The Arduino microcontroller platform is probably one of the coolest things to happen to microcontroller hobbying in a long, long time. I'd seen them featured on Hack-A-Day performing various silly jobs for their programmer, I just had never taken the time to look into why people were using them or what made them unique. Last week (at the urging of Bre Pettis) I bought the Arduino Duemilanove. Wow.

First of all, the Arduino is an open, "free" (as in beer) platform running atop the plentiful (and cheap) Atmel AVR microcontroller line. The open nature of the platform allows each revision of the platform and IDE to improve. The current 2009 model is very easy to use. The documentation is pretty good and (imo, best of all) it uses the C programming language. This rounds off the learning curve quite a bit since I have more than a couple years working with C-style programming languages. Now I don't have to fool with BASIC or assembly. I really disliked the patty-cake approach that the BASIC Stamp provided (i hate BASIC), it's easy to get bogged down in assembly, and most C-compilers for microcontrollers are well over $200. The BASIC Stamp pales in comparison to the Arduino in just about every category. The Arduino is cheaper, faster, offers libraries and has a much wider audience than the Parallax BASIC Stamp. The PIC and standard AVRs have a relatively steep learning curve and is easy to get buried in the syntax.

The Arduino abstracts quite a bit for you, freeing you up to be creative and rapidly develop whatever interests you.

What's interested me lately is parsing the WWVB atomic clock signal from Ft. Collins, Colorado. Thanks to a C-Max CMMR-6P receiver chip that I got from DigiKey, I have a data stream going right into my Arduino. A little bit-twiddling and voila I now have the exact time and date. I dug up a couple of old HD44780 LCDs and now have the time displayed. Next up will be the addition of a Real Time Clock chip to hold the current time, maybe the addition of temperature and barometric pressure sensors and I'll have a neat little info station. More on that project some other time.

I also bought an Ethernet Shield so maybe I can share my future project(s) on the interwebs. There's so much that is possible, I can't recommend the little microcontroller highly enough. Check 'em out, they're only $30!

I recently added the KXAT1 antenna tuner kit to my Elecraft KX1. The antenna tuner allows me to automatically tune up any non-resonant antenna quickly. Construction took one evening. As usual, winding the toroids was perhaps the most tedious part, but "zen-like" while I was doing them (as I heard it put by someone). I did have trouble with the transformer. It can be tricky and I'll warn other kit builders to check out this thread if they have trouble. I also found some pictures from a japanese ham helpful, but I've since lost them. :(

After building and installing the tuner, I purchased 40ft of some "silky" 26AWG wire from TheWireMan as suggested by Elecraft. I cut the wire to give me two lengths. One length is 24ft and the other 16ft. The 24ft length is my radiating element and the 16ft acts as my ground. The tuner quickly finds a nice 1.1-1.0 match and gives me full KX1 power out (~4W). It makes for a very lightweight, field-portable antenna. I can also use my crappie poles to elevate one end if trees are unavailable.

I use a BNC-to-binding post that I purchased at EPO in Houston. While at EPO, I also picked up a small 12V 1.3Ah gel cell battery. The UB-1213 is about 3.8" x 1.7" x 2" and provides adequate power for portable QRP work. If I was going to operate for very long, I may go with a little larger capacity gel cell, but for now this makes a very lightweight and super portable setup that allows me to get one the air quickly.

About two weeks ago I completed construction of my Elecraft KX1 ham radio kit (serial #2182). It wasn't the easiest build I've done, but definitely the most fun. The purchase was funded almost totally by referral bonuses from Dreamhost. When anyone signs up for an account with my referral link I get a kick-back. I had let the bonuses build up over time and eventually had enough to cover the radio, but I digress.

The KX1 is a "trail-friendly", portable CW ham transceiver. There's plenty of other sites that will give you more detailed information about this gem of a radio. I finally got to use mine yesterday for more than a couple of minutes and I must say I totally love it. The receiver is great, the noise floor is low, the filters are tight, and the features are really packed into this tiny radio.

My antenna was a random wire made from speaker wire with one end elevated to 20' using a BnM Black Widow 20' Crappie Pole purchased at Bass Pro Shop in Shreveport, LA. The antenna sloped down to my BLTPlus antenna tuner which tuned the random wire without any problem. I had the tuner hooked into the KX1 with a short piece of BNC cable.

In short order I was copying stations on 7.030Mhz (40m QRP) and trying to copy the faster stations lower down on the band. I had to tighten up the filters because of the sheer number of signals I was able to pull in. I wasn't able to raise any station due to my diminished transmit power. (I was running off of internal AA batteries because my gel cell hadn't been charged in quite some time.) I was also impatient due to the strong wind, fading daylight and biting insects. I'm going to try again later this week and see if I can't finally capture that elusive QRP contact with this fun little radio.

update: I now have the KXAT1 auto tuner installed.

What a great idea! or I wish I'd thought of that!
Neodux's own bpaugh has setup a Texas BBQ review site: www.texasbestbarbecue.com. (What an excellent marriage of BBQ and computers!) Visitors to the site can search others' reviews or post their own. I'm sure Brent will be adding more features to help you plot out your next BBQ-hopping road trip, but this one's definitely going in my Bookmarks list.

Register for a login and start posting reviews for your favorite BBQ joints. I've already commented on a couple of my favorites.

Grendel sez: I forgot I even had a "meat" category! How appropriate.

Our good friend ltd posted a link to this story in The New York Times concerning how wireless carriers are essentially screwing over the consumer when it comes to the charge for text messages. While that point is more true than any carrier would like you to know, some of the details provided as a basis for this claim are incomplete.

But first, some nomenclature! The technical name for a text message is SMS (Short Message Service). It was designed and originally codified for use with GSM networks and devices during the 1980s. It consists of a short message, usually 160 total ASCII characters or less in length, transmitted between devices.

Another term thrown around is control channel. The control channel represents the very small piece of RF spectrum that is always active and serves as the, "always on" link between your device (usually a phone) and the network. All network information is transmitted over the control channel, including what RF channel to use and at which power setting to operate. Additionally, it is used to transmit paging messages, which is also why the control channel is often called the paging channel. Those page messages include alerts about incoming calls, outgoing calls from your device, incoming call waiting calls, network alerts, and other network/device communications. The other channel is called traffic channel, and is utilized when a call is made (either voice or data).

With that in mind, the central point of most of the articles published about this story is that SMS utilizes the control channel of the network, which does not require a traffic channel connection to be made that takes up valuable spectrum on a particular sector of a cell phone tower.

This point is flawed. Specifically, SMS messages are designed to roll over to the traffic channel any time the control channel is too busy to handle the additional traffic. This happens regularly in large cities during peak usage. Moreover, on non-US networks where the SMS size is greater than 160 characters, those messages are usually sent over a traffic channel. In CDMA, all devices have a setting that can force the device to send all SMS over the traffic channel if the carrier so chooses.

To be clear, most text messages are sent over the paging channel. But it is important to understand that SMS is not limited to use of the paging channel. The message must run through the SMS Concentrator (SMSC) and is then transmitted over wired networks, and often the Internet when sending messages from one network to the other. They are small, but they are utilizing network resources. And that does cost the carrier in terms of bandwidth and infrastructure. When that message has to be transmitted over the traffic channel, that message takes up a slot on that sector that cannot be used for other data calls or voice calls. That doesn't seem like a big issue when looking at a single sector, but if you weigh in the traffic on a national network, it does start to add up.

Now, carriers are of course screwing over the customer at any possible turn. Though the carriers do have some costs, the economies of scale they enjoy from a network infrastructure standpoint render those costs infinitesimal at best. So why have they doubled their rates over the last year? Simple: to pay for everything else.

Voice networks are not generating the revenue they used to. They used to make a lot of money off ringtones and pictures, and while that is still a viable market, it isn't what it used to be either. The real issue here is data usage. The amount of data used by subscribers is very significant, especially for EVDO Rev. A users on Verizon and Sprint. Both of those carriers have rolled out ridiculous limits on the service, such as Verizon's limit of 5GB per month for $60. Prior to these limits, they were virtually no gauges on data usage, and it was the same price. The huge margin they enjoy on SMS helped offset the loss of margin in voice and data services.

Another reason is that the consumer is willing to bear the cost of the service as offered. If people didn't use it, they would lower the cost, but text messaging is (lamentably) growing in popularity. That's a classic example of supply and demand at work.

Without a doubt, carriers are screwing over the consumer. They charge outrageous fees for services in order to maintain margins. That's right boys and girls, not revenue, but margins. The revenue continues to cover operational costs, but margin has been adversely impacted. A synonym for margin is profit.

They're all greedy jerkfaces. and I'm all for Congress investigating these companies for failing to compete, but the problem with that is that the only body we have responsible for this is Congress. I suppose time will tell, but I don't expect anything to come of it that favors the consumer. What say you?