I just submitted my first POTA activation log :-)

This is hilarious ! www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJTX...

Cor, Phew, what a scorcher ! A very enjoyable session of POTA activity at Old Warden today with @g7soz.bsky.social

One of the fans in @TNMOC's Elliott 803 has stopped working. After a good clean and lubricate it was back to full speed again.

In 1933 (93 years ago) the BBC were doing field strength surveys that lead to Droitwich being chosen for a Long Wave transmitter site. downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/repo... This year it closes down. www.bbc.co.uk/reception/wo...

I've spent some time over the last few days translating some FORTRAN code into ALGOL-60. The code came from an example for the IBM 1401 FORTRAN compiler. It used various array addressing "tricks" to access a matrix and a vector that made the translation very tricky. Not a good example in my view.

Today we had the Elliott 803 doing some FFTs and Inverse FFTs on X and Y coordinates of some line drawings. Progressively removing higher order spectrum components produced some interesting effects.

This topical art work was drawn on the real Elliott 803's plotter yesterday and drawn today on the virtual Elliott 803's plotter.

Some fault finding on a virtual Elliott 803 emulated at the logic gate level. Two of the timing pulses were occurring at the same time !

Join us May 13 for a Relaxed Home Educator Day! 🖱️✨ We’re closing to the public for a quiet, sensory-friendly experience. ✅ Quiet zones ✅ No rigid schedules ✅ Fully accessible ✅ Friendly experts Let your child explore at their own pace. 🤖 Book: https://ow.ly/4LI650YINlq #HomeEducatorDay

FIVE WEEKS 😬 I'm sure it'll be fine and I'll have my Camputers CUB monitor working by then. Yes. It's going to be a fun weekend so everyone come!

Who to believe ?

Classic SID (Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance) at 08:13 this morning. See how the 20m and 40m bands just got turned off for a while!

DHL have taken a week to deliver my parcel to the wrong place. Someone called "sara" has my parcel !

The first flower is appearing on the roses I'm growing from the seeds I picked last autumn.

DHL failing to deliver my package :-(

That thing where you google an error message and find the solution in a forum posting from six months ago when you last had the same problem. 🤦‍♂️

I could have just bought a new one. But I'm GenX :-)

Today's target was to get my Midi keyboard to control the PSGs. Only monotonic sofar.

Here is my RC2014 sound board now with both AY-3-8912 PSGs installed and the new active mixer daughter board fitted.

Today's little construction project. It's a mixer for my Dual AY-3-8912 sound board. It mixes the six channels down to stereo, two left, two right and two center (71% left and right).

Here is my RC2104 AY-3-8912 board in action :-)

My RC2014 sound card is making music :-)

Why does everyone put captions in their videos these days? I find them very distracting as I find myself reading them rather than actually looking at the things being shown in the video. The choice to see them should be made by the viewer so that those that need them can have them always enabled.

My latest RC2014 board. It takes two (though only one fitted so far) AY-3-8912 Programmable Sound Generators. That will give me six channels of square-wave goodness

This might explain the trouble I had with my SGC-239 yesterday. This is the plot of the patch lead I was using with a 50Ω dummy load on the end. Subsequently I found I could just pull off the PL259 on one end. It has been fixed now.

Today I built an sd-card interface board in my RC2014 system, and it worked first time :-)

@g7soz.bsky.social Batteries on charge for a /P trip somewhere this afternoon....

My paper tape model now includes how the tape naturally curves due to it having been wound up. The vertical lines show the tape curvature calculated at each point.

30m λ/4 vertical fed against the car body worked very well this afternoon. Good reports from I,DL,OK,F. Then with more wire added so that my SGC-239 ATU would tune it on 80m, I finished off with a good qso with Brittany just as the sun was setting.

Every few years I have a go at modeling the motion of paper tape as it is moving through the Elliott 803 tape reader. I've never been very happy with the results so it has never been added to my emulator. I think my current attempt is the best I've achieved.

Repurposed loud speaker stand works well as a drive-over pole mount.

Somewhat anomalous spot in China on 30m this afternoon !

This is the manual for the Elliott 803 library subroutine D2. It was implementing this sorting algorithm in 803 machine code that lead to Tony Hoare suggesting to his boss that he had a better algorithm, which turned out to be quicksort.

Sad to hear of the passing of Tony Hoare. I only met him once at a CCS meeting at the Science Museum celebrating Algol-60. Tony and his team wrote the Algol-60 compiler for the Elliott 803, which we still use today at TNMOC. The "team" kindly signed my copy of the 803 Algol manual.

That should ensure some dry weather for a while 🤦‍♂️

Some experiments with finding intersections between triangles.

Triangle fill ported from the driver for my RC2014 VDU. Now to sort out the drawing order.

@breakintoprogram.co.uk What techniques did you use for hidden surface removal in your Next 3D library ?

I finally remembered how to do rotations properly :-)

Not for the first time, rotations in 3D space are "doing my head in"

A bit of 3D fun with github.com/recp/cglm

The rose seeds that have been in my fridge all winter have started to germinate :-)

@pimoroni.com I've been working on a C API for the Tufty2350 display, and the basics are now working :-)

I might have to get one of these ! shop.pimoroni.com/products/ada...

I'm in unfamiliar territory today. I'm developing a C wrapper for the Pimoroni C++ libraries for the Tufty2350. So far I have some "proof of concept" code running on a PICO2 which calls a C++ class constructor from a C programme.

Today's Start Trek Academy, Wow, just wow.... :-)

Spring is in the air here, so I've been out doing some gardening, well mostly pruning, trimming, dead heading and weeding.

Does anyone have recommendations for C/C++ extension to install in VScodium ?

Tools installed for building C code for my Tufty :-)