olsrd ported to android

Saturday I spoke with Joel Stanely about his new Android phone.

I've been looking for a replacement for mine as its just getting old and falling to bits.

This morning I found another incentive to look at the android;
olsrd ported to the google phone

OLSR on a phone, sounds like the kind of networking for me =)

kim vk5fnet

Fun with radio - part 2

Now that I have built a receiver, as the first stage in a QRSS grabber, how do I calibrate it?

I commented in Bills blog, SolderSmoke News, about the how the two pixie 2's David Rowe and I built were not on the same frequency despite being the same circuit. They are about 2KHz apart, which we put down to the tolerances in the components.

My HF rig has a 'digial readout' that measures down to 1KHz increments. QRSS uses a 'band' of 100Hz wide. Thats right, a tenth of what my smallest increment on the HF rig. So how to I measure that?

I'm looking to build a frequency counter or meter. Are there homebrew designs out there?

kim vk5fnet

Fun with radio - part 1

Yesterday I spent an afternoon working with David Rowe building a Pixie 2; www.kenneke.com/~jon/pixie/

The Pixie 2 a tiny direct conversion radio intended for training new HAMs in under standing radio and building electronics. The initial build was a little bit troublesome as the oscillator wasn't. This makes it quite hard to build the rest of the radio, as it can be built in stages; the oscillator, the PA/detector, the audio amplifier.

Well the afternoon turned out to be quite productive and with a working radio picking up Davids Pixie transmitting from a foot away on the work bench. It puts out a whopping 200milliWatts and the output waveform on the oscilloscope was very sinusoidal.

David has a full amateur radio license and is a very cluey electronics engineer. I have my foundation license, so while I'm not worried about building a transmitter yet, I am quite interested in software defined radio(SDR) and QRSS. Which is what this project/journey is all about.

Whats next? Well as I now have a DC radio with audio output, SDR being the end goal, the next thing to build is the audio interface to the laptop so I can get the Linux QRSS client running...

kim vk5fnet