November 15, 2024

 

SSTV on the ISS transmissions scheduled to begin on Monday, November 11 at 11:50 UTC & end Monday, November 18 at 13:40 UTC. They will be paused during scheduled school contacts on November 15 &16. Downlink transmissions will be on 145.800 MHz mode PD180. See ARISS-USA News Blog.

 

Added new link to the awesome Online OCR website. If you have scanned (as graphics not plain text) PDF files & need to convert them to text then this is the free tool (50 pages) for you! It also has three subscription tiers if you need to convert more PDF pages. I have used it to convert 12th to 19th century scanned free PDF books, written in multiple languages, downloaded from various internet library archives. Those were converted by Online OCR to a Word docx (or plain text or other formats, if you prefer). Any non-English text were then translated by the commerical version of ChatGPT AI. As an Amateur Radio historian writing about radio history, I no longer have to try & figure out facts from nonsense often found on third-party websites that willy-nilly copy errors from other websites! Now I can read the actual words of the orginal authors written hundreds of years ago! Both the commerical versions of ChatGPT AI & Adobe AI can analyze text PDF files & created detailed anaylsis & summaries (saves me time & reading of 1000's of pages), which often reveals how much of what we think we know is "history" is actually someone's spin, confirmation bias, misinterpretation or misunderstanding! I use both AIs, but Adobe AI offers suggestions of the types of questions you can askeit based on the information provided in the PDF file (it can't do graphic PDF's, yet, but OCR ability should be added in the near future). ChatGPT offers three verisons of itself plus the Google Gemini & Claude AIs. But I find they get hopelessly "confused" by all the stale, erroneous or conflicting data that comes along with the actual facts located on websites in cyberspace. They can't read or analyze online documents & they can't tell fact from fiction. You have to do that for them & this can take several passes before the AIs learn enough from you about what to keep or ignore during your online session.

 

 

 

The April 8 North American total solar eclipse will soon be here, but the odds of having a clear sky view in my part of Ontario aren't in my favour, according to the climate records.

 

Fortunately, there're also several more radio monitoring options available. Here's a list of new ones published in the recent ARRL Newsletter:

 

Solar Eclipse QSO Party (SEQP)

 

Gladstone Signal Spotting Challenge

 

Medium Wave Recording Event

 

Time Delay of Arrival (TDOA) Event

 

Grape 1 Doppler Receiver Project