... back in April I removed this blog because it was hosted at home and the server was under constant, though never successful attack. Given the home server does, well, home things I decided to block external access and thus the blog died. It is now hosted on a VPS. So far, all I have done is put everything back as it was, so it is now very much out of date. I will update it going forward. The only real item of news is I am now the membership secretary of the British Railways Amateur Radio Society. Membership is currently closed but we are hopefully sorting that out soon. In the meantime do feel free to check http://brars.info/

My interest in radio, and electronics more generally started when I was about 6 years old. Interest in railways came shortly after but more so was an interest in telegraphy. I suspect that came from listening to morse signals. Anyway, however it came about the telegraphy side of things coupled with my railway interest via railway signalling when I was invited into a sigal box and saw the various telegraphy kit. Fast forward a few decades and an entire unrelated career and I find myself working on a heritage railway in the - you guessed it - Signal and Telegraph department. So, and in keeping with the title of my blog here are a couple of work pictures... The lever frame. Both mechanical and electrical interlocking is used here in order to ensure conflicting routes cannot be set. The mechanical interlocking is behind the levers under cover and the electrical interlocking is under the floor. These indicators show the state of signals (on or off) and points (normal or reverse) plus 'wrong'. The instruments use DC coils so that a single wire to whatever is monitored can be used with a polarity reversal to indicate the two states. The 'wrong'…

I made some time to have a play with Meshcore on 868MHz. I had a Meshtastic node in the loft but locally the only traffic was people sending test messages so I fell out of love with it. I installed Meshcore as a USB client which allowed me to talk to it via one of the Linux boxes here and use a command-line interface but it was lacking in features. Anyway, I found another 868MHz device today and installed the Meshcore BLE companion code, and then swaped the loft node for the repeater code. After a little while it all came to life. There is a repeater about 7km from here that my loft repeater can see so my tap into the network is via that. It is much nicer using the iPhone or iPad app than struggling with the serial connection - well, no surprise there of course. As to how useful it will be, to me it still feels a tad toy like but that's probably just me.

For some time now I had been running a radiosonde receiver based on one of the small Lilygo LoRa devices with a built-in display. It used wifi to connect to our LAN and thence off to its reporting platform https://sondehub.org/. Because it used an antenna in the loft it never did very much with regard to monitoring but it was a no-cost 'why not' type of thing. However, after some time now the display was dimming and it would often have issues if the wifi hub rebooted. So I really wanted a no-wifi solution and found one based on a Pi and an RTL-SDR dongle.The software and setup instructions I followed can be found here and worked semlessly. The setup creates its own web server, by default at port 5000. After a few days of nothing it finally recorded two hits overnight: Not too bad for a 70cm Big Wheel in the loft. Looking at the data, for the first entry which is the one approaching Liverpool data was received when it was at 11,500m altitude down to 9,521m at 403.4MHz. The second trace out to sea was on 405.1MHz and from 19,670M to 25,349m at the end. The traces…