Hello gopherverse!

Since I last wrote I've mostly been just working and playing with radio stuff.

I got the USRP2 working with gr-osmosdr and thus all the other things, like
irridium, p25, etc etc,... which is fun. It's been great.
Furthermore, I also got a new module for it which will let me do RX and TX on 
the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, which should be useful for mucking with 
bluetooth/wifi/and all the other ism band crap, as well as maybe some 
satellite stuff (although the output is rather low power).

I also got another new radio, an IC-9700 which has VHF/UHF/SHF and a satellite
mode that will come in handy for all the satcom work.
One very nice thing about it is that it's computer controllable with a single
USB cable, it emulates 2 serial ports (one for CAT control and
one for digital voice data) which means i don't need to have a mess of audio 
cables and homebrew ptt interfaces to use it for digi modes, which
is nice. It also has an ethernet port so you can hook it up to the network. 
It uses the network for ntp time sync, it also runs a little telnet
daemon, but you can't do much over the telnet interface 
(looks to be running some type of RTOS shell: 

	> telnet 192.168.29.203
	IC-9700 # 
	exit	password	bell	clear	timeout	more	ver	save	restart

The LAN interface also lets you input/output audio and do CAT control (if you 
don't want to use the usb-serial iface)
Supposedly it does SDR as well, but all the software I've seen is payware only.
My guess is that it communicates over the LAN interface for that purpose as well 
(and of course it's all windows-only). - Getting that to work with gqrx is 
going to take some deeper digging. I couldn't find any details on it by 
googling, so I might have to do a bit of reverse engineering. 
I wonder if I can get anything useful out of the firmware update image.

Meanwhile I also made a crappy 2m yagi beam antenna out of alluminum L-channel,
I just soldered the connector onto it last night, I have yet to test it.

That's about it really.
Cya!