And now for something completely different

 Morse Code/CW.

I'd like to try it on satellites, but I need to get my speed up over 10WPM.

Used to be there, but alas, old brain cells are having a tough time on certain letter combos.

Listening every morning, brings back nostalgia.

Good Stuff

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Weather Sats (again)

So, I've been playing around with my SDRPlay RSP1 on an rpi4, which has enough power to run a GUI SDR++.

One application was to receive NOAA APT files, decode, and display WX pictures.
The current functioning APT satellites are NOAA 15, 18 and 19, and folks get decent
images using modest antennas.

Mostly.

Not so me, at least with that setup. I have an MFJ 2m/70cm groundplane on the corner of my roof at about 3 meters and it's, eh, ok. Not great.  Plus with my neighbors house, our house, and trees around, you really need decent passes for decode anyways, but the ground plane really has some nulls on high passes, which is frustrating with the obstructions on low passes.

That said, I'll eventually get around to building a more suitable WX Sat antenna, several plans are out there.

For now, though, I really have not cracked the code between CubicSDR and any of the APT decode programs... noaa-apt seems most acceptable, but the GUI version doesn't seem to have options to decode all the various filtered images available from the download data stream, unlike wxtoimg, which apparently has the filters coded in, but for the life of me, can't seem to work with CubicSDR's data.

So, I went simple and reconnected my rtl_sdr dongle with an FM broadcast notch filter.

A straight pull of raspberry-noaa, which is a nice git repository which has pulled all the rtlsdr scripts in an easy to use "plug and play" solution.

https://github.com/reynico/raspberry-noaa/blob/master/INSTALL.md

it was literally 5 steps:

cd $HOME
git clone https://github.com/reynico/raspberry-noaa.git
cd raspberry-noaa
./install.sh

and then change some directory permissions to allow the scripts to create the image/audio directories.

Let it run.

Not perfect images by any stretch, but a lot better than the other attempts I've been doing.

Results are back to what I used to get, and about expected with my location and given antenna performance

6BTV

has been up all summer.

no radials, but the performance compared to the A99 is, like not kidding Sherlock, amazing.

I do have an issue with RFI into my home intercom/music wiring, unfortunately, especially on FT8.

And on some frequencies I have have stray RF feedback into my transmission chain between my shack RPi computers and the radio... have to work on that more, but I think I need another reorg of my cabling/wiring to straighten it out.

a few discussions around this pop up from time to time on qrz.com

so, a good typist transcribed an old QST editorial:

Hams we are!

Posted on 10 Jan 2013 by Nate Bargmann

An oft asked question, particularly from newcomers to amateur radio, is the origin of the name ham as applied to our hobby. Many explanations have been offered over the years but none have been as credible to me as this editorial in the December 1931 issue of QST:
EDITORIAL
APPROXIMATELY every so often an anguished member writes in to ask us how we can dare to apply the term ham to radio amateurs. Not because it is undignified, for we’re not much on false dignity in amateur radio, particularly within our own family, but because, says our correspondent, everybody knows that a ham means a punk, a lid, a poor performer, a person not fully familiar with his vegetables. Why throw asparagus upon ourselves, our inquirers ask.
Now we arise to remark that if we felt for one moment that that was a correct interpretation of the meaning of ham, it would be a thoroughly hated word at the very  top of our Index Expurgatorious. We’d have a town ordinance in West Hartford prohibiting its utterance and we’d pay a bounty to QST‘s proof-readers to run down the despised term. But as a matter of fact we’re quite convinced that the appellation is an honorable one, one over which we need have no qualms whatever.
Somebody’s dictionary suggests that ham is derived from hamfatter, which was a word used in a popular refrain of many years ago. Just what the significance was is not now clear. Then there are many people who believe that the word comes from the theatrical field, being derived from “Hamlet”–because the ham actor was forever strutting the boards and reciting from “Hamlet.” For ourselves, we find a much more convincing account in an article on the etymology of the language of sports, by William Henry Nugent, appearing in The American Mercury several years ago. Mr. Nugent establishes that the United States learned its first lessons in sports journalism and sports slang from the British Isles, where early writers invented a special style and vocabulary that are still in use. Ham, says he, “began as an abbreviation of amateur to am, which the cockney foot-racers and pugilists of the 70’s pronounced h’am.”
The moment one glimpses that ham is derived directly from amateur, much is apparent that before escaped recognition. One has only to consider, for instance, the way the word amateur is abused. Webster says that an amateur is “one who is attached to or cultivates a particular pursuit, study, or science from taste, without pursuing it professionally”; there is no implication of lack of skill. Yet how often have we heard people say, speaking of many things beside radio, “Pooh, he’s only an amateur!” They are wrong, dear friends, as sure as you’re born, and they’ve merely displayed the depths of their ignorance. We accept no such connotation with respect to amateur; neither do we with respect to ham, and for the identic reason.
The word came to us in amateur radio from the wire telegraphing fraternity, where a
beginning operator was known as a ham operator. That our wire brethren, in professional scorn, employed it to mean a poor operator does not make that application correct; the misuse is, in fact, blood brother to the even more common distortion of amateur. If we borrowed the term from them we took its proper sense, and emphatically left behind any stigma of the opprobrious. There is, we repeat, nothing in the derivation of either amateur or ham to imply a lack of skill, but rather the contrary.
Hams we are, then, and proud of it!
K.B.W.
K.B.W. was Kenneth B. Warner (Secretary, A.R.R.L.), Editor-in-Chief and Business Manager and the QST editorial offices were located in West Hartford, CT at that time.