Back To The Drawing Board

I've been doing a bit of restoration today.
Having played with HF radio and all its modes for the past year and a half I've decided that at heart I am a Shortwave Listener (SWL). I have no real interest in discussing what radio I have or collecting callsigns for competitions. I'm happy enough just listening to everyone else do that. I'm still keen on learning Morse Code up to a decent speed, I'm currently at 5wpm. It'd be nice to just listen to the dit's and dah's without resorting to using software.
I still have my radios around me so that I can listen in but the HF transceiver has been put in the loft until such time as I can find good reason to get it out.

In the meantime I restored the drawing board to its rightful place on my desk and I'll be getting the pencils, pens and paint out so that I can zone out doing my two favourite things, drawing and listening to the radio.
My brain is already calmer for the transformation of the desk.
I'll still report on SWL stuff but there should be an even sprinkling of art posts. For that matter I might just report odd stuff on this blog too.
I'm looking forward to the small but significant changes that you'll find here.

The Art of Noise with Max Headroom - Paranoimia (Official Video)

Once you've woken up...

Art Of Noise - Beat Box (Diversion One)

Sunday morning has never felt so automated.

MW Revival

This is my latest radio acquisition. I've been testing it for a couple of weeks and it's extremely good.
As a Shortwave Listener (SWL) I've neglected listening to Medium Wave (MW). In my mind it was a bit of a mish-mash of UK and European stations, I also remember the band being a bit sparsely populated. While this may be true during daylight hours at night the MW band comes into its own. The above object is a Tecsun AN-200 and is a tunable medium wave loop antenna.
It works as if by magic too with no batteries required nor a connection to the radio. One simply positions it at right angles to the internal antenna and tune it to the same frequency that the radio is tuned to. The way it works is that at the same frequency as the radio it amplifies the signal being recieved and the radio uses the amplified signal to tune into. what this means is that even weak MW signals can be tuned into with enough clarity to listen to.
It won't change the signal to noise ratio and in some cases will amplify noise too but on the other hand it can bring out some stations that would be inaudible without it.
The units are reasonably cheap too, I think I paid about £17 for mine. They're certainly worth the investment if you like to listen to MW or are interested in a little MW DXing.

Midlands Weather Animation

This is a bit of an experiment.
I was wondering if I could get an image sequence online. I obviously can.
The sequence comes from zyGrib and is transformed into a small mpeg file in OpenShot. Blogger seems happy to upload it so here it is.
The info shown is precipitation. The darker it gets the more rain we'll get.
If it works well I might just put up a weekly forecast on a dedicated page.