Buy A Baofeng While You Still Can? FCC Scowls At Unauthorized Frequency Transmitters

September 25, 2018 by Jenny List 93 Comments

There was a time when a handheld radio transceiver was an object of wonder, and a significant item for any radio amateur to own. A few hundred dollars secured you an FM walkie-talkie through which you could chat on your local repeater, and mobile radio was a big draw for new hams. Thirty years later FM mobile operation may be a bit less popular, but thanks to Chinese manufacturing the barrier to entry is lower than it has ever been. With extremely basic handheld radios starting at around ten dollars and a capable dual-bander being yours for somewhere over twice that, most licencees will now own a Baofeng UV5 or similar radio.

The FCC though are not entirely happy with these radios, and QRZ Now are reporting that the FCC has issued an advisory prohibiting the import or sale of devices that do not comply with their rules. In particular they are talking about devices that can transmit on unauthorised frequencies, and ones that are capable of transmission bandwidths greater than 12.5 kHz.

We’ve reported before on the shortcomings of some of these radios, but strangely this news doesn’t concern itself with their spurious emissions. We’re guessing that radio amateurs are not the problem here, and the availability of cheap transceivers has meant that the general public are using them for personal communication without a full appreciation of what frequencies they may be using. It’s traditional and normal for radio amateurs to use devices capable of transmitting out-of-band, but with a licence to lose should they do that they are also a lot more careful about their RF emissions.

Read the FCC statement and you’ll learn they are not trying to restrict the sale of ham gear. However, they are insisting that imported radios that can transmit on other frequencies must be certified. Apparently, opponents of these radios claim about 1 million units a year show up in the US, so this is a big business. The Bureau warns that fines can be as high as $19,639 per day for continued marketing and up to $147,290 — we have no idea how they arrive at those odd numbers.

So if you’re an American who hasn’t already got a Baofeng or similar, you might be well advised to pick one up while you still can.

UV5-R image via PE1RQM

One Man’s Disenchantment With The World Of Software

September 22, 2018 by Jenny List 164 Comments

There is a widely derided quote attributed to [Bill Gates], that “640k should be enough for anyone”. Meaning of course that the 640 kb memory limit for the original IBM PC of the early 1980s should be plenty for the software of the day, and there was no need at the time for memory expansions or upgrades. Coupled with the man whose company then spent the next few decades dominating the software industry with ever more demanding products that required successive generations of ever more powerful PCs, it was the source of much 1990s-era dark IT humour.

In 2018 we have unimaginably powerful computers, but to a large extent most of us do surprisingly similar work with them that we did ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago. Web browsers may have morphed from hypertext layout formatting to complete virtual computing environments, but a word processor, a text editor, or an image editor would be very recognisable to our former selves. If we arrived in a time machine from 1987 though we’d be shocked at how bloated and slow those equivalent applications are on what would seem to us like supercomputers.

[Nikita Prokopov] has written an extremely pithy essay on this subject in which he asks why it is that if a DOS 286 could run a fast and nimble text editor, the 2018 text editor requires hundreds of megabytes to run and is noticeably slow. Smug vi-on-hand-rolled GNU/Linux users will be queuing up to rub their hands in glee in the comments, but though Windows may spring to mind for most examples there is no mainstream platform that is immune. Web applications come under particular scorn, with single pages having more bloat than the entirety of Windows 95, and flagship applications that routinely throw continuous Javascript errors being the norm. He ends with a manifesto, urging developers to do better, and engineers to call it out where necessary.

If you’ve ever railed at bloatware and simply at poor quality software in general, then [Nikita]’s rant is for you. We suspect he will be preaching to the converted.

Windows error screen: Oops4321 [CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Use And Abuse Of CT Scanners

September 20, 2018 by Jenny List 22 Comments

David Mills is as a research scientist at the cutting edge of medical imaging. His work doesn’t involve the scanners you might find yourself being thrust into in a hospital should you be unfortunate enough to injure yourself. He’s working with a higher grade of equipment, he pushes the boundaries of the art with much smaller, very high resolution CT scanners for research at a university dental school.

He’s also a friend of Hackaday and we were excited for his talk on interesting uses for CT scanners at EMF Camp this summer. David takes us into that world with history of these tools, a few examples of teeth and bone scans, and then delves into some of the more unusual applications to which his very specialist equipment has been applied. Join me after the break as we cover the lesser known ways to put x-ray technology to work.

Continue reading “The Use And Abuse Of CT Scanners” →

Linux, Without The Git Factor

September 17, 2018 by Jenny List 82 Comments

Linux started as a student project in the 1990s, the creation of Linus Torvalds. He has attained celebrity status while steering his creation through the decades, but along the way he has also attracted a different reputation within the Linux and software community. He is famous for his outbursts and rants, some of which become rather personal, and it is not difficult at all to find kernel developers or would-be kernel developers who have turned their backs on the project as a result.

It’s very refreshing indeed then to read an update from [Linus] as part of his regular communications, in which he admits that he has an issue, and says that he is taking the time to seek help for it. There is an accompanying update to the kernel maintenance code of conduct, which suggests that this is likely to mark a sea-change in that environment, as well as we hope salvage that aspect of [Linus]’ reputation.

“My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.”

The Hackaday community has a much greater than average proportion of Linux users among its readership. Even those readers who use a desktop OS with BSD, Windows, or other kernels will almost certainly have a Linux kernel somewhere, whether it’s in their phone, their set-top-box, their children’s toys, or even their domestic appliances. And of course a large swath of the Internet runs on Linux. It is in the best interest of us all that we continually attract and retain brilliant people to contribute to the effort put into developing and maintaining the Linux kernel.

Without wishing to lionise [Linus] above the many others whose work has also contributed to Linux and its success, his contribution to our community has been beyond measure and it has been uncomfortable to see his other side. It’s a step in the right direction to apologize for personal attacks and behavior that drives a wedge into the kernel developer community, and seek to change that behavior. We’d urge others to follow his example, we’re sure every grouping has at times had its personality problems, and it’s never too late to enact some repairs.

While Linus steps away to work on his self improvement, veteran kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman will take the reigns among the kernel maintainers.

A Look At The Smallest Magnetic Deflection CRT Ever Made

September 15, 2018 by Jenny List 40 Comments

A high-resolution LCD or OLED screen is a commodity component that we can buy on a little breakout board and plug into our microcontrollers without spending more than a dollar or two. We can buy them in sizes ranging from sub-postage-stamp to desktop TV if our budgets stretch that far, and they are easy to drive in every sense of the word. It is not so long ago though that a high-resolution LCD, even a small one, was a seriously expensive component. In consumer electronic devices such as camcorders engineers went to great lengths to avoid those costs, and [12voltvids] recently took a look at one of them.

Inside the viewfinder of a miniaturized Sony camcorder is a CRT. It’s fairly mundane in the scheme of CRTs, in that it’s a monochrome device with no unexpected features. Except that is, for one thing. It’s tiny, with only a 0.5″ inch screen size. Everything else is the same as your vintage full-sized TV, it has an electron gun and a deflection and focusing coil pack, but the entire device has been miniaturized to the point at which the coil pack is larger than the screen it is driving. On the accompanying PCB are all the support circuits, including a tiny flyback transformer and a single IC – a Rohm BA7149 electronic viewfinder driver that is as near as possible an entire CRT TV on a chip. That’s it, the whole device runs from a single 5 volt supply.

He doesn’t give the date of the camcorder, but given that it looks as though it uses 8mm cassette tapes and has a curved miniaturized design rather than the angular black exteriors that were fashionable earlier we’d guess it to be from some time around the year 2000. To give it some context, at the time one of the hottest pieces of consumer electronics would have been a Diamond Rio MP3 player, and if your desktop PC had the first of the AMD Athlon processors you probably considered it to be about the fastest you could hope to own. The surprise then is that Sony still considered it more economical even at that point to use the CRT and associated circuitry than a tiny LCD. Either way we’d agree with him that it’s a keeper, a fascinating curio for any electronics enthusiast. If we see an old camcorder going for not a lot, we’ll certainly give it a second look after this.

Continue reading “A Look At The Smallest Magnetic Deflection CRT Ever Made” →

Electromagnetic Field: Speczilla!

September 15, 2018 by Jenny List 9 Comments

It is a golden rule of the journalist’s art, that we report the news, we don’t make it. But just occasionally we find ourselves in the odd position of being in the right place such that one of our throwaway comments or actions has the unintended consequence of seeding a story. This is one of those moments, so it’s a rare case of use of the first person in a daily piece as your scribe instead of Hackaday’s usual second person.

At the SHA2017 hacker camp in the Netherlands, [Matt “Gasman” Westcott] gave his presentation on composing a chiptune from an audience suggestion. Afterwards my Tweet about never having seen a Sinclair Spectrum as large as the one on the presentation screen grew a life of its own and became the idea for a project, which in turn at Electromagnetic Field 2018 was exhibited as a giant-sized fully working Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

Since much of the work was performed in Oxford Hackspace I saw Matt’s progression, his first experiments with foam rubber keys, then as he refined his two-wire switch mechanism. Early experiments hooking a row of them up to a real Spectrum motherboard weren’t the success he’d hoped for, so he moved to the FUSE emulator on a Raspberry Pi. A huge effort and needlework learning curve plus a lot of help from OxHack’s textile specialists and buying his local furniture store’s entire stock of foam allowed him to perfect a facsimile of the classic Spectrum’s case and blue rubber keys, while its lettering and iconic BASIC keywords were vinyl-cut at rLab in Reading. A Milton Keynes Makerspace member provided transport to the camp where it was united with a huge TV in a gazebo, completing the trio of local spaces.

At the camp, though it suffered a few technical hitches along the way it was rather a success. There were two techniques, kneeling down and pressing keys with the palm of your hand, or dancing on them in socked feet for complex manoeuvres. The trademark single-key-press BASIC keywords took a little while to re-learn though, there was a time when those were instinctive.

We’d normally wrap a piece like this one up with a link or two. To other projects perhaps, or other hacks from the same person. But in this case we have neither another home computer on this scale, nor any hacks from [Matt], as he’s well known in the European arm of our community for something completely different. As [Gasman] he’s a chiptune artist par excellence, as you can see if you watch his set from the 2014 Electromagnetic Field.

My Career As A Spammer, And Other Stories From The Sneakernet

September 13, 2018 by Jenny List 12 Comments

A large hacker camp is in microcosm a city, it has all the services you might expect to find in a larger settlement in the wider world. There is a telecommunication system, shops, bars, a health centre, waste disposal services, a power grid, and at some camps, a postal system. At Electromagnetic Field, the postal system was provided by the Sneakernet, a select group of volunteers including your Hackaday scribe under the direction of the postmaster Julius ter Pelkwijk. I even had the fun of delivering some chopped pork and ham. (More on that later.) Continue reading “My Career As A Spammer, And Other Stories From The Sneakernet” →