The recent power outage and our awesome WebSDR supporters!

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Thank you everybody for your patience while the WebSDR was down. We are thrilled to have power back!! 🙂
But unfortunately we still have some line issue here and I’ve notified our local utility company. I’ve identified 2 noisy utility poles carrying high voltage that are extremely noisy – one of which I’m fairly certain has a cracked insulator arcing over. The noise isn’t too noticeable on a solid signal, but it’s way more challenging to pull a low power QSO out of the noise.
The noise is very noticeable across almost all bands – typical spark gap transmitter! Anyway, hopefully we get it fixed soon. 5 utility trucks showed up this afternoon but I’m not sure they’re still in the area.

Also, a SUPER BIG thank you to all those that donated “support funds”. You guys are great!! One thing I immediately used some of it for was a 15A line isolation transformer which (and I’ve tested this) helps reduce the noise from my generator enough that the hamshack APC UPS stays on without going to battery for “noise on line”. It’s basically a giant inductor cleaning up the genset output. That said, so long as we have internet, the WebSDR should stay up just fine!

A second project in the works coming out of the donations is a completely custom, from scratch, GPU based, wideband SDR that will handle 0-60 Mhz (with some room to spare). Similar to the one used at UoT, but built cleaner. Gig ethernet right into the server! I actually got most of the chips I needed as free samples! (Thank you Harry Edwards, our local Analog Devices/Linear sales engineer!!) That might take me some time – but it will get done. In the end (and if I can keep the cost low), I’d like to do a short production run and see if there’s any interest. I really think I can “git ‘er done” for under $100!

In the meantime (and I think I’ve said this elsewhere), I’m putting together a complete second server with another 7 dongles for specific VHF and UHF bands. That’s actually almost done. I just have to do some antenna re-wiring.

And if you’d like to hear my power line which is probably about to explode (LOL):
http://k3fef.com:8901?tune=5750

Have a great evening everybody!
73!
Michael – K3FEF