Author: G0JPS

A brief look at the Morserino32

I saw this intriguing new kit mentioned by someone on Twitter, and decided to take a closer look.
So a quick email to Wili OE1WKL in Austria, and one affordable PayPal payment later, I was waiting and within a week a small package arrived.
The kit comes as a couple of boards with SMD components pre-populated, all I had to do was solder on the speaker, connectors, and controls. A small LiPo battery was sourced from a toy helicopter I no longer used; the total assembly took less than an hour from start to finish, following the excellent build instructions downloaded from the internet.
So, what does it do then? Well, first off you get a 5 to 50wpm keyer that connects to a radio. The morserino also has audio in and can act as a decoder; audio out so it can be used on iCW or similar internet based morse chat systems. A separate headphones socket so it can be used for quiet practice. You can use your own single or dual-lever paddles, or use the supplied capacitive touch paddles (which I find I quite like, having made a couple of QSOs on air using them).
But the fun doesn’t stop there; also built in are some learning modes too, such as a Koch trainer, random groups, Q codes, common words, and a fun ‘echo’ game where the keyed sends you something and you have to send it back (this can also have a RUFZ-like setting where it gets faster or slower depending on your errors).
Oh and a couple more surprises; it has built-in wifi and you can update the firmware or upload your own text files to it using nothing more than a simple web browser – no more ‘windows only’ or hunting for obscure drivers nonsense, this is pure cross-platform genius.
And the final surprise – if you’re with (or near) someone else who has one of these, you can have an over-the-air QSO with them. Wait, what? Yes – there’s even a built-in transceiver which uses LoRa (long range WiFi in the ISM band). I’ve put a few CQ’s out, but no replies yet…

In summary, a great kit to build and use, and support is excellent with an online user group. It’s well worth a look; check out Willi’s page at http://www.morserino.info/morserino-32.html

Chris, G0JPS Lid #156

The Lidspotter has now been completely rebuilt from the ground up.
Some issues were noticed where spots got delayed, and reappeared a couple of hours after they should have been posted. This turned out to be a delay in the email part of the chain (Hamalert was doing the spotting, and emailing the spots to the script which formatted and posted out to the social media channels).
After the rebuild (and a bit of debugging), the spotter is now reading a direct feed from the RBN, so our spots now appear almost immediately, rather than the about-a-minute delay as was.
The other improvement is it now reads the Lids_CW member page to directly grab the callsign filter list, so any new members are automatically added to the list when Michael updates the site. Previously I had to notice a tweet, and edit two separate lists on different services; now it’s just a case of sit back and watch!

Oh, and the last bit of good news, Twitter are allowing us to post again!

73 and see you on the air
Chris, G0JPS

Twitter hasn’t been very nice lately; apart from the constant spamming of adverts all over the place, they have now also severely restricted the ability of bots and scripts to make automated posts, which broke the lidspotter. The program was still happily running, it just couldn’t post. A temporary fix was made (using a very shoddily coded web page), but the bandwidth of a £1.20 per month virtual server isn’t huge.

Enter Telegram. A free, secure messaging app that’s cross platform. I’ve been using it to communicate within a gaming clan for quite some time, and one of the channels we use is run as a news feed, which seemed ideal. So I got some setup details from the chap that made it, and created a LidSpotter version which runs smoothly and faster than twitter’s ever did (and we’ve discovered the alerts can even be made to appear on smart watches, too!). This feed can be found at t.me/LidSpotters

And now, Mastodon as well. I’d heard of it, but never really looked until Simon G0FCU mentioned it on twitter; so I had a chat with the admin of the mastodon.radio instance

and got permission to play – and, on the first attempt, it works! Just create a free account, and search for @LidSpotBot then follow it.

I’m sure there will be some snags along the way, Mastodon is a new open-source network and is still evolving, but it looks good.

Hope to see more members on there.