Over the weekend, I followed this guide to make a 2 meter tape measure antenna. Here is what I ended up with:  The build was fairly simple and the antenna seems to be working okay. I’ve got it hooked directly to a Baofeng UV-5R5 and I’ve been able to pick up a few more repeaters than usual. I’ve got no way to test the SWR on it at the moment so I don’t know how well it actually works.

A few months ago, I found the soldersmoke podcast and started hearing about the SI5351 clock generator board. I found AK2B’s site and followed this post and this is what I ended up with.  Now I just need to figure out what I can do with this thing. Being completely new to amateur radio I am slowly learning all the bits and pieces. Hopefully I’ll have my own home built radio sometime soon.

I finally picked up some cheap fpv goggles. I went with the quanum v1 goggles. They were too cheap to pass up and I’m still not sold on the whole fpv thing. I still need to finish my good quadcopter build. I’ll post some info on it later, but for now I’ve got a quad that I slapped together with some spare parts. There is no pdb or anything, just directly soldered wires with a cheap flip32 flight controller.

Well, its been a long time since I last wrote a blog post. I’ve set up a new site and moved over a few old posts, but I can’t seem to find the time to write up anything I’ve been working on. A few weeks ago I passed my Technician, General, and Amateur Extra exams, so I am now officially a licensed amateur radio operator. I still don’t have a radio, but I did pick up two of the CW Pixie kits and built a 40m dipole.

Edit: There are now better ways to get kodi on a fire tv stick by using adbFire. During last week’s Amazon Prime Day, I picked up a Fire TV HDMI stick for cheap. As far as media players go, I’ve got an HTPC running Kodi, an Asus Oplay Air, a Chromecast, and a Roku stick. For my use case, I mostly stream my own videos from a network share and for the longest time, the Oplay was the best media player for that.

I picked up a Fire TV HDMI stick during last week’s Amazon Prime Day and the built in streaming/casting wasn’t working with my Nexus 6. It turns out the Nexus 6 doesn’t have miracast enabled by default, but it can be enabled in the android build.prop file. To enable miracast you must be root. You can then edit /system/build.prop using either a text editor or a build.prop editor app. Add persist.