Back to work on a Monday

I meant to do a bunch of stuff over the weekend, mostly having to do with ApolloCon, the science fiction convention that I basically run.  However, Saturday was spent away from home and Sunday found me lounging around, when I wasn't diagnosing issues with GNU Radio, and now here it is Monday, and I didn't get anything done.

So, today I'm wrapping up loose ends.  I've asked one of the local rocket clubs if they would be interested in doing a thing for ApolloCon, and I (once again) faxed the room reservation form to Central Market so that we can hold convention committee meetings there.

I've got one or two other things to do, but we'll see if it happens today or a different day.

Saturday morning, 8:30 AM

The clock at the top of the screen says it's 8:26 and I'm sitting in the vending machine alcove on the first floor of the Digital Technology Center at the North Harris campus of the Lone Star College.  I'll be here today for another four hours, most likely, and I'll probably be repeating this trip for the next 14 weeks as J-Mag takes her Business English class.

I am bored.

As far as Internet, we get "both kinds" here (HTTP and HTTPS) and so my shell sessions to my main server at the house and in the Chicago data center as well as IMAP and SMTP sessions to get and send mail just timeout with the bits lost without a trace.  I can post to this blog.  I can do programming or whatever, as long as I don't want to check anything in to revision control because that goes over SSH.  I can play "Civilization: Call to Power" as long as it's a single-player game, or maybe even fly "X-Plane 10" (I've got the disk 1 ISO on the hard drive so I don't need my physical disk.)  Maybe next time I'll set up a proxy to tunnel everything through HTTP.  Maybe I'll just put up with it.  How hard can it be?

At least I have a computer.  I had the foresight to bring it and the power supply.  The library opens at 9, and I can move to a quieter, if not more comfortable, space, then.  I've got snacks, I've got soda and PowerAde and something to sit on.

But I'm bored.

What I'm reading, these days

Here in Houston, we have have these things called "book swaps" which are rather awkwardly named, but they're where science fiction fans get together and talk about the books they've read and they loan them out to people who are interested in them.  I go to two of these groups, the "North Houston" group, which usually meets up off 249 and the "Katy Freeway" group, which meets near the Katy Freeway.  (Imagine that.)

I wind up mostly reading books I get there, and right now is no exception.  I just finished a collection of Neil Gaiman stories called Smoke and Mirrors that I'm borrowing from Doug of the North Houston group, and I just started a book called As the Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer that I got from Anita at the Katy Freeway group.

I borrowed the Neil Gaiman book because I truly enjoyed Good Omens, which was a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett and I've tried to read a couple of Pratchett's books and, well, they aren't my favorites.  So, I thought, maybe it was Neil Gaiman's contribution that made me like Good Omens.  Judging by Smoke and Mirrors, though, that's not it.  I continue to recommend Good Omens.  Smoke and Mirrors, not so much.

Maybe I'll remember to talk about As the Crow Flies when I'm done with it.  Perhaps not.  It's kind of historical fiction, a lot like Robert B. Parker's All Our Yesterdays.

Software Defined Radio - Projects

Over the last couple of months, I've done a bunch of stuff with Software Defined Radio.  I run Linux at home  and so I have been working with GNU Radio, and I've got a couple of different kinds of radio hardware, one being a TV Receiver USB Dongle (read about my adventures getting that working) that can be convinced to generate a data stream centered on some frequency between about 70 MHz and about 1700 MHz.  The other is a Softrock 40 R, which is a crystal-controlled quadrature downconverter that hears about 96 kHz of the 20m band centered around 14.070 MHz.

So far, I've mostly used the TVRO dongle to listen to FM Broadcast (87.9 MHz to 107.9 MHz in the USA)  and to the local repeater (147.2 MHz in Katy, Texas) and I've rigged up a CW Receiver for the Softrock.  I've been collecting my thoughts about SDR projects, and I thought I'd list a few of them.

Incidentally, it may not be intuitively obvious to the casual observer that the GNU Radio software isn't a radio application, it's a toolkit for producing radio applications.  It certainly wasn't intuitively obvious to me, but then I'm widely known as someone who rarely pays attention.

Anyway, the projects.  In terms of software I want to do these:

First, is a CW Skimmer like thing that works under Linux or just with the GNU Radio software.

The second would be a CW Skimmer like thing that does PSK-31 instead of CW.  Update:  I know such a thing exists.  See for example:  http://www.walter-dallmeier.de/software-by-dl4rck/rckskimmer/

Third would be a receiver that speaks rigctrld protocol (I looked, but I can't find a link) and can be used to receive satellite signals.

I think I'll start by implementing these things in Python and then convert them to C++ if it seems be an appropriate thing to do.

In terms of hardware, I want to do things like these:

A TVRO Upconverter so I can use the TVRO dongle for receiving HF signals.  This will likely require hardware modifications to the dongle.  I especially want to replace the antenna connector with an F connector or BNC connector or something.

In fact, I'll probably modify more than one of those dongles so I can use the UHF preamp I've bought and then so I can connect that preamp to an antenna with significant gain.

I also want to build a couple more kits, including the UHFSDR kit and ultimately I want one of those "nimblesig iii" devices I mentioned in previous blog posts.

That should keep me busy for a while, shouldn't it?