104 lines
5.8 KiB
Plaintext
104 lines
5.8 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 4488
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Title: HPR4488: Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 2: What is the problem?
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4488/hpr4488.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-11-22 14:57:03
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---
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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4488 for Wednesday 15 October 2025.
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Today's show is entitled, Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 2.
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What is the problem?
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It is hosted by Trey, and is about 6 minutes long.
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It carries a clean flag.
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The summary is, delving into the problem I want to solve using my cheap yellow display.
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Hello again, this is Trey.
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This is Part 2 in my cheap yellow display project series.
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You can find Part 1 in Episode 4472.
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We previously left our handy hero, learning about the technology of the cheap yellow display,
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but without a compelling reason to begin using one.
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As we rejoin the topic, it was Winter Field Day 2025, that would be January 25th and 26th.
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Winter Field Day is actually two days, but yeah, January 25th and January 26th, 2025.
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Winter Field Day is an annual event where amateur radio operators from around the world
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gather some portable radio equipment and set up somewhere away from their normal
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base of operations.
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It is designed to encourage operators to practice their emergency preparedness skills in unfavorable
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weather.
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Usually, they will run their equipment using batteries or generators.
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I chose this day because I knew there would be a good amount of radio traffic.
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I had just finished tuning my first handmade, inverted V dipole antenna for use on the
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10 meter amateur radio bands.
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These bands span 28 megahertz all the way up to 29.7 megahertz.
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I had the antenna connected to a 10 meter amateur transceiver to listen in on the radio traffic.
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Yes, I will include pictures of the antenna in the show notes.
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Scanning through the lower end of the band resulted in receiving a number of very strong
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continuous wave signals.
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This wave is abbreviated CW or Charlie Whiskey in amateur radio circles, and it stands
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for Morse code signals transmitted over radio frequencies.
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The tones indicating dots and dashes of Morse code were clearly audible through the radio
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speaker.
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Wait, stop time out.
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I can hear you shouting as you listen.
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This is supposed to be a discussion of the ESP32 cheap yellow display.
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What does this have to do with amateur radio?
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You know what?
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You are absolutely right.
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Now hold your horses and we will get there.
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I barely learned Morse code as a child, and I used it a bit as an aviator in the 90s.
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Well, when flying, I was always able to reference a visual representation of the Morse code beside
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the actual letters for navigational aids and other things that I was using to Morse
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code to identify, but that's neither here nor there.
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The point of it is I never really became proficient.
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Shortly after Winter Field Day 2025, I began taking lessons on Morse code with the goal
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of becoming proficient at both sending and receiving Morse code around 20 words per minute.
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This training may be the topic for another episode in a different series, maybe.
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We'll see.
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We'll see how my skills progress.
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Anyways, I scanned further up the band, and I also identified some digital transmissions.
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They sound like noise, sometimes like modems, other things like that.
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I'm guessing what I heard was FT8, and further up the band I heard voice transmissions.
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So my antenna was working, at least for receiving.
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Now I've been a radio operator for a while.
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A little back history.
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I've had an amateur radio license since 2016, and I quickly progressed all the way up
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to an extra class, which gives me permission to use all the amateur radio frequencies that
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are allowed within the United States on the high frequency HF, very high frequency VHF,
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and ultra high frequency UHF bands.
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However, to this point, I have only actually operated on the VHF and UHF bands, and have
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done so using mobile and handheld transceivers.
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I inherited some HF equipment from a close friend who went silent key in 2023, and I was only
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now trying to use it.
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You can learn more about my friend, and about the term silent key, in episode HPR 3922,
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with a link in the show notes.
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Alright, back to field day.
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There was far too much traffic, and it was way too intimidating for me to even consider
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making my first attempt at transmitting on the HF bands.
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Nope, no sir.
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This would have to wait until later.
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But I didn't need to determine how well my antenna would transmit.
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I began to ponder my options.
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I really did not want to talk to anyone until I listened to some more QSOs, and I could
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implement proper radio practices.
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Now the term QSO, that's QSO Quebec Sierra Oscar, is the amateur radio term for radio
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conversations.
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Anyways, I also have no interest in digital modes yet.
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And I like the simplicity of voice and CW, so there I am back at Morse code again.
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What if, what if there was a way that I could transmit a signal in Morse code and get
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reliable feedback on signal propagation without the need to try to reply to any responses?
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Now for this to work, it would need to be accurate and repeatable and properly structured
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in timed Morse code transmission.
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And it's way more than my training at the point of this recording, or even at the point
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where this was happening, more than my training could can accomplish.
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So this is something to think about, and think about, and think about.
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Alright, enough thinking.
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Tune into the next episode in the series to learn where these thoughts led me and how
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in the world this all relates back to my cheap yellow display project.
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Goodbye.
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You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio, and Hacker Public Radio does work.
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Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
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If you ever thought of recording podcasts, click on our contribute link to find out how
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easy it really is.
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The hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive
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and our syncs.net.
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On the Sadois status, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
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License.
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