Posts

K3/100 Transceiver and P3 Panadaptor Formerly For Sale

K-Line Setup (Update: Sold) Thanks for your interest - this radio is no longer available. Sold to a new home. With some hesitation, but after much deliberation, I’m going to sell my K3/100 Trasceiver and P3 Panadaptor. I will entertain any reasoned offers. I might consider splitting the units. I will not part (decompose) the transceiver or P3. K3 Transceiver Model K3/100 Serial No 65XX uC FW 5.67 DSP FW 2.88 FL FW 1.26 DVR FW 1.03 Unit history Purchased as K3/10-K from professional builder in Aptos California. Added KPA3 + options as current owner. ESD precautions followed, experienced electronics builder. Included KDVR3 - Digital Voice Recorder - installed KIO3 - installed - IF & Transverter Interface KPA3 - 100W PA - installed KAT3 - 100W Auto-tuner installed Filters (Inrad): FL2 : 2.7kHz (General purpose) FL3: 1.80 kHZ 8-pole INRAD (SSB/digital) FL4: 400 Hz 8-pole INRAD digital modes Has upgraded VFO knobs (heavy steel/brass) Original VFO knobs included. Not operated very much since 2013 (3-4 hrs total, stored in pelican case w/ desiccant. Recently tested - just as I left it.

Wednesday, August 26, 2020 Read

MacOS and pyenv peculiarities

Update: 2025/2026 I use uv almost exclusively now; and sometimes poetry. My development environment is typically something along the lines of: homebrew for installed, compiled applications. mise for common utilities that are large and updated infrequently, for example: ansible node python uv for python virtual environment management. One side effect of the above is that I haven’t had to remember how to compile python in a while. For historic context; here’s the original post:

Monday, May 4, 2020 Read

GNURadio -- Hello my old friend.

GNURadio From time to time, I try to play with GNURadio. It has a lot going for it and I like the ideas, concepts and other things that it brings to the table. After 10 years of flirting and messing around I can say this: It hasn’t gotten much easier to support and install on OSX. I’ve had to fight with (in no particular order this evening): pyenv SIP PyQT5 (which if you have any idea - you know this hurts or ends in tears) In most cases - the package manager did the wrong thing and I had to rebuild from source. I suppose I should expand this blog entry to record what I did so I can do it again.

Sunday, May 13, 2018 Read

Migrating Again

Another migration… For a variety of reasons, I’m migrating away from Amazon Web Services platform. Things will be rough while I do this in my very limited free time. I know that this will completely kill my SEO; but this site isn’t about that. I will end up somewhere in another cloud, likely the one operated in part by me (and my employer).

Meta

Sunday, March 4, 2018 Read

LM317 Application Notes Example

I was messing around a while ago to modify my Norcal QRP Club Power Meter kit so that I could power it from the shack DC supply. The kit takes a 9V battery by default and I wanted to power it from the 13.8V shack supply. I didn’t have an LM7809 handy but I did have an LM317. I also didn’t want to mess around with a variable trim on the supply so I looked at the oddball combination of resistors that I had on hand and decided to draw the curves for the LM317 against all the combinations I could make fairly easily (parallel and series for any two).

Monday, March 2, 2015 Read

K3 and KX3 Macros

Intro In response to a question that came up on the Reddit amateur radio IRC channel #reddinet I decided to write-up the macro settings I’m using on my KX3 and K3. A thread on the Elecraft Mailing List in March of 2013 was discussing the use of self-modifying macros to chain multiple functions on a single button. The examples given were for operating split (cycling though various split values) and for modifying the TX EQ for various applications.

Monday, January 5, 2015 Read

Photo Data Visualizations

I spent a little time this evening playing around with matplotlib, seaborn and my photo collection. Some early results PDF.: Heatmap of Photos over Time (First Cut): With a little more work, we add a histogram by year and by day-of-year PDF: High resolution PDF_ for viewing. When I get a chance, I’ll likely write this up a little more. (or not).

Tuesday, December 23, 2014 Read

Another Brief Announcement

We are pleased to announce the arrival of Maisie, in early January 2013. Sister to one very excited Eamonn.

Family

Monday, January 21, 2013 Read

PWM Controller Hacking

Enough people have asked about it so I figured I would write up my PWM controller that I’ve hacked together. Ultimately I’d like to make it ATtiny powered and I might have made a mistake by getting the analog version working - as it works well enough and has removed the pressing need to build the digital version. I managed to source everything at Radio Shack except the MOSFET. I picked that up at a local, terribly overpriced component supply store. I also purchased the pot there, simply because I liked the physical size of it - RS had a reasonable replacement. In choosing your N-channel MOSFET, make sure you select one that is fully ‘on’ at the level generated by the 555 circuit (not a problem as the signal is around 12V peak-to-peak) and has a very low $$R_{ds(on)}$$. If you are planning to use an ATtiny for the controller (instead of the 555) then you need to select a MOSFET with an appropriately low threshold voltage, such as the STP36NF06L.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012 Read

A Brief Announcement - Welcome E

We are pleased to announce the arrival of Mr. E, mid afternoon, in late January 2012

Family

Monday, January 30, 2012 Read

XOF1 Solar Car - Spotted in the Wild

As we were driving North on CA-1 on our way back from the elephant seal rookery, KC and I saw an odd vehicle off in the distance. At first it looked like a wide-load with some sort of farm equipment in the front. As the ‘farm equipment’ got closer (it was closing fast) it started to look like a squat vehicle. At first I figured it was a Shell Solar Challenge vehicle, but once we got home we noticed that the news had a story.

Sunday, March 1, 2009 Read