"Tuk-tuk". They're powered by little 125cc two-stroke engines that ought to be familiar to any other suitably crabbit auld bugger that remembers the Villiers unit construction ones.

What if you run your VoIP phones over a microwave link? Just throw up a couple of Orthogons, hook your phones up and have at it! :-D <ducks below the parapet again>

In a previous job I looked after 460MHz (bloody longwave bollocks) comms gear on the roof of the library at the Kings buildings site. My first choice was alongside EDN but apparently mobile phone kit

No, but I'll tell you a funny story. A mate of mine darn sarf had just changed all the bulbs in his new house from incandescents to compact florries, reasoning that the lower power consumption would s

Massive network latency somewhere between you and the hotel's switch, sufficient for the echo canceller to drop its guts. This stuff mostly all runs over IP connections now, and if they are suitably m

That's going to be smaller than a perfectly ordinary TV aerial, isn't it?

I might be able to lay my hands on some old Westica MiniMux kit running on 1.4GHz, but I don't know an awful lot about it yet. Apparently it goes down to 1350MHz. Does anyone know if it's possible to

ITYM "massively defrauded by the US government". The US company that Ferranti bought, International Signal and Control, was essentially a front for the CIA and used to launder drug money and sell ille

Some sort of chat server? Hmmm, the sort of thing that aprsd would be ideal for, right? It's even got filtering so you can cut the noise down a bit by only listening for specific areas.

Please don't use the word "hack" like that, either. Radio amateurs ought to know better, since they were the original hackers. The group hasn't been "hacked". Someone has sent a spammy message, possib

Drop me your address off-list. -- Gordonjcp MM0YEQ

I have a ridiculous amount of SGA6486 MMICs. The datasheet is here: http://www.rfmd.com/CS/Documents/SGA-6486DS.pdf I haven't really played with them yet (I'm waiting for some suitable SMD capacitors

If you've got the position data, drawing it on a map is trivial. Have a look at OpenStreetMap. Google Maps is pretty poor stuff by comparison ;-) Now, if you can get me a feed of the data I can see ab

Okay, it shows three for Elgin. There are definitely more than three ;-) There are none at all shown on the Isle of Skye, even zooming into locations where I *know* there are mobile phone masts - one

Either it doesn't like Firefox, or apparently there are no mobile phone masts of any kind in the north of Scotland... Gordon MM0YEQ

I have the big brother of the Delta 44, the Delta 1010LT. That works pretty well with the Softrock kits, although it's slightly overkill. I mostly use it for audio work, but it's handy for the SDR. Fo

A discarded Sky dish with a wee wooden block to hold the dongle of your choice in place of the LNB could work well there, particularly for 3G coverage on 2.1GHz - it certainly works wonders for wifi a

I can host it if you want - either mail it to me offlist or email me for sftp login details. Saves all this tedious mucking around with splitting files. Gordon

We're really desperate for people to give interesting talks at our club but I suspect getting you to haul everything up to Glasgow would be unreasonable, especially without expenses. Up here we have t

You're still waiting, because not everyone sits watching their email constantly ;-) Some of us have lives away from the computer, and 20m has been pretty active lately - got to make the best of it in