Here we go:
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Posts Tagged windows
SdrDx 2.16a for OS X and Windows
2016 Jan
2016
18
RFSPACE SDR-IQ and Mac OSX 10.5.8 Leopard
2011 Jan
2011
6
No Mac support as yet, but… install VMWARE and XP, and it works great. I’m listening to Radio Havana on 6050 KHz right now on a three foot piece of wire. Tomorrow, when I can buy a length of coax, I’ll hook it up to my shortwave antenna, which is out of reach of my computer desktop right now. I expect to have a lot of fun.
I tried it with Parallels 2, but Parallels screws up the USB connection and it just won’t fly. It was less expensive to “cross-grade” to VMWARE than it was to buy a Parallels “support incident”, so Parallels just lost a paying customer. Funny how that works. VMWARE imported my Parallels XP VM without comment, and the only catch was that XP bitched at me about having to be re-registered because “my hardware had changed significantly.” Oops. Turns out that wasn’t a problem… re-registration went smoothly, just a couple clicks and it was done. One of the benefits of having a legal copy, I presume.
Anyway, just thought it’d be worth noting for Mac users that you too can have an SDR instrument on your desktop. You do have to run it inside a Windows VM, but that doesn’t seem to be much of an inconvenience.
On the left, you see WinRadio; it has a lot fewer features than SpectraVue, but on the other hand, it acts a good deal more like a radio than a spectrum analysis tool. It doesn’t seem to have any system for managing memories, but that may just be new-user unfamiliarity. I confess to not (yet) having RTFM. I will update this post if I learn otherwise.
Some benefits WinRadio brings to the desktop are ECSS reception for standard SW and AM signals, and DRM (Digital Radio Mondial), a digital reception mode. ECSS works very well indeed; DRM is… well, it’s interesting. Haven’t got that figured out yet. I downloaded the DReaM decoder, and tuned in to some DRM broadcasts, but haven’t got anything to report other than no success.
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Deb's Stained Glass work
2008 Jun
2008
16
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Deb and I bought a church in mid 2006 and are working to turn it into a home.
It was a “Nazarene” church, and as part of their outlook, there wasn’t anything fancy about the building. No stained glass, per se, just some yellow “rippled” glass panes that probably served to keep the congregation focused on the proceedings inside.
Well, early in 2007, Glasgow experienced a hailstorm with baseball sized hail, and it took out all of our west-facing windows. And I mean completely. If you’d like your windows broken, three or four minutes of consistently baseball sized hail has few peers in efficiency. So anyway, we boarded ‘em up, insulated them, and resolved to get to them later.
Well, later is here, at least, for our bathroom spa window, it is. Deb spent two months of evenings down in her workshop putting together that beauty; I spent three days learning how to frame it into the old window casement, and what you see here is how the window looks inside the spa by the bath (our bath is in its own room, separate from the other fixtures.) You can see the tree branches outside just a little bit during the day, but it isn’t distracting:
We plan to do all the windows this way. Other than the huge amount of time, which Deb seems more than willing to contribute, this is a very inexpensive way to do windows. We’re looking at about $100 per window for double layered, sealed single acrylic panes, including all the woodwork, which I do. The building has 13 huge windows, most are about six feet tall; we’ll have all manner of opportunity to do cool things, and at very little expense compared to standard window treatments.
