Digital Amateur Television After the RSGB Convention’s DATV talk, I’ve been super curious about playing more with DATV (Digital Amateur TV). It’s pretty cool - transmit broadcast standard video using low powers and homebrewe equipment. I remember many moons ago Iain, tj and I came up with an MPEG4 proof of concept and streamed Citizenfour between a hackrf and rtl-sdr. Naturally, to do it properly, I’m going to have to advance my license (work in progress, honest). Before we hit that stage, though, I can work on receiving and fiddling about on an SDR at home. …

See Day 1 notes for the first half of this piece! Convention’s over! I left Milton Keynes at roughly 1630 after a full day of lectures and after a stopoff in Glasgow made it home at 3am. Total round trip of 1003 miles! That’s a long way to go for some radio chat. Day 2 was again insteresting, enthusing and inspiring - here’s a compressed colletion of the notes I took. …

So, I came down to the RSGB Convention to see what’s what in the world of radio. After day 1, it’s been good - Here’s a disorganised selection of my notes and thoughts. Session 1: Advances in Amateur TV Given by Noel Matthews, G8GTZ Noel started out telling us about the bands that ATV is on these days, the ones that caught my interest were: 13CM (Roughly 2432MHz) 70CM (2MHz, Digital centered around 437MHz) 2M 2M D-ATV 2M Digital Amateur TV is really interesting, it seems. …

Abroad’s going mostly well. Initially very busy, now things have slowed down and I’m waiting on others. I’ve been fiddling with this tablet a lot. It’s been, much to my surprise, really useful. A Tablet in Industry As I said previously I really like the size and shape of it. I’ve been using it in my industrial context extensively as a document viewer. 16GB is a large amount of documentation, and having it in the palm of my hand (or pocket) at all times is super useful. I can bring it out and show clients, or staff, drawings to describe something, zooming in on specific areas to highlight important details, or giving an overview of the whole system. The machine can be on all the time, with connectivity off, and afford me several days battery life, compared to my work-assigned laptop’s 1 hour. I can hang it from a rail or mount it somewhere and leave the screen on to use as a reference. …

I’m travelling again. It’s time for another Arabic Adventure, and to be honest I’m really looking forward to it. Hands on work, over a broad range of areas that will really stretch me. I absolutely thrive on the environment I’m forced into when I’m there. It’s terrifying, difficult, high pressure and unfamiliar and I every day is different and difficult for a whole set of reasons. Because I’m travelling, I’ve been looking at my tablet again - the original Nexus 7 from back in 2012. …