Radio, railways, stuff...

For a while now I've been pondering whether to get a Windows PC. For starters, SDR Console needs it as do other SDR packages. But other than watching them come and go on eBay I never took the plunge. However, as I've taken all the electronics out of the workshop due to it always being damp I had a spare Lenovo ThinkCentre PC, one of the very small things. I already use one as the home server but this other one was destined to run a DCC setup for a model railway that is still just a pile of bits. It ran Ubuntu but when I got it it came with Windows 10. All I had done was swap hard disks, keeping the Windows one just in case I ever needed it. Well... ...it is now in the shack and SDR Console has been installed and all is well. We had a screen lying around which is full HD, a much better display option than the old laptop I had been using. And with it being a fresh Windows 10 it's not (yet!) cluttered up. One strange thing though. I set up SDR Console just as I had on the laptop along with the recommended offsets etc. But on the laptop I had to adjust the offsets to set it correct, e.g. for the lower beacon to actually appear where it should. But now, with the published offsets it is in the right place with no further adjustment. Another oddity is that when I boot this PC and run SDR Console up having shut it down with the SDR receiving the lower beacon, it comes right back. On the laptop it was always somewhat off and would drift. Not sure how that happens given it's all in the digital domain. I must have set something up odd on the laptop, but no idea what. Anyway, it works. The Lenovo only has the one set of audio jacks, those on the front. And only 4 USBs, two at the back in use for the mouse and keyboard. In order to get audio into the mixer I will need to use a USB sound card, not an issue except that will need to plug in the front and I like to keep cables out of the way. Maybe it's time for another wireless keyboard and mouse, after all the current keyboard does rather dwarf the tiny PC!

After a long delay (other work, life getting in the way, general laziness etc) I ran some more tests on the Pibox. With the fans disconnected (actually, one disconnected itself!) and the case assembled I've been running the box to see how bad the temperatures get. With two of the three Pi cards operating, and all 3 powered up, pi-star, which is on top due to the DVMEGA hat settles at 60 degrees C, and the utility Pi which has a Discone attached settles at 50. So not actually bad. I think what I will do is go back to Plan C or whatever it was and run the fans via a transistor hanging off the GPIO port of one of the cards so the fan comes on if it is getting a bit steamy. For now, at least it means I can run pi-star 24/7 again, especially as I had to upgrade it by hand as it has missed a lot of the overnight updates. And it saves me having to run mains power into the loft.

I managed a couple of rather poor grabs from the ISS SSTV event of the 28th and 29th January. Nothing to write home about, my setup is not suitable being simply a loft mounted colinear. However, this one fragment was interesting because when received the ISS was over the middle of Poland. Not too bad for around 800 miles or so. In fact, I received another fragment after this... And two further grabs on the 29th, the first over the English channel and the second as it passed over Poland.