TWIAR News Feed

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Santa Turns to Remote Operating to Boost Radio Coverage of North America

Posted: 24 Dec 2016 03:45 PM PST
http://ift.tt/2hQjdVg

The word from Santa Claus World near the North Pole in Finland is that the
elves at OF9X will try remote operating to generate more contacts in North
America. So far, OF9X has logged more than 20,000 contacts, but only 1,200
of them have been with US radio amateurs.

“Efforts are continuing toward doubling that number, and more firepower is
being added to the OF9X US script,” a statement said this week. “Santa will
arrive on American soil, activating W1/OF9X from New Hampshire. When
finally boarding his sleigh, he will say goodbye to America as W7/OF9X from
Tacoma, Washington.

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FEMA Interoperability Exercise Deemed a Success

Posted: 24 Dec 2016 03:41 PM PST
http://bit.ly/2hUFscR

Laura Goudreau, KG7BQR, Regional Emergency Communications Coordinator for
FEMA Region X, said the December 21 Region X interoperability
communications exercise on 60 meters went well.

“We had 48 check-ins, of which 42 were amateurs,” she said. “It was very
successful and also included our first digital test.”

The “COMMEX” consisted of check-ins from authorized state, tribal, federal,
and Amateur Radio stations to test HF interoperability in case of an
emergency or disaster response. FEMA Region X is made up of Alaska, Idaho,
Oregon, and Washington.

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via HACKADAY: Power For An Amstrad Spectrum

Posted: 24 Dec 2016 03:40 PM PST
http://ift.tt/2hhKiQV

If you were an American child of the early 1980s then perhaps you were the
owner of a Commodore 64, an Apple II, or maybe a TRS-80. On the other side
of the Atlantic in the UK the American machines were on the market, but
they mostly lost out in the hearts and minds of eager youngsters to a
home-grown crop of 8-bit micros. Computer-obsessed British kids really
wanted Acorn’s BBC Micro, but their parents were more likely to buy them
the much cheaper Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

Sinclair Research was fronted by the serial electronic entrepreneur [Clive
Sinclair], whose love of miniaturization and ingenious cost-cutting design
sometimes stretched the abilities of his products to the limit. As the
8-bit boom faded later in the decade the company faltered, its computer
range being snapped up by his great rival in British consumer electronics,
[Alan Sugar]’s Amstrad.

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via HACKADAY: B Battery Takes a 9V Cell

Posted: 24 Dec 2016 03:40 PM PST
http://ift.tt/2ikHvb4

Old American radios (and we mean really old ones) took several kinds of
batteries. The A battery powered the filaments (generally 1.5V at a high
current draw). The B battery powered the plate (much lower current, but a
higher voltage–typically 90V). In Britain these were the LT (low tension)
and HT (high tension) batteries. If you want to rebuild and operate old
radios, you have to come up with a way to generate that B voltage.

Most people opt to use an AC supply. You can daisy-chain a bunch of 9V
batteries, but that really ruins the asthetics of the radio. [VA3NGC] had a
better idea: he built a reproduction B battery from a wooden box, some
brass hardware, a nixie tube power supply, and a 9V battery (which remains
hidden). There’s also a handful of zener diodes, resistors, and capacitors
to allow different taps depending on the voltage required.

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Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

Posted: 22 Dec 2016 11:54 PM PST
http://engt.co/2hxIQY0

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released an experimental version of its
Linux-based Pixel OS for Windows and Mac PCs. The OS, originally designed
to run only on the Raspberry Pi hobby board, comes with the Chromium web
browser and a suite of productivity and coding tools. "We asked ourselves
one simple question: If we like Pixel so much, why ask people to buy
Raspberry Pi hardware in order to run it?" founder Eben Upton wrote in a
blog post.

Built on top of Debian, the OS is light enough to run most old machines,
provided you have at least 512MB of RAM. "Because we're using the venerable
i386 architecture variant it should run even on vintage machines like my
ThinkPad X40 (above)," Upton said.

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DARPA aims for personal mobile ultra low frequency radio for transmitting
devices to communicate through water and soil instead of 2000 acre
transmission complexes using megawatts of power

Posted: 22 Dec 2016 11:50 PM PST
http://bit.ly/2hiMzN8

A DARPA project could enable radio to be transmitted through water and
rock. Radio frequency signals hit veritable and literal walls when they
encounter materials like water, soil, and stone, which can block or
otherwise ruin those radio signals. This is why scuba buddies rely on sign
language and there are radio-dead zones inside tunnels and caves.

With his newly announced A Mechanically Based Antenna (AMEBA) effort,
program manager Troy Olsson of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office is
betting on a little-exploited aspect of electromagnetic physics that could
expand wireless communication and data transfer into undersea, underground,
and other settings where such capabilities essentially have been absent.
The basis for these potential new abilities are ultra-low-frequency (ULF)
electromagnetic waves, ones between hundreds of hertz and 3 kilohertz
(KHz), which can penetrate some distance into media like water, soil, rock,
metal, and building materials. A nearby band of very-low-frequency (VLF)
signals (3 KHz to 30 KHz) opens additional communications possibilities
because for these wavelengths the atmospheric corridor between the Earth’s
surface and the ionosphere—the highest and electric-charge-rich portion of
the upper atmosphere—behaves like a radio waveguide in which the signals
can propagate halfway around the planet.

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via HACKADAY: UK Government to Hold Drone Licensing Consultation

Posted: 22 Dec 2016 11:36 PM PST
http://ift.tt/2ieF7yu

All over your TV and radio this morning if you live in the UK is the news
that the British government is to hold a consultation over the licensing of
multirotors, or drones as they are popularly known. It is being reported
that users will have to sit a test to acquire a licence before they can
operate any machine that weighs above 250 g, and there is the usual fog of
sloppy reporting that surrounds any drone story.

This story concerns us on several fronts. First, because many within our
community are multirotor enthusiasts and thus we recognise its importance
to our readership. And then because it takes as its basis of fact a series
of reported near misses with aircraft that look very serious if taken at
face value, but whose reported facts simply don’t match the capabilities of
real multirotors. We’ve covered this issue in the past with an
incident-by-incident analysis, and raised the concern that incident
investigators behave irresponsibly in saying “It must have been a drone!”
on the basis of no provable evidence. Indeed the only proven British
collision was found to have been with a plastic bag.