While trying to photograph meteors in the Perseids shower recently I ended up taking a lot of longish exposure photographs of the same patch of sky. I was hoping to catch a meteor or several shooting though the frame. Reviewing the photos when I got home I found I caught no meteors, indeed I saw …
Category Archives: experiments
Playing Radio
Last weekend a bunch of us from the Havering Amateur Radio Club decamped to a field at the Kelvedon Hatch secret nuclear bunker and set about trying to contact as much of the planet as possible by radio. It was a good excuse to try out my new radio, an Icom 9100, and break out …
Canary islands
Gone to the Canary Islands to explore volcanoes, drink wine and stargaze. It rained all day yesterday. Today was rather better.
Hellschreiber
What do you get when you mix a cheap MSP430 development board with a simple oscillator circuit and blend in a handful of code from various sources? Hellschreiber– a radio transmission mode invented in the 1920s. The screenshot above shows the signal as transmitted across my bench – a distance of about 50cm. The text …
Game of life
Conway’s Game of Life is a mathematics puzzle / toy / serious bit of research that I mess with from time to time; usually when I get a new computer and want to see how fast it is compared to older ones. I wrote a basic GoL simulation for the Sinclair Spectrum back in the …