Radio, railways, stuff...

I gave the pibox a present today in the form of a 3.2" Nextion display. It came with a bezel which I wanted because I could guarantee not to make a neat hole in the panel. Oddly, the bezel was black in the advert but came unfinished... The screen runs off a USB port on the Pi via a CP2102 USB to TTL dongle, and the wires that came with the Nextion just reach the dongle which in on the far side of the box. It was surprisingly easy to set up, albeit I had to wrestle the Windows PC to set up the Nextion editor as I did not have a spare SD card to download the HMI file directly to the Nextion. Of course, this exercise was very much a 'got a new thing, must get it working immediately' type job and I will take time now to read up on it all and maybe find different displays, but it has at least turned a boring blue box into a blue box that appears to have a purpose!

It’s been an impressive two days on 2m FT8. Yesterday (3/march) pskreporter showed that I had been received in GI, EI, GD and GW as well as right down into Devon, and today similarly so with the exception of Ireland and the addition of GM. Not bad for my cobbled together dipole in the loft. Of course it’s likely that all the reports are from stations with humungous antennas but hey, a report is a report. And yes, tidying the loft is on my to-do list!

(updated) As I am learning morse, well, in theory anyway, I wanted a decent morse key. I think a straight key will be best but I want something decent and not naff looking or ex-military. I like the look of the Bencher (probably because it’s shiny!) but I have no idea of the feel of any of these keys and looking around for comments shows that everyone likes their own - to be expected of course. Back in December 2020 I had actually ordered one that gets good reviews but it never came. After three emails to three separate contacts and never getting a reply I turned to PayPal and got a full refund within two days. Two months was long enough to wait for the key to fail to arrive. I suspect the order was messed up by our rather stupid exit from the EU and the resultant complexities… but to not receive any reply, well, that’s just not good customer service. So... I got this instead, it's so shiny!