Hi Everybody,
I tend to usually only post if I have a new version of software ready for testing, or completed a specific project. Unfortunately this leads to long times before posts and then I get emails asking whether I’m still alive :p
I’ve decided to start a weekly post or so just chatting about what I’ve been up to in the shack the past week (depending on work obviously). The past week has been the first week back in the shack after the holidays.
I’m currently restoring my TX section of the QO-100 DATV station. At the end of 2023 we had some bad wind storms and the dish broke off and got damaged, and caused some damage in the process. I’ve since then gotten a new 1.6m dish, but the mountings are a bit different and also I’ve learned some lessons from the previous dish so I’m slowly setting it up on the ground first while I sort out the brackets/mounting for the new dish on the roof. Currently its setup and receiving without issues, and the plan for the coming week is to get it transmitting again.
I’ve got most of the bits ready but still need to get new POTY parts sourced and assembled. I’m taking my time with this as the previous setup was “temporary” and ended up staying that way for 2 years.
On the software side I’ve been pretty busy again on Open Tuner, or rather Open Tuner X which is the newer cross platform version. I’ve currently got a version running on Windows and Linux (Ubuntu). It should potentially work on a Mac as well, but I don’t currently have the hardware to try that out. There has been numerous challenges in this project and the nature of our experiments don’t make it easier. I’m documenting the journey on my BMAC Members page if you are interested in a more in depth discussion of the development journey of OTX (there are no downloads thus far, just sharing technical development info along the way).
I’ve been doing lots of testing on receiving various signals from the satellite in the evenings to test and so far I’m happy with how it’s progressing. Apart from making it cross platform the newer version also aims to fix various stability issues around displaying video and also to combine the various versions of Longmynd Client, Winterhill Client and Open Tuner into a single project so that all new features automatically apply to all. Here are some in progress screenshots of how its been getting along:
Initial testing on Ubuntu:
Running on Windows, you can see that the interface has a lot more options for organizing windows and layout due to using a different GUI library.
Gary (ZS6YI) and Ohan (ZS1SCI) were doing some VCC/H266 tests on the satellite and it was very helpful to me as well to sort out a few bugs:
Hope everyone has a great week ahead and stay safe!
73,
Tom