Related work Baby QRO Switching RF amplifier for HF Digitally Adjustable RF PA Supply A new generation of the Baby-QRO switching amplifier targets 25W to 50W of RF output for FT8 and other FSK modes. While it can do 100W, it becomes more of a thermal engineering project then ;) It is designed to operate with a Bare DDX-Commercial transceiver board and has an inbuilt T/R switch. Design 3D render: ...
Related work Baby QRO Switching RF amplifier for HF A new generation of the Baby-QRO switching amplifier targets 25W to 50W of RF output for FT8 and other FSK modes. Goal The Baby-QRO amplifier already has a very useful RF power control knob: the PA drain voltage. A bench supply works for experiments, but it is not the right answer for a digital beacon or transmitter stack. We want the MCU controller to set the PA voltage, and therefore the RF output power, in software. ...
Photographers often say: The best camera is the one you have with you. DDX-UNO applies the same philosophy to amateur radio. The best HF transceiver isn't necessarily the most powerful one. It's the one you remembered to bring. Most HF stations remain at home. Portable radios often require batteries, coax cables, antenna tuners, protective cases, and a backpack full of accessories. The result is that many operators leave their radios behind. ...
Running your own AI coding assistant locally using ROCm, LLaMA C++, and Nanocoder. Why Local AI Coding? Cloud AI coding assistants are convenient, but local models offer: Better privacy Lower long-term cost Offline development Faster iteration for small/medium models Full control over models and tooling With modern AMD GPUs and ROCm support improving rapidly, Ubuntu 26.04 makes it surprisingly easy to run local coding models. In this guide, we'll set up: ...
I recently bought a ceiling fan from Kuhl which came with "free installation". The experience was simple: Wait 4 days Nobody comes No installation No accountability Ultimately I returned the fan - it took around 15 minutes over a phone call with Amazon's customer care to initiate the return process. This time could have been better spent on something else… Now yes - I can install a ceiling fan myself. ...
"While minimal kernels cannot prevent every vulnerability, reducing attack surface by removing unnecessary kernel features, drivers, and services can proactively mitigate many classes of security issues and reduce exploitability." For a long time, Linux optimization work was seen mostly as a performance exercise. Faster boot times. Smaller images. Lower RAM usage. Better cache behavior. But over the years, something interesting became increasingly obvious: Optimization and security are often deeply related. ...
Intro There's something slightly absurd about turning a tiny retro handheld into both an app development platform and a weak-signal radio decoder. The R36S - cheap, hackable, and rough around the edges - wasn't built for any of this. That's exactly why it works. The Constraint Advantage Modern development hides inefficiency. The R36S exposes it. With limited CPU, RAM, and screen space, you're forced to: Write tighter code Design simpler interfaces Think in constraints, not abstractions That same constraint-driven thinking applies perfectly to signal processing tasks like FT8. ...
It's a Training Ground for Engineers (And We've Been Ignoring It) Let's drop the nostalgia and say something uncomfortable: If you think ham radio is just people talking into microphones, you're not just wrong - you're overlooking one of the most hands-on, intellectually rigorous engineering playgrounds still accessible to individuals. Because amateur radio isn't about conversation. It's about understanding how information survives reality. And reality is hostile. Signals Don't Care About Your Abstractions Modern software engineers live in a world of clean abstractions: APIs work (until they don't), packets arrive (until they don't), networks are "just there." ...
Initial setup Initially, I had set up a TP-Link ER605 (TL-R605) V2 router to handle the dual WANs - on paper, it checked all the boxes: load balancing, failover, and a relatively affordable price point. But in practice, it turned out to be a frustrating experience. The biggest issue was how excruciatingly slow the device was to boot and handle failover. In a setup where uptime actually matters, waiting around for the router to recover or switch links defeats the whole purpose of having redundancy in the first place. Failover should feel seamless - this felt anything but. ...
'Rant' Urban EDC used to be about utility; now it's often curated consumption dressed up as identity. What started as practicality has turned into a cycle of buying and upgrading - less about need, more about filling a vague psychological gap. At some point, this stops being a hobby and starts looking like a loop that's hard to justify. I am sure that most of us DO NOT NEED that ~1L INR Koenig Mini Goblin Flipper knife ;) ...