New Video : HAM Radio Update!

The last time we talked about my amateur radio adventure I had just passed my technician license exam but didn’t yet have the license! In this latest video I fill you in on all of the things I’ve been doing on the air. Here’s what I’ve managed to figure out:

Contacting the Space Station
The International Space Station has a pair of amateur radios on board and it’s possible with just a handheld radio to communicate through it! Most of the time the astronauts aren’t available but the radio is set in repeater mode so people on the ground can communicate with each other over great distances. In the video I demonstrate how I was able to talk with some 300 miles away using the station as a repeater!

Digital Voice Communications
The Anytone 878UVII Plus radio I purchased works in analog and digital modes. I was able to connect to a local repeater and communicate with the Connecticut ARES group digitally. I’ve found so far that experienced Hams have been very welcoming and helpful with this newbie :).

Packet Radio
I am very interested in sending data through the air without having to use phone lines or Internet connections to do it. In the video I demonstrate how I was able to send an email through a local Winlink server using my handheld radio and a laptop.

What’s next? I need to get a proper antenna mounted on my roof for VHF & UHF communications along with a more powerful base station radio. That’s my next project although I’ll probably hire a professional to install it. I welcome any tips, recommendations and advice !

Newton Makes a Cameo in For All Mankind

I love the Apple TV+ show For All Mankind. It’s an alternative history sci-fi drama where the Soviets landed on the moon ahead of the United States. There’s something for everyone with this show which is helmed by Ronald Moore who previously worked on Deep Space Nine and Battlestar Galactica.

Season 3, which just launched this week, takes place during an alternative 90’s where the Soviets and Americans are racing to get to Mars. And being an Apple show they are of course using Newtons as their personal digital assistants!

Unfortunately the Newton’s screen never looked this good. The best they could do was a green “indiglo” that was popular on some watches back in the day.

Perhaps all of the space age tech that developed out of the alternative space race in For All Mankind made for better displays!

Read and watch more about Newton in this recent blog post.

New Extra’s Channel Video: Unboxing the Wyze Cam Floodlight

As many of you know I use a bunch of Wyze IOT stuff because it’s convenient, cheap, and can work without a subscription fee. I have a long dead motion detector floodlight on my garage and recently came across this Wyze floodlight that has a Wyze Cam Version 3 attached to it.

I haven’t hooked it up just yet (I am having an electrician friend do the work for me) but thought I would unbox it so people who are more handy can see what’s in the box for hardware. The TLDR is not much.

Watch the unboxing here! And see some of my prior Wyze reviews here.

Today’s Links

Microsoft releases Game Pass cloud streaming app for Samsung Smart TVs, announces additional game streaming options for purchased games – Xbox

Vivaldi web browser now has an email client, calendar, and RSS reader built in – Liliputing

Roku Staffers Swirl in Netflix Acquisition Rumors – Next TV

Streaming a Graduation Ceremony

Yesterday I spent the day at my local high school assisting the student TV network with their graduation stream and recording. We had perfect weather for the outdoor ceremony. This year the local cable access television station brought over their Tricaster and simulcasted to their cable station too. It was fun to get all of this stuff working together. We had a mix of SDI cameras and NDI sources. 

Each year we experiment with new gear to up the production value. The school recently purchased a few of these Hollyland Cosmo wireless transmitters (affiliate link) for football games and I was surprised by how well they worked. Even across a soccer field with hundreds of people seated in between it maintained a strong signal throughout. 

I am donating a laptop to the school for Vmix use and we’re going to be building out a portable production setup. I’ll do a video on how we plan to set that up in the near future so stay tuned! 

New Video: Lenovo Yoga 6 (2022) Review

Lenovo’s 13″ Yoga 6 2-in-1 laptop has been updated for 2022 with Ryzen 5000 series processors and a 16:10 1920×1200 display. They’ve packed a lot of value into this one. See my full review here.

They checked all of the boxes here: decent casual gaming performance, that nice 16:10 display, a 1080p web cam, backlit keyboard, a fingerprint reader along with face recognition, relatively quiet fan noise, a thin design that weighs just under 3 pounds and excellent battery life. It also has a carpeted display lid if you’re looking for something a little different from an aesthetic standpoint.

Lenovo loaned me the entry level version for this review that is currently on sale for $599 (affiliate link). Its Ryzen 5500U is fine for most tasks and light gaming, although the 5700U option with 16GB of RAM will provide better performance for games and video editing.

Just note that the better performing Ryzen 6000 series chips are now making their way out to laptops like this one. I have no doubt it a year’s time (or less) we’ll see better performing units at around the same price point as this one. But if you’re need an affordable all-rounder right now, this is definitely one worth looking at.

HAM Radio Update

Still having fun with amateur radio! I’ve made some progress on a few fronts.

Last night I made my first successful contact with another HAM through the International Space Station’s repeater! The person I reached is in Ithaca, NY – about 300 miles from my home in Connecticut. He offered to send over an Mp3 of his side of the transmission which I’ll post here soon!

Typically my radio can reach about 20 miles give or take so having the space station relay transmissions is a huge range booster. What’s remarkable is that my radio only transmits at about 6 or 7 watts and the station is 250 miles up.

What I’m finding with this hobby is that you need the right antenna for the job. So I recently picked up the handheld monstrosity pictured above which is designed for making space station contacts. It’s also useful for regular local contacts until I get a proper antenna installed here.

Additionally I was also able to send my first message through the Winlink email system without using any Internet infrastructure! This is a hybrid email network that can work via local radio receivers but can also route email either from station to station or over the Internet. It was fun to watch the transaction on my laptop. I bought a special device called a “SignaLink USB” which can switch on my handheld radio’s transmitter when the PC sends out the audio.

Once I get an antenna installed I’m going to set up a little BBS on a Raspberry Pi for the local HAMs to use.

I’ll put together an update video soon once I have a few things ironed out!

Chinese Influencer Censored Over a Tank Cake?

A few months ago on the Weekly Wrapup we talked about the growing trend of “Social Shopping.” The best way to think of it is as a modern version of the Home Shopping Network where an influencer talks about products live that are available to purchase. This is something I do on Amazon from time to time.

In the video I pointed viewers towards an excellent video from Bloomberg that shows just how big social shopping has become in China. There it’s an industry worth tens of billions of dollars.

One of the creators featured in that video, Austin Li Jiaqi, has been effectively taken off the air by the government after a guest presented him with a cake in the shape of a tank according to Vice News. The government wants to erase memories of this picture from the Tiananmen Square massacre:

AP Photo

The video happened to take place on the 33rd anniversary of the 1989 event. Jiaqi has not yet reappeared after the stream was suddenly shut down.

New Video : Your Next Smartphone Might Use Satellites vs. Cellular Networks for Messaging

This week’s Weekly Wrapup Video was inspired by a Robert X. Cringley post about a rumored secret deal between Apple and satellite operator Globalstar. From the post:

Apple will shortly enter the satellite business by acquiring GlobalStar and its 24 satellites. They will use those 24, plus 24 more satellites that Apple has already commissioned, to offer satellite service for iMessage and Apple’s Find My network just like they implied in their denial last year.

The link in Cringley’s post goes to this Space News Article about a recent infusion of cash that Globalstar is set to receive from a top secret potential customer.

The operator said Feb. 24 it picked MDA and Rocket Lab to supply a set of 17 satellites to replenish its constellation after a “potential customer” agreed to fund most of the $327 million project. The agreement includes an option for up to nine additional satellites at $11.4 million each

The potential network will only run at about 10 megabits per second per satellite so it won’t be able to transfer large items like videos or high resolution imagery, but it is enough to provide service even in the most remote locations. In fact this type of messaging is very popular in the amateur radio world, with protocols like APRS transmitting location data in very small bursts at a much slower rate 1200 bits per second.

Would it work indoors? Who knows. But developments in weak signal technologies lead me to think that it will be able to send small bits of data anywhere in the world with an off-the-shelf consumer smartphone.

Like many other tech leaps the confluence of a bunch of technological developments are coming together here: cheaper launches to space, microprocessor advancements and smaller and cheaper satellites.

Comcast Ups Gigabit Pro Speeds

Comcast’s fiber optic service got a huge speed increase this week – the plan went from 3 gigabits symmetrical to a whopping 6! This is the second speed increase I’ve received for no extra charge since I had the service installed in 2020. You can see my series detailing the adventure here.

In addition to the six gigabit circuit (available as an SFP+ connection) there’s also an additional 1 gigabit circuit running on ethernet for a total of 7 gigabits. The link speed is 10 so there’s still a little more room to grow. The funny thing when you’re running this fast is finding a speed test that can actually handle the bandwidth!

After taxes I pay around $320 a month for the service. It pays for itself by the fact that uploads that once took me 45 minutes to an hour can now be done in about 30-45 seconds. That means I can upload much closer to my deadline vs. before. Most of my videos get uploaded to three different platforms (YouTube, Floatplane and Amazon) so not having to babysit uploads is a real efficiency gain for me.

Reliability is also immensely better than the coax service. Over the last two years I’ve had maybe 30 minutes or so of downtime. Streaming is rock solid even when pushing 10’s of megabits upstream to multiple platforms. This is metro ethernet, not a shared GPON connection, so you’re getting a very reliable industrial grade connection here. My circuit connects directly to the “head end” about eight miles away with nothing in between.

Getting installed depends on how close you are to a splice point or node. I was fortunate that I lived right down the street from a fiber splice so the construction costs were within the scope of what they cover for an install. If you go beyond that allowance you have to pay the difference. If you’re not near a node or a splice point it can get very expensive.

While there are far less expensive fiber options out there in my area Comcast is the only game in town. That is changing though and I suspect these two big speed increases in the course of the last year are evident that competitors are beginning to catch up.

Frontier, the local phone company here in Connecticut, has emerged from bankruptcy and running fiber all over the place. Verizon and T-Mobile are also offering wireless service for the home along with Starlink.

Today’s Links

Amazon is launching an invite-based ordering option, starting with the PS5 and Xbox Series X – Techcrunch

Musk Threatens to Walk Away from Twitter Deal – AP

Sega Has Considered Dreamcast & Saturn Mini But Is Worried About Extreme Costs – Nintendolife

‘No Man’s Sky’ is Coming to iPad in Addition to Mac Later this Year – Touch Arcade

Alien Wreckage on Mars

Of course the aliens in this case are us! An aerospace engineering student on Twitter put together this neat 3D model of the Mars rover’s back shell and parachute crash site.

Last year NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released some amazing footage of the entry, descent and landing process where you can see the parachute and sky crane system working to safely drop off the nuclear powered golf-cart sized rover on the surface.

On Tap for This Week

On tonight’s wrapup we’ll be looking at how mobile phone makers like Apple may run their own low bandwidth satellite networks to bypass carriers. Receiving satellite signals, especially from low orbit, is easier than one might think!

As for reviews next up will be a look at a new Ryzen powered Lenovo Yoga 2-in-1. It’s running with a 5000 series processor (not the newer 6000s) but these machines are always fun to look at nonetheless. I also recently got in the new Synology router and hope to start working on that soon for a review later in the week.

Later today I’m getting in some new parts for my handheld ham radio to start my adventure into packet radio! Once I have a better understanding of how it works I’ll likely do another video in my radio series.

And when I get a little caught up I’ll pop on for a livestream on both YouTube and Amazon to repair that Gameboy I picked up two weeks ago. It should be a fairly easy fix but it will involve a soldering iron. If you like watching auto racing for the wrecks you’ll probably enjoy this one!

And of course we’ll look at whatever other shiny objects show up. Stay tuned!

8bitdo Ultimate Wired Controller for Xbox Review

8bitdo released a new game controller for the Xbox (affiliate link) called the Ultimate Wired Controller for Xbox. You can see my full review here.

Unlike their last Xbox branded controller that didn’t actually work with the Xbox, this one will work on any Xbox One or Series console along with Windows PCs. I also found it to work with Raspberry Pi’s and the MiSTer project. It does not, however, work on mobile phones or Android TV boxes.

As its name implies this is a wired only controller but its cable is a little short at 3 meters (about 9.8 feet). This might have been ample length back in the 80’s and 90’s but it only got about 3/4s of the way to my couch from my Series X console. While it has a bluetooth radio on board that is only used for its configuration app. It will not function wirelessly.

In my game controller latency test (done by shooting a screen and the controller at 240 frames per second) I found this to be one of the least laggy I have ever reviewed. It was even a little quicker than the first party Xbox One controller connected via a USB cable.

The control sticks have a little more travel vs. the first party Xbox controller so you may notice a larger dead zone in some games. Most Xbox game developers are targeting the Xbox controller for their controller dead zones so you might find yourself having to push the stick a little further to get the same movement vs. the stock controller.

The directional pad looks a lot like the SNES inspired one of the 8bitdo Pro 2 controller. But it doesn’t feel as a precise – I encountered a few errant diagonals when moving my character back and forth in the legend of Zelda. But the d-pad here is definitely better than the stock Xbox controller.

The rest of the controller feels pretty nice. It’s a little smaller than the stock xbox controller but I like the way it felt in my medium-sized hands. Buttons are solid and it even has two buttons on the lower portion of the controller that can be configured.

The configuration software is really the killer app here. It’s possible to configure the controller with your phone and remap its controls while it’s active in a game on the Xbox or PC! You can find that demonstrated in the video – it’s something I’ve never seen on a controller.

It’s possible to configure the controller with a phone while it’s plugged into an Xbox or PC!

While it doesn’t allow for macro functionality you can remap any button on the controller, adjust the sensitivity and deadzones of the control sticks and analog triggers, and invert the stick controls. It stores those settings in one of three profiles that are stored on the controller.

For the price point I think this is a solid offering for more casual gamers who are not looking to spend $100+ on a controller.

Minor Errata on HP Dock Review

Just a quick update on the HP Dock video – the details of the video are correct but I referenced it as the “G2” dock when it is in fact the new “G4.”

I really wish YouTube would allow us mortals to replace existing videos! I won’t be reuploading it but have added a pinned errata comment to clarify which version of the dock that was reviewed.