Radio and rails...

In between various large-ish DIY projects that need to be sorted over the summer I took time out to begin to rearrange the shack. I really want to site the radios next to the screens for ease of use but with the four monitors I have too little horizontal space. So I thought, if I had a longer support pole for one of the dual monitor stands I could put the other two above. I printed a test cylinder with a flange to see if I could make a coupling for the two poles and after using that to get the size right I printed a 100mm one. This coupled the two nicely but during test fitting the monitors it snapped. Serves me right - I had originally intended the 3D printed part to be a guide only with a metal clamp connecting the two support poles. Anyway, Amazon had extension poles which are a lot cheaper than a 4-monitor stand (Plan B was to buy a 4-screen stand) which arrived today. Here, then, are 4 monitors all nestled together - well, sort of: The Linux screens are across the top, Windows bottom left and Mac bottom right. I use…

SDRplay's SDRConnect was released as a preview a couple of days ago ( https://www.sdrplay.com/sdrconnect/ ). Like many others I expect I had been waiting a while for this, having heard about it maybe a year ago. So of course, new shiny... I had to install it. It failed to run on my Linux box but, being a fiddler that is probably down to my own config. So I installed it on a Pi 4B with a 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (SDRConnect needs a 64-bit OS). I had a quick fiddle but running headless via VNC was too painful and I had lots of house stuff to do so too little time to trim things. Regrouping, SDRplay publish video guides on how to set things up. I prefer just textual documentation but their videos are generally good. I installed the s/w on my Mac mini and ran it up on the Pi as a server (--server flag) and it runs nicely with no GUI and just a textual status output. The software has a good look and feel and I can see me buying at least one other SDRplay device to add to my somewhat old now RSP2 as…

Five years+ on from retiring I no longer feel the need to tell the world my continuing story via the likes of Facebook. I actually only came to Facebook to find out what other people were saying, principally about my employer. I engaged a little with LinkedIn but never in any serious fashion and I deleted my LinkedIn presence a few months ago. As to Twitter, well, I think in all the years I held an account I sent five tweets. I deleted that account too since I moved to Mastodon. I have since deleted all my Facebook posts and all photos on Instagram and Facebook. I kept the accounts but will no longer engage with either, not even to post ‘likes’. From having my name at the bottom of several thousand web pages over three decades I reckon now it’s only on my own blog. Oh, and my Ph.D. thesis which is online. And I think that’s a good place to be.

While the house is more empty than usual I am getting on with numerous essential DIY tasks - pointing, plastering, boxing pipes in, fixing leaky radiator valves, installing LDF4-50A... the usual stuff.

I've pondered getting one of these for a while... finally got around to it.