Radio, railways, stuff...

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 a result. My initial aim is to mount the Pi in the garage as I have Ethernet down there, and set up a VLF antenna outside - far too much noise in the house, hopefully the garage is far enough away.

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.