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I love my Baofeng. Not because it’s cheap. No, I love it because it’s smart and so different from my FT-60 that I sold some time ago. The FT-60 is considered by many to be superior to the Baofeng. I’m convinced that these people have never used both. NiMH battery technology is outdated. The FT-60 drains the battery completely, after that no reception is possible anymore. A Baofeng disables transmit so you can continue receiving some some time, that’s smart… I know that this is required in order to save the Lithium-Ion battery, but it would benefit NiMH as well. Baofeng’s two channel reception is very practical.Read More →

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In: Amateur Radio
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After updating my FT100, see FT100 MLU, Murphy attacked. The PTT switch inside the mike started to act weird, just as I was on holiday and operating /A from Denmark. Of course, I didn’t expect a switch failure and thought it was RF getting into the transceiver. After some Internet research it became clear that this PTT switch failure is a common FT100 failure. One solution is to order a replacement switch from Yaesu, which apparently is still possible (at least in the US). Alternatively you can buy a new mike from Ebay for little money and upgrade to DTMF along the way (the FT100Read More →

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In: Computer

I recently followed a discussion on booting from a Time Machine volume. One participant was 100% sure that when the Time Machine volume did not contain a separate, bootable partition, booting from the volume was not possible. This is wrong. Misunderstanding this might have big consequences, after all we are talking about backups here. The OSX bootloader supports booting from files, when the file is stored in a known filesystem, i.e. the bootloader must understand the filesystem.  This file is then handled as a partition containing a filesystem. Time Machine stores OSX’s hidden recovery partition as a file on the Time Machine volume. When running Time Machine for the first time, aRead More →

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In: Audio
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The Apogee MiniDAC is a wonderful converter. But how does it work? Well, first of all, you can’t download the schematics from the net. So how it exactly works I don’t know. But looking at the components inside reveals at least some info. Therefor my guess is as follows: 1. Two times CS8416 input digital receiver/PLL chip. Looking at the number of inputs and print layout, I guess the two units are needed because of the number of inputs to be switched. 2. Wavefront AL1402, that’s an ADAT receiver chip which decodes the 8 channel (optical) ADAT stream into 4 stereo pairs. 3. Xilink Spartan XC2S50Read More →