astrid.tech

I went out on a walk with my extendable antenna to test the APRS signal. When I came home and looked at aprs.fi I got a grand total of... 2 APRS packets out. Turns out there is horrible I-gate and digipeater coverage in the Peninsula. The nearest digipeater is 11 miles away,… read more

APRS on the trip back for Thanksgiving

I decided to take my radio's APRS functionality for a spin on the ride home this Thanksgiving break. Unfortunately, there was horrible coverage along most of the trip. It seems I got picked up by the W6DXW-1 digipeater in King City, KI6ETL-10 in San Jose, and WA6TOW-2 in Pacifica… read more

Misadventures in configuring an AT-D878UV radio

Last week, because my Baofeng UV-5R's VHF band appeared to be broken and I wanted to experiment with APRS, I decided to splurge on a Anytone AT-D878UV radio. I received it from eBay today, and I was super eager to try it out! However, I ended up encountering a whole bunch of… read more

Testing a Raspberry Pi 4 with SPI TFT Screen

Today, my Raspberry Pi 4 and TFT/case bundle came in the mail, so I decided to give it a spin and see how it works. This will be used for an upcoming project that I will not spoil. Assembly The case came with 4 screws to screw the Pi into the bottom of the case. ![The Pi,… read more

My site now supports hidden content about NSFW topics! It's a bit janky, but if you scroll down to the footer there is a checkbox for that. Do NOT check that box if you are under 18, or are not willing to see such topics. Eventually I'll make a modal for this content, but I'm… read more

Can we turn smartphones into fax machines?

At today's CPARC meeting, I had an extremely stupid idea. If fax is just audio over phone, what if you had a smartphone app that: converted a PDF into a fax signal dialed a fax machine sent the fax signal over the phone call? But then it gets better. What if on the receiving… read more