• Mar 5, 2018

    Picking a HAM radio

    Now that I've decided to go further with HAM radio, I have to pick a radio. My BaoFeng BF-F8HP is usable, but hard to program and not the best radio. I've decided that I want to get a handheld (VHF/UHF) radio as well as a base station radio that does HF/VHF/UHF. The base station radios that do HF/VHF/UHF have been referred to as "shack in the box" and don't perform as well as standalone HF and VHF/UHF radios, but for starting out I'm fine with the limitations.

  • Feb 27, 2018

    HAM Radio in today's world

    When I was in middle school, our principal came to talk to the science club about HAM radio (yes, I was in science club). The most interesting part of his talk was when he demonstrated making a phone call via a phone patch. Since it was amateur radio, the phone call could be heard by anyone monitoring the frequency so it wasn't a replacement for the phone. However, this made an impression on me, but not enough to get licensed.

  • Feb 27, 2018

    Review: UVC-G3-AF and UVC-NVR-2TB

    [Updated 2/28: Added camera images]

  • Feb 15, 2018

    Cobbling Together a Home Automation System

    I was introduced to home automation at a young age when my father installed an X10 system hooked to our alarm system. The basic gist of the automation was to turn on lights when we were away and to have all the lights in the house turn on if the alarm system activated. This was more than 30 years ago and was pretty simple in what he wanted to accomplish. Since then I've dabbled with the X10 Firecacker hooked to a Linux box, but really didn't get serious about home automation until about four and a half years ago when we purchased our current house. We were remodeling the house we purchased, so I used the opportunity to design an automation system and briefly wrote about it.