Contesting & SDR

Presentation: How new technologies affect the art of contesting

Tobias — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:35:09 +0000

Last weekend I was invited to speak at the Contest Universtity in Friedrichshafen, Germany. This year I tried to visualize a rather abstract topic, the influence of technologies on the art of contesting. Mainly two topics are discussed: Information Management and Software Defined Radios. How new technologies affect the art of contesting Do you like [...]

Survey Results

Tobias — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:38:15 +0000

The Contest Community has voted. Almost 500 contesters particpated in the survey on ARRL’s recent decisions. As promised, I’m providing the results one day after the survey’s end for further discussion. Some of the answers are very clear, other’s should be refined. However here are the results without any interpretation or censorship. Take them, build [...]

Survey on ARRL’s IARU Contest Decisions

Tobias — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:34:13 +0000

Yesterday I received an overwhelming amount of replies on my personal opinion about ARRL’s IARU Contest decisions. Fellow contester agreed, disagreed and expressed their own opinions. The amount of replies is a proof that our contest community takes this discussion serious. However, it is unclear if these personal opinions are representative for our whole contest community. [...]

ARRL taking wrong consequences

Tobias — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:07:15 +0000

Yesterday ARRL oficially published their answer on the Spanish Request to disqualify the German Headquater station DA0HQ in IARU Contest 2009. Read in this blogpost why I fundamentally disagree with ARRLs consequences! I call several Spanish and German HQ Team members my personal friends. Over the last decade, I have operated almost all of my contests in [...]

SDR appliance: JN1SDD’s NCDXF / IARU Beacon Monitor

Tobias — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 05:00:24 +0000

On my ongoing search for SDR appliances, I discovered a couple of weeks ago an SDR (Softrock & Linux) based Beacon Monitoring System. The system is making use of the NCDXF Internation Beacon Project (IBP) which consists of 18 timely synchronized automated transmitters, located around the world. It monitors the signals on the various bands and [...]

WebSDR & Java fix for Ubuntu Linux

Tobias — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:59:32 +0000

If you are using Ubuntu Linux you might have problems to open the Dutch WebSDR page. The problems appears in both, Firefox and Chrome. Canonical does not ship the Sun’s Java Runtime Environment anymore with Ubuntu. Instead they included OpenJDK and IcedTea, a Java Web browser plugin. Unfortunately, IcedTea does not work with the WebSDR [...]

Ham Convited due to exceeding power limitations

Tobias — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 05:30:15 +0000

Lately a fellow Ham in New Zealand was convicted by court to pay a $1750 fine because he massively exceeded the legal power limitations. He posted a video on Youtube showing him transmitting with more than 3000 Watts. This was considered as a sufficient prove by the New Zealand judge. On top of the fine [...]

The (Software) Patent Absurdity

Tobias — Sun, 30 May 2010 14:23:09 +0000

The idea of patents in early days was to support innovation. Today happens exactly the opposite. We have reached a point where patents prevent technical innovation. Patents are no longer used to protect innovations, they are mainly used to sue other companies, or to counter-sue if anyone sues you. We have seen this lately between Apple [...]

CW Skimmer, Win-Test & FT1000MP: my wish!

Tobias — Sun, 30 May 2010 02:30:19 +0000

Three years ago I added a Software Defined Radio (Softrock Clone) to the 455kHz intermediate frequency of my FT1000MP shortwave receiver. The idea was to use it as a spectrum scope in conjunction with CW Skimmer. Unfortunately the solution has one big disadvantage: I can’t use it with Win-Test my favorite Contest Software. In a [...]

Ubuntu Hams

Tobias — Sat, 29 May 2010 23:27:41 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I migrated one of my older machines to the new Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”. I must admit that Canonical did a tremendous job with their Linux Distribution. Ubuntu is definitely worth a look. It can be booted directly from CD and does not need any installation. It’s stable, fast, has an excellent [...]