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Updates

April 20, 2026

When MFJ Enterprises, Inc. shutdown operations with the retirement of owner/operator Martin F. Jue, it sent shock waves throughout the Amateur Radio world. But some good news! ITU Corporation has aquired the famous Cushcraft & Hy-gain antennas & rotators product lines. The deal includes all the designs, tooling, specialized equipment & marketing rights. ITU has purchased the old former National Guard armory building in Linton, Indiana & will relocate manufacturing from Starksville, Mississippi to Linton. Via Amateur Radio Daily/Weekly.

Apr 15, 2026

Am now using an RX-888 MKII SDR to extend my WWV propagation page to include 15 MHz. See Radio Magic. The beta version of SDRConsole added more control of the RX-888's internal features.

I also bought Turn Island Systems

GPSDO clock kit, which includes a much larger, internal thermal pad & copper foil-to-case contact, along with their excellent SDR front-end hardware filter (shelving & LPF). The RX-888 can "swallow" the HF spectrum from 10 kHz to 64 MHz in one "gulp", but lacks hardware front-end filtering, which is strange because it's "cousin", the Web-888 internet SDR version does have excellent band-specific hardware filters. As a result, the MKII easily overloads on strong signals because we can't use AGC & only use minimal DSP

in order to maintain signal "purity". We want to keep it the way the ionosphere affects WWV's signals—not how the SDR does!

Even with the larger internal cooling pad, the RX-888 still runs hot & it runs really hot with the small, stock & totally inadequate thermal pad so I have my two RX-888s (one is dedicated for the new UberSDR shared SDR network) sitting on a ventilated aluminum stand with a large, but fairly quiet, USB powered (150 mm dia.) cooling fan.

Apr 6, 2026

I have my WWV 5 & 10 MHz propagation page operating on a test basis. See www.va3rom.com/WWV/WWV.html. It uses SDRConsole, an RSPduo SDR, Leo Bodnar GPSDO, W6LVP active loop antenna, two virtual audio cables (VACs) feeding two instances of fldigi & two custom Python 3 scripts to process the data, create the graphs & ftp them every 15 minutes. It's my fork ofHamSCI's Linux Grape 1 DCR Python 2 script, which I enhanced & added real-time processing & streaming.

I'm a classically trained Fortan, Pascal & C programmer & had no experience with Python, so MS Copilot AI was used to translate my pseudo-code into Python 3 scripts. Learning how to use Matplotlib (it's a beast) was the only major roadblock that, at times, stumped Copilot! But I've learned a new programming language in the process, thanks to AI.

Python is a bloated & slow interpreted language, but it's great for quick 'n dirty science programming projects. Pycharm (it's free) was the IDE used & is highly recommended for developing large (1000+ line) Python projects. It also has an embedded AI (Jetbrains).

Apr 3, 2026

Reedited & posted my previous TCA articles "The Road to Radio—Part 5" (RM070) & "The Road to Radio—Part 6" (RM071) for your reading pleasure.

See Radio Magic.

Mar 16, 2026

Added support material for my next TCA (Mar-Apr 2026) column "The Road to Radio—Part 8" (RM073).

See Radio Magic.

Jan 07, 2026

Happy New Year! Added support material for my next TCA (Jan-Feb 2026) column "The Road to Radio—Part 7" (RM072).

See Radio Magic.

Nov 22, 2025

Reedited & posted my previous TCA article "The Road to Radio—Part 4" (RM069) for your reading pleasure.

See Radio Magic.

Oct 20, 2025

Added support material for my next TCA (Nov-Dec 2025)column "The Road to Radio—Part 6" (RM071).

See Radio Magic.

Oct 01, 2025

Reedited & posted my previous TCA article"The Road to Radio—Part 3" (RM068). The Napoleonic Wars are making this part of the journey precarious as we dodge shot and shell!

SeeRadio Magic.

Sep 12, 2025

Added support material for my next TCA (Sep-Oct 2025) column "The Road to Radio—Part 5" (RM070).

See Radio Magic.

Sadly, the last three aging analog NOAA weather satellites—that hobbyists faithfully received images from for decades—have finally reach the end of life & have been officially decomissioned.

Contact VA3ROM

THUNDER BAY WEATHER