Hi Evan,
Yes - Last reading was meant to be 80m.?
Re-checked this morning and 7.150 MHz produced 3Watts with RV1 at max (after re-calibrating BFO due to it being re-set upon installation of a firmware upgrade)
Bob has suggested 'Howard's' modifications, which look promising, particularly for 40m power issues.
I will resolve this one way or another. It will be a great day.
As I said previously - awaiting bit for RF probe and Dummy Load/Power Meter.
Thanks again for your continued interest in my bumbling investigation.
Best,
Nick
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From 1983 to 1985 I worked for a company called Qubix, down in Saratoga CA.
They were building a"Document Processing Workstation", had a huge 2kx2k monochrome monitor?
driven by a Sun-1 computer running Unix.
The plan was to drive a phototypesetting machine from a workstation with a WYSIWYG user interface,
allowing people to quickly create technical documents with all the drawings and funny fonts they might need.
My first project there was to create a multibus card for the Sun-1 to drive one of the the early laser printers,
Since memory was expensive we wrote a Unix driver to DMA the raster image to/from main memory on the Sun-1.
First target was a combination printer/scanner from Fujitsu, probably weighed 400 lbs.
But then the cheap Cannon CX engine (used by HP) came out and we switched mostly to that.
Quibix bought font outlines from Bitstream, these had to be compressed and scaled and italicized and rasterized before use.
One of the programmers took this on using spline curves to compress, but it took minutes to rasterize and
the results looked horrible. I was charged with building hardware to at least speed it up.
I wrote code to compress the arcs and vectors of the Bitstream outlines down to a minimum of vectors for our needs
with an option of using bezier curves (which unlike spline curves go right?through the control point), holding the
critical baseline at the bottom of each character, using fixed point arithmetic on the Sun-1's 68000 to accurately
scale and rasterize those compressed outlines.
Turned out vectors compressed down just fine so no need for the bezier curves, the results looked far better than
the spline curves, and an entire font got rasterized in a couple seconds instead of several minutes.?
No need for special hardware, it just took some carefully built code.
By the time Qubix had something to sell in the middle 80's, things had changed.
Apps were developed for the new Macintosh that could do most of what the far more
expensive Qubix machine could do.
Adobe had PostScript to drive the laser printer, which solved the font issues for everybody.
Jerry, KE7ER
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On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 11:28 PM, Tom, wb6b wrote:
Also my first exposure to Neural Nets. The company I worked for hired a new Phd engineer/student who was trying to create and train a Neural Net to do font hinting. (a way to jiggle some of the pixels around so they look smooth when tiny fonts don't really have enough pixels to not look jagged.)
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Re: I've ordered my BITX V6.? now I need help choosing a better microphone.
I really like this powered mic on Amazon:
You can either change the 4 pin plug to a 3.5mm plug or as I have done make an adapter.? I have both older ?BITX in cases with the 4 pin connector and a new v6 with the 3.5mm jack.
73
Evan
AC9TU
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Re: I've ordered my BITX V6.? now I need help choosing a better microphone.
On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 09:26 AM, Zvi Segal wrote:
Just be aware that the plug is standard 3.5mm stereo, in which the center pin is the PTT push to GND signal.
Zvika, To be clear, the mic plug is a 3.5mm stereo with Tip, Ring, and Sleeve (TRS) connections. NOT the normal smartphone type of plug with two rings (Tip, Ring, Ring, Sleeve plug).  The mic is connected from the Tip to the Sleeve and the PTT switch is connected from the Ring to the Sleeve. Your comment on the rig going into transmit mode if the plug is inserted or removed with the power on is correct.? You want to always insert and remove connections to the ?BITX when power is turned off. 73 Evan AC9TU
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CW, the BITX 40, J2A and the Dos Equis Man
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Re: I've ordered my BITX V6.? now I need help choosing a better microphone.
The supplied mic is nothing to write home about.? As a minimum you can enlarge the front hole.
The PTT sw is OK.
Just be aware that the plug is standard 3.5mm stereo, in which the center pin is the PTT push to GND signal.
So whenever you plug it (or other plug) in/out the the uBitx will go into Tx.
--
Zvika?
4Z1ZV
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Vic,?
Thanks for the correction, LinPSK it is.
Your brief correction will undoubtedly save several forum members a few days.
In addition to the RPi-Zero, it may work on the RPi-B's from 2012 I have sitting in a drawer.
Jerry
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On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 02:03 AM, Vic WA4THR wrote:
Just a correction on the Pi-zero, Jerry. I do run PSK on a Pi-zero quite well, but not with Fldigi. I am using a program called LinPSK, written especially for Linux systems a decade or so ago, but recently (like yesterday) updated by the author. I tried Fldigi, but it is far too much for the little Pi and it would just freeze up, so that is why I searched for an alternative and found LinPSK.
I do run WSJT-X on the Pi-zero, but it is marginal as the decode time is such that the next transmission cycle has usually started before it is done. I have been whittling away at that by eliminating background programs and overclocking the Pi, and I can make contacts, but it still needs to be a bit faster to avoid the repeats that happen at least once with each QSO. The Pi-zero is not the best for ham programs, but a computer the size of a stick of gum for a portable application is attractive and, well, I already had the zero looking for an application. The whole digital interface could easily fit inside the uBitX case with this little thing.
=Vic=
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Mornin' Tom:
I really haven't done much with the controller, other than to read about the BTE to see if I could use it to improve the waterfall processing. The documentation for it (attached) is pretty helpful, but I haven't spent a lot of time with it.
Jack, W8TEE
On Monday, March 22, 2021, 12:10:32 AM EDT, Tom, wb6b <wb6b@...> wrote:
On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 08:44 PM, Jack, W8TEE wrote:
We've offloaded some of the computational load onto the RA8875 controller
Interesting, just looked that chip up to see what it does. Looks like a really good way to handle the intense parts of the GUI. Are you able to process other things with it, like folks are now doing with the GPU boards; processing computations not related to graphic rendering? Tom, wb6b ?
-- Jack, W8TEE
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Looks like I am among likeminded people here (big surprise ;) ) - after working for two printer manufacturers and fixing their (and customer¡¯s) PostScript problems, I am still maintaining PostScript code. And yes, there is a Forth system for Linux. It¡¯s been a few years since I last used it. And speaking of Donald Knuth, I am pretty sure I was the first one to port his TeX system to Linux - after failing to get it to work on a Coherent Unix system with its 64KB limitation.?
--
Karl Heinz - K5KHK
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On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 01:12 AM, Ashhar Farhan wrote:
I still have the FORTH book on my shelf!
This is bringing back nice memories of days gone by. I'm sure there must be a Linux FORTH interpreter out there. Preferably one that is not so committed to being a write only development system, and play with it some. Maybe to really relive the day, try to do things that produce ASCII plots. Or turtle graphics. FORTH did fit the state of the art of microprocessors from that era. The Nano is a supercomputer compared to what we worked with back then.? Tom, wb6b
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Just a correction on the Pi-zero, Jerry. I do run PSK on a Pi-zero quite well, but not with Fldigi. I am using a program called LinPSK, written especially for Linux systems a decade or so ago, but recently (like yesterday) updated by the author. I tried Fldigi, but it is far too much for the little Pi and it would just freeze up, so that is why I searched for an alternative and found LinPSK.
I do run WSJT-X on the Pi-zero, but it is marginal as the decode time is such that the next transmission cycle has usually started before it is done. I have been whittling away at that by eliminating background programs and overclocking the Pi, and I can make contacts, but it still needs to be a bit faster to avoid the repeats that happen at least once with each QSO. The Pi-zero is not the best for ham programs, but a computer the size of a stick of gum for a portable application is attractive and, well, I already had the zero looking for an application. The whole digital interface could easily fit inside the uBitX case with this little thing.
=Vic=
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Re: I've ordered my BITX V6.? now I need help choosing a better microphone.
I don't have good experienc with the supplied microphone and prevere to work with dynamic microphones like used on my old Yaesu's and use on my?. So I build a dynamic microphone amp so I could use those microphones on my uBitx :
?
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Re: First stone of my "Cocorico Ubitx
To me it was a perfectly reasonable question to ask ! The guy had
probably never heard
that expression before, although in common usage in the
States....therefore no need
to take the moral high ground and sound condescending !
Dave
On 21/03/2021 23:06, Jerry Gaffke via
groups.io wrote:
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Show quoted text
Nothing wrong with welding parts to a PC board,
I understand what is meant perfectly well.
This is an international forum.
Not everyone follows your notions of typical American English
usage.
Fine with me if he posts in his native language, Google Translate
works well enough.
Jerry, KE7ER
On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 03:22 PM, Stephen Wandling wrote:
Are you using weld??to mean the same as solder???
_._,_._,_
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I still have the FORTH book on my shelf!
On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 11:58 AM Tom, wb6b < wb6b@...> wrote: On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 09:42 PM, Jerry Gaffke wrote:
I just recently (about a month ago) read the PostScript Bluebook
Cool, enjoyed looking at your hand crafted PostScript code.?
At one time I was one of the few laser printer controller designers around. I was relocated by a company to Silicon Valley to design a controller for them. Was nice to be in SV and have all the moving paid for. Stayed there about 10 years. Now I don't think I'd care to live there, much prefer the pine trees here.?
We were working with Adobe to incorporate one of their proof of concept designs into a real product. So we dealt with PostScript a lot. When our design prototype was working, we had to run extensive test suites and stress over every little pixel, and get the results QAed by Adobe.
However, it could be difficult to get things done with them. They had evolved to the place that we would have big meetings with them. A conference room full of managers. Other than myself, maybe one engineer. Every question that could have been answered in three minutes by talking to the right engineer would always be answered with we can't disturb our engineers and would disappear into the void. Eventually many questions got plausible answers.?
My favorite thing was I was going to design a custom ASIC to handle the logic rather than their discreet design. There was an obsolete eeprom used in their design and I was going to integrate that into my chip. They said Oh No, so and so (one of the founders) designed that part of the firmware and the timing is critical with that chip and none of the other engineers can touch it. I tried to explain that I could make the timing any way needed (mostly slow) so if they are using some software subroutine that can't be changed by anyone, I can still make it work. It ended up after much subsequent high level manager to manager communication, my design incorporate the obsolete eeprom.?
But, I remember experimenting a little with hand writing PostScript just to see what it could do. And reading about PostScript somehow evolved from a Navy battleship training docking simulator, or some such thing.?
Also my first exposure to Neural Nets. The company I worked for hired a new Phd engineer/student who was trying to create and train a Neural Net to do font hinting. (a way to jiggle some of the pixels around so they look smooth when tiny fonts don't really have enough pixels to not look jagged.)
This was way before any of the modern training algorithms were developed, that has made the AI comeback possible. Too bad, the early attempt at this was beyond the technology of the time. I rely liked the guy. He did all this hard core AI stuff, but he would drop by my office and I'd help him with making some of the more bread and butter logic designs more practical. Enjoyed learning a tiny little about the AI thing he was doing.?
Tom, wb6b
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On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 09:42 PM, Jerry Gaffke wrote:
Read "Threaded Interpretive Languages" soon after it came out in 1981.
Wow, it is so much fun to see the future in retrospect. I found a readable copy on Archive.org and glossed over the introduction.? I recognized the cover artwork from Byte Magazine. Had not seen the book. But reading the intro was the same things that were absolutely futuristic when I first read similar articles. And now that future is so far in the past, but still evokes the inner feelings of the unknown and marvelous things that will be possible in the future. I may read some more, as looks like something I may have wanted to read back then. I fiddled in Forth a little. But could not or did not know how to save anything that I did in the interactive mode. So did not do much with it.? Someone at the computer club I belonged to had used forth to create a controller that would calculate the volume of liquid at any level of an irregular shaped tank. He used it in a customer controller he designed for Cal Fire for dropping known amounts of fire retardant from whatever the large fire fighter planes were at the time.? Also, the Sun workstations programmed their disk boot loader in a version of Forth. Tom, wb6b
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Re: First stone of my "Cocorico Ubitx
Hello to all
I use reverso to translate French into English
After if you prefer I can post in French, you will have to do the translation. (Option in Edge)
But I think it¡¯s better to put it in English.
Evan told me my translations were good.?
I found interesting prices on Banggood for a lot 1206 of resistors and capacitors
We can pay in Paypal + small free gift (I took a waterproof cover for mobile) + discounts.
On the other hand there is no lot on a value. So I ordered on A...o a lot of 100 pieces of capacitors 100nf
There are also initiation kits for CMS.
I don¡¯t use the expression SMD for components, otherwise Stephen will call me to order. I believe that in English it also means something else. LOL....It¡¯s just a joke.
have a nice day
cdt
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On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 09:42 PM, Jerry Gaffke wrote:
I just recently (about a month ago) read the PostScript Bluebook
Cool, enjoyed looking at your hand crafted PostScript code.? At one time I was one of the few laser printer controller designers around. I was relocated by a company to Silicon Valley to design a controller for them. Was nice to be in SV and have all the moving paid for. Stayed there about 10 years. Now I don't think I'd care to live there, much prefer the pine trees here.? We were working with Adobe to incorporate one of their proof of concept designs into a real product. So we dealt with PostScript a lot. When our design prototype was working, we had to run extensive test suites and stress over every little pixel, and get the results QAed by Adobe. However, it could be difficult to get things done with them. They had evolved to the place that we would have big meetings with them. A conference room full of managers. Other than myself, maybe one engineer. Every question that could have been answered in three minutes by talking to the right engineer would always be answered with we can't disturb our engineers and would disappear into the void. Eventually many questions got plausible answers.? My favorite thing was I was going to design a custom ASIC to handle the logic rather than their discreet design. There was an obsolete eeprom used in their design and I was going to integrate that into my chip. They said Oh No, so and so (one of the founders) designed that part of the firmware and the timing is critical with that chip and none of the other engineers can touch it. I tried to explain that I could make the timing any way needed (mostly slow) so if they are using some software subroutine that can't be changed by anyone, I can still make it work. It ended up after much subsequent high level manager to manager communication, my design incorporate the obsolete eeprom.? But, I remember experimenting a little with hand writing PostScript just to see what it could do. And reading about PostScript somehow evolved from a Navy battleship training docking simulator, or some such thing.? Also my first exposure to Neural Nets. The company I worked for hired a new Phd engineer/student who was trying to create and train a Neural Net to do font hinting. (a way to jiggle some of the pixels around so they look smooth when tiny fonts don't really have enough pixels to not look jagged.) This was way before any of the modern training algorithms were developed, that has made the AI comeback possible. Too bad, the early attempt at this was beyond the technology of the time. I rely liked the guy. He did all this hard core AI stuff, but he would drop by my office and I'd help him with making some of the more bread and butter logic designs more practical. Enjoyed learning a tiny little about the AI thing he was doing.? Tom, wb6b
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Re: I've ordered my BITX V6.? now I need help choosing a better microphone.
Hello, i had a lot off prolems with the BAofeng mike, after killing this mike :-)) i put a electret from aliexpres in it, changed the C's and changed the wire to a straigt cabel (old stereo audio cable from HK speakers) connected them and super sound. Still working to make a little ajustable mike amp but no time.
Regards
Rene
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Read "Threaded Interpretive Languages" soon after it came out in 1981.
I especially liked how Loeliger developed an interpreter from the ground up, piece by piece,
like a blacksmith forging his tools.? Very cool, had thoughts of?coding something like
a Forth interpreter from scratch.
I worked at a company where somebody implemented some very clever code in Forth on a Z80
a few years before I arrived.? All the C programmers were very happy it worked so well, because they
didn't want to fix it.
Around 1979 I attended a few sessions of the Homebrew Computer Club on the Stanford campus.
Remember seeing Donald Knuth and Douglas Hofstadter there.? Charles Moore (created Forth)
came to give a talk, and saw more of him at the social gathering later.? I remember him claiming stuff
coded in Forth was typically faster than stuff coded in assembly language, since assembly language
programs were usually so poorly structured.? He had some suit from his company (Forth Inc) with him
who tried to shush him up, as that was a bit over the top for a crowd of assembly language programmers.
I just recently (about a month ago) read the PostScript Bluebook
Started because I wanted to print a large clean compass rose among other projects,
read it all the way through because I found it all very fun.
And very Forth like.
Cool it may be, but a stack machine is not terribly practical as a general purpose
programming language these days.? Code written for one is tough to wade through.
Memory is not such a scarce commodity as it was in the 1970's.
Attached is my PostScript code for the compass rose,
execute using ghostscript at a linux shell prompt with "gs xcmps11.ps"
Jerry, KE7ER
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On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 07:13 PM, Evan Hand wrote:
On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 06:22 PM, Arv Evans wrote:
Thoughts run toward implementing a Forth based core OS with
Python-like constructs.?
Arv,
You are one of the few programmers that I have run into that know Forth.? I did a port to a TI994a and a CPM computer that I had built.? Also did a port to a TRS80 Model I before either of the other two.?Of course, I also used it on my work computer that was MSdos based at that time to develop a batch programming simulation.? ?For personal use, I wrote a parallel printer driver on the TRS80.? Stopped using it around the same time that C and Pascal compilers were more affordable for the PC environment.
Good to know that there are others crazy enough to port the code to new hardware.
73
Evan
AC9TU
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On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 08:44 PM, Jack, W8TEE wrote:
We've offloaded some of the computational load onto the RA8875 controller
Interesting, just looked that chip up to see what it does. Looks like a really good way to handle the intense parts of the GUI. Are you able to process other things with it, like folks are now doing with the GPU boards; processing computations not related to graphic rendering? Tom, wb6b ?
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Zvi Segal
Vic WA4THR
Gerard