Cool design from pleaseenjoy.com.

I have not been to the Whiteboard in a while so today I carved out some time to let my thoughts wander to see if I could find a creative thought or two. An hour and a nice IPA later, all I could whip up was to open up a second IPA. (Hit the link for more!)

Chris Sullivan's (N0DOS) talk on "What is Ham Radio?" I could not agree more. Great presentation!

I am still working on documenting the Internet Remote station. Until it is complete, check out this brief screencast that shows the station in action.

Have you ever wanted to connect a computer to your television? Check out the project pages for my HTPC project! It works great.

On February 2, 2009 the ARRL introduced a new challenge to design, or adapt a published design, and build a 50 W amplifier for a 5 watt 40 meter transceiver. There will be two cash prizes for this challenge. I hope we will see more of these kinds of competitions. Good luck to everyone participating in the build!

One of my design philosophies for amateur radio projects this year (2009) is to attempt to exploit electronic components that are being developed for high volume markets outside of amateur radio. In order to take advantage of the low cost components available we must try to be creative. To this end I have kept my eye on the wireless sensor network industry as they are attempting to solve problems that can be very useful to ham radio. Ideally, this is a great concept. However, one problem remains that prevents us from taking advantage of these incredibly capable components. As the components have matured, so have the fabrication and assembly processes. The printed circuit board fabrication and assembly methodologies are getting very complicated. Unfortunately for us, that means expensive. Developing hardware concepts for amateur radio instantly becomes a costly endeavor. Hit the link for more!

When I was a kid I was fascinated by pirate radio stations. Occasionally we would hear a pirate station or two on the FM broadcast band playing odd music and going by fun DJ nicknames. Later when I got to college the trend continued. However, the stations seemed to be more interested in talk of politics and media censorship than playing any music. The media censorship argument was simply that the pirates felt they had no way to disseminate local information they decided was not being covered by large broadcast networks. They typically defined "local" to mean a few city blocks/square miles. Eventually the FCC addressed this need by creating the Low Power FM (LPFM) Service. I am curious if anyone today is using 802.11x as an alternative. Hit the link for more!

I have a reached an interesting milestone with the Internet Remote Amateur Radio Station this morning. Over the holidays I purchased a new HTC Touch Pro cell phone and switched service providers to Sprint. More important was that my new plan has unlimited data and that the HTC Touch Pro uses Windows Mobile 6.1. I quickly realized that I should be able to access my station via my cell phone. Unfortunately, the Skype mobile application does not work on my HTC Touch Pro and HTC support does not seem to be a high priority. Luckily I found Fring. Fring is an alternative Skype client that is interoperable with Skype! This morning I installed the Fring voip application and connected to the Internet Remote. At 12:15AM EST I contacted WA4TXE over a local repeater. I was pleased to hear that my audio was intelligible and that this might be a great alternative to using a HT! I still have a few bugs to work out and I'll post more on roteno.com soon.

I will be documenting my build of the DV adapter as soon as I receive it. This board includes a GMSK modem and AMBE vocoder for D-STAR. This board will allow me to use my existing amateur radio station for D-STAR. If all goes well I will be adding this capability to my Internet Remote station. Keep an eye on the project pages for updates on this build.