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Like many hams, I have a scanner installed in my vehicle along with my radios. It’s great for keeping tabs on what’s going on around the area. The newer models of scanner from the major players (Uniden, Whistler, etc) typically have GPS capabilities to lock/unlock scanning banks depending on your location. This is super convenient, especially when you travel across states frequently as I do. I own a BCD996P2 that I picked up secondhand from a friend a few years ago. It came with the standard Uniden “puck” GPS receiver, which plugs into the scanner’s rear DB9 port and includes

Apologies for such a long gap between posts. I meant to keep up with the sat rig project more closely but work and travel are doing a good job of getting in the way. Turns out, it’s not as easy as I thought to work on a large personal project while travelling all over the country for work. In this episode of the DIY Sat Rig saga, we’re playing with real power. Well, 10 watts at least. The boards for the first revision of my amplifier design came in, and I just couldn’t wait to start finding out if my

An interesting new development has sprung out of the wonderful Osmocom project: a low-cost, wide bandwidth SDR transmitter that works with GNURadio. How low cost? How about $10? This is all possible thanks to the wonderful work of Steve Markgraf, an Osmocomm developer who found that when properly coerced, a cheap USB3.0 to VGA adapter will output raw samples straight from its RGB output lines. While the base sample rate of the dongle, using the FL2000dx VGA chip, has a normal max frequency bandwidth of 150MHz, it was found that since the output is essentially unfiltered valid signals can be

So here we are again. Same radio, different day. In our last adventure, we discovered that my newly acquired Motorola Spectra Railroad Model was stuck in a boot loop with the FAIL 01/90 error code, the general hardware fault code. Unfortunately, it was not going to be as simple as program and go with this radio.