Mr. Beat explains how some of those dystopian novels we were forced to read growing up in school have already (partially) come true.
Disclaimer: Mr. Beat offers opinions in this video
Uh ok, so this is, like, the description of the video so keep reading. Produced by Matt Beat and Beat Productions, LLC. Filmed by Matt Beat. All images and video by Matt Beat. Additional images used under fair use guidelines or found in the public domain. Music by Electric Needle Room (Mr. Beat's band), Bad Snacks, Kwon, MK2, Otis McDonald, Patrick Patrikios, and Underbelly & Ty Mayer.
Urban noise is a common problem, and the vast majority of it is created by motor vehicles. Noise is far too often dismissed as a minor nuisance, rather than the legitimate health issue that it is.
The book "Curbing Traffic" has a chapter about the health impacts of noise pollution. I explore the research in the book, and visit Delft, the city that is highlighted in the book as being a shining example of what can happen when noise pollution is taken seriously.
This video explores the problem that farting cars, farting motorcycles, and farting mopeds create in our cities.
The last place I lived was originally on a country road and was generally pretty quiet. But growing up population of the nearby city meant more and more traffic, and subdivisions (one was which ended up against my back property line). By the time I moved, the area had become solidly suburbia and the road became a major secondary road and quite noisy
There is no 'free' market, and there never has been. The 'free' market is predicated on the belief that all players will act honestly, and make informed choices based on available information. This is a completely false assumption, and has been proven so time after time.
It completely ignores human nature whereby someone will always lie, cheat, and steal to achieve their own ends -- this is what we see here.
Industry players will always form cartels and collude in anti-consumer behavior -- price fixing being the prime example.
Without someone to keep corporations in line, the market would steadily skew to all of the power being in the hands of a few.
There is no such thing as a 'free' market, and there simply never has been. It's a utopian myth which can never be true.
People who go around spouting about the 'free' market are either naive, self deluded, or actively lying.
well, the same is happening here in the Netherlands. people have been voting the neoliberals into power for decades, despite things going to shit, and other parties being available here.
it's the propaganda that's working; most people still believe that free market capitalism is great, and it will take a lot more downfall before they understand it's shit.
@bazkie same in UK, but I think its also because neoliberalism provided short term gains - a young adult working in the skilled trades or the remaining middle level office jobs which exist and haven't been outsourced/replaced by AI can afford to get a used Audi on finance and just about run it - they get scared of green/left parties as they think "tax will go up and petrol will be £2/2€ a litre again" and that's a powerful paranoia (especially if they are in a long term relationship and have now got kids to feed/fund through school)
@bazkie about 10 years ago when I had learned just enough Dutch to read sites where younger folk hung out (and chat to them) I learned a fair few thought all the bicycles, good public transport (which folk in UK often envy!) and the high cost of learning to drive (which is same as UK) was imposed by "big government/EU" and they wanted to have cars just like young people in UK, enjoyed watching Top Gear and thought folk in UK and USA had more "freedom" (and those youths would be 30-40+ by now, many with families of their own)
At least you are highly unlikely to get Nexit as everyone can see the mess the UK is now in 5 years later..
@vfrmedia UK has been a lovely warning sign for us indeed!
..tho people have been voting far right the past few years despite Trump, so maybe most people don't really understand warning signs 😅
and about that dutch youth; keep in mind we've had neoliberal rule for decades now, so the whole "free market good, nationalization bad" has been really hammered in.
not sure if we'll get rid of it in my lifetime tbh. but most of the lovely social policies we have left stem from the more progressive governing we had before I was born 😅
btw why did you learn dutch? (maybe I asked before)
@bazkie I moved to Suffolk, which is not /that/ far from the Netherlands (especially at the point of Lowestoft which is the furthest Eastern part of England) and has many cultural and trade links with NL, also I am a former radio pirate and was always curious about the pirate radio scene there and started listening to the stations and wanted to learn the language (piratenzenders are quite surreal, with 3 different languages of music and songs which are a mix of synthpop/disco, country and western and seashanties 😁 )
@vfrmedia ohh right I think you mentioned that before! those piratenzenders sure are something else :D it's funny how it combines, eh, "rural culture" with everything else!
I don't know if it's actually a pirate station, here's an FM broadcaster near Quinault Lake here that plays all kinds of odds and ends with weird stuff in between. It might fall under LPFM, but I doubt the FCC would hassle them anyway since it's in the middle of nowhere and low power.
the "free market" is to economics what the frictionless spherical cow is to high school physics.
The very existence of corporations means there is no free market. Corporations are a legal construct of governments that grants a business (and later even a mere collection of assets) status as a district entity separated to some degree from the owners and workers within.
As such, there is no choice between "government vs corporations" because they are *two sides of the same coin*...it is all one big hegemony.
We have all been thoroughly conditioned to think otherwise for a couple of centuries now. It is thoroughly ingrained the minds of everyone in the "free world" that corporations are the capitalist free market and government is the socialist planned economy but that is pure BS.
The biggest economies in the world have arrived in the same place from two different directions...the US being a corporatocratic regime and China practising state capitalism.
Playing with reflectors for the first time. It's so cool seeing how its positioning affects the feed point impedance! :D #AmateurRadio #HamRadio #antenna
all modules sth sth SA818 have transceiver chips RDA1846 and by default they only do 12.5kHz channel bandwidth, that's too little for AFSK 9k6, they should be reconfigurable to 25kHz but even then it didn't work for me
SiLabs 4463 should be able to do it, but it's configuration is on the involved side, or SX1255 also advanced, pc/raspberry direwolf soundcard handheld radio, maybe easiest setup
9k6 shouldn't be too difficult. Back in the olden days there were lots of instructions on how to access the discriminator directly in whatever transceiver. You need to bypass the audio stages in both directions, then you should be good.
Not so much crazy as why exactly would you need to cool a feedline or matching balun? Have you got an extraordinary mismatch? Shouldn't your RF be radiating instead of making heat? And the same comment for running a fan! Fairly extraordinary situation you have there, Neil.
The issue is that the radiation resistance is around 5 ohms, so I need to step the impedance down a ton to get a match. The loading coil between the matching transformer to get this 6m dipole down to the 10m band is what's overheating because of all the resulting current. :(
You're talking about a trap dipole which will require capacitors to fit up the impedances. A fan dipole is easier and will work the first time. Just wind up your excess length on the loading coils.
Well, even 10 gauge wire wasn't enough to prevent the 10m match from overheating when transmitting at 100W. Darn low radiation resistance. Guess it's time to graduate to copper tubing since magnet wire is hard to find in larger gauges. 👀 #AmateurRadio #HamRadio
Keep them in case you ever need to make your antenna longer again! I have a few old food jars repurposed for this, labeled with what antenna they came off of. #HamRadioShitPost
(No but seriously, I do have some 6"-10" pieces of "LMR400-like" coax bouncing around in my toolbox, despite never having any reasonable use of them.)
@va3wft This! I mean, why do you think they call them antenna farms?
Do make sure to plant them at least 1/2λ apart, or they'll crowd out and grow too short. If you're lucky, they're usable on a higher band, but it's just not the same.
Can't get #DireWolf to actually transmit the packet audio burst via my FT-991a. I have this config setting:
ADEVICE plughw:CODEC,0
Which corresponds to these devices:
VID PID Product Sound ADEVICE ADEVICE HID [ptt]
--- --- ------- ----- ------- ------- ---------
08bb 29b3 USB Audio CODEC /dev/snd/controlC0 /dev/hidraw0
08bb 29b3 USB Audio CODEC /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c plughw:0,0 plughw:CODEC,0 /dev/hidraw0
08bb 29b3 USB Audio CODEC /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p plughw:0,0 plughw:CODEC,0 /dev/hidraw0
Bus 001 Device 017: ID 08bb:29b3 Texas Instruments PCM2903B Audio CODEC
I'm listening in on 144.390 MHz on my handheld while my FT-991a is transmitting, but all I get is the transmission starting and ending with no audio inside it. Any suggestions?
Anyone know why #DireWolf is hellbent on using /dev/ttyS0 with hamlib? I have this in direwolf.conf, which should force it to use /dev/ttyUSB1:
PTT RIG 1035 /dev/ttyUSB1 38400
But it refuses:
Dire Wolf version 1.7
Includes optional support for: gpsd hamlib cm108-ptt
Reading config file direwolf.conf
Audio device for both receive and transmit: plughw:0,0 (channel 0)
Channel 0: 1200 baud, AFSK 1200 & 2200 Hz, A+, 44100 sample rate.
Hamlib determined CAT control serial port rate of 38400.
User configuration overriding hamlib CAT control speed to 38400.
Retrying Hamlib Rig open...
Retrying Hamlib Rig open...
^C
QRT
Hamlib Error: rig_set_ptt command for channel 0 PTT
rig.c(947):rig_open entered
rig_settings_get_path: path=.config/hamlib_settings
rig_open: async_data_enable=0, async_data_supported=0
serial_open: /dev/ttyS0
serial_open(335): open failed#1 No such file or directory
serial_open: Unable to open /dev/ttyS0 - No such file or directory
port_open: serial_open(/dev/ttyS0) status=-6, err=No such file or directory
rig.c(1178):rig_open returning2(-6) IO error
rig.c(947):rig_open entered
rig_settings_get_path: path=.config/hamlib_settings
rig_open: async_data_enable=0, async_data_supported=0
serial_open: /dev/ttyS0
serial_open(335): open failed#1 No such file or directory
serial_open: Unable to open /dev/ttyS0 - No such file or directory
port_open: serial_open(/dev/ttyS0) status=-6, err=No such file or directory
rig.c(1178):rig_open returning2(-6) IO error
rig_set_ptt: rig or rig->caps is null
Invalid parameter
?WATCH={"enable":false,"json":false};
If I make /dev/ttyS0 a symlink to /dev/ttyUSB1, it works flawlessly. What gives? :/
I've not run into this in the past, but not currently running direwolf this way either.
I've got direwolf set up with rigctld to handle the radio control, so direwolf just gets: `PTT RIG 2 localhost:4533` (note that's not the standard rigctld port)
Glad you can make it work that way -- I'm not saying it's the right choice, but it makes a lot of things easier.
I'm sure others involved with #FARPN @farpn might have a guess about your original issue. We've also been able to get `udev` to assign names to the serial ports for radios (like /dev/ic706 instead of /dev/ttyUSBS0), which can help with the issue of inconsistent serial port device names.
Back when this was more affordable I bought some 0 gauge silver wire. Silver's pretty soft but that stuff takes significant hand strength to bend at all.
In ITU R.2 (the Americas) it seems to be almost all 144.39 MHz. There is some HF stuff, too, mostly on the 30-m band but I don't know specific frequencies. In other ITU regions, there are other "default" frequencies on, at least, the 2-m band.
Closest I come is "DPRS" which is APRS-ish via D-STAR.
Do *I* do actual #APRS? No. Do I want to do it? Yes. Do I use my lack of antennas as an excuse for this and other things? I'm sorry, that's all the time we have today.
Well, the 10m feed for my 6m dipole works, but when the loading coil warms up (it's warm to the touch), the resonant frequency shifts down, which means I need to compensate for that by trimming the hats a bit more. :3
Note: This post is a work in progress (early May 2025). I haven’t yet finalised the build of this antenna. I built a Meshtastic node around a Heltec T114, zerofox3d’s FLEXO case, LiPo b…
oh geez i don’t understand that yet but am looking forward to when I do. Will share with my more informed North Carolina mesh people for their consideration. TY!
The 40-meter band (7 MHz) is a cornerstone of High-Frequency (HF) amateur radio, but a full-sized half-wave dipole for this band is about 66 feet (20 meters) long. For hams with limited space, this can be a serious challenge!. Enter the “Shorty Forty”—a classic solution that uses loading coils to achieve excellent performance in a much more compact footprint.
It might be because we're looking at a very narrow slice but I'm not sure you're seeing sidebands. Can you see this sig with a different rcvr eg an SDR?
You are 100% right! I mistakenly had my radio's filter pass band set to 500 Hz. Setting it to the recommended 3 kHz for FT8 both fixed that and improved my FT8 experience. :P
I used to see such bad decodes until I turned off some setting. I don’t remember exactly what it was but something like ´extra decode pass’ or so; I think I can find it if needed.
I really want to set up a #Meshtastic / #Meshcore router with a wired Ethernet backhaul. The idea is to have the router and its antenna outdoors, but run the cable indoors to our home network. Any suggestions?
Meshtastic there are hardware options with wired ethernet instead of wifi (there is a rak esp32 option), the pakets can transferred over to an local mqtt server and from there over your lan to the mobile app,
Or to an local running linux native meshtasticD service on a computer.
In the newer firmware there is the UDP option where no mqtt is involved too. Then you need a second node (hardware or meshtasticD service) for your client side needs.
For meshcore there is no such option beside getting a raspi in the outside enclosure too and tunnel the usb serial interface through your network, or play with experimental wifi firmware and app, but no native ethernet.
You could try socat or ser2net to get serial data over ip network, with a linux based endpoint on the other end, like a second raspberry.
The esp-based serial to wifi firmwares (running on a second esp8266 board) was not 8-bit binary transparent, as i searched for this last time for 3d printer use. So this doesnt work.
I have had the UDP connection by accident working, but not the other things. It look like the meshtastic firmware had a lot of troubles on esp32 platform with wifi, but worked stable on version 2.5.23 I dont tried ethernet over cables but others said it run on their hardware
Removable capacitive hats sure are an easier way to adjust a linear antenna's resonant frequency than cutting the antenna. (Other easier ways are telescoping legs and an adjustable feed point.)
The NanoVNA comes with attenuators, test/calibration loads, and a couple of (admittedly poor quality) cables. Adding to that, SWR+power meters are pretty important (I have both the HF and VHF versions of these for that).
I'd also recommend learning how to make your own cables and obtaining the equipment to do so. Aside from the much better quality and durability you'll gain, it'll also let you build any cables you need (good for getting away from adapters).
I usually stick with old-fashioned UHF connectors, but the NanoVNA forced me to become comfortable with SMA connectors. (More recently, I'm starting to explore N connectors instead of BNC.)
@deepfryed Butting in a bit, sorry: the most important advice of all is implicit in the original post: know your gear and how to self-check it. Be skeptical of cables (especially inexpensive ones), because they're what get the most wear.
Speaking of wear, get "port savers" for any SMA test gear. They're just a consumable male/female "adapter" that goes on the port once and take all the wear. Decent ones aren't cheap, but you _will_ wear out the SMAs on cheap test gear after a few years.
bazkie 👩🏼💻 bitplanes 🎵
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in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •every time I contemplate "upgrading" the stock exhaust on my bike, I remember it's already louder than a car exhaust.
Most car exhausts, anyway. Not the M3 that my neighbour across the road drives.
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