Well there goes summer for a bit. What a difference from the last few days!.

Anyway, I've been playing about with Linux for a couple of days now. Don't really why I keep insisting on having another play when most of my software is Windows based anyway, but there you go.

The idea this time around was to have a Linux distro on a pen drive or two so I could boot up either Windows or Linux as the mood took me. Basically I was bored Hi!.

Simple right?. Ermmmm!.

Bought an 8 gig pen drive, which will host Ubuntu easily, so downloaded the iso via the program 'Universal-USB-Installer' . (Later I was to do it again via the program 'unetbootin-windows-494'). The drive was formatted FAT32 first by the way.

Rebooted the desk top to boot up from the pen drive, and all seemed ok. That is until the screen became covered in pretty colours and everything froze. This actually happened before when I tried a Ubuntu 11.10 disc that came with a Linux mag. Brilliant! I thought. Stitched again. Had to hard shut down and reboot to Windows.

Meanwhile I had been downloading 'Puppy Linux' in the same way on my notebook. (That would fit on a 1 gig pen drive I already had) That done I abandoning the desk top and tried rebooting the notebook to Linux. Although the pend drive showed in the bias and the alternative hard drive was dissabled, all I ended up with was an error message to the effect of no boot disc detected. Nice one!. The day is really going well Hi!.

I tried the 'Puppy' pen drive on the desk top, and it fired up and ran the distro ok. Mmmmm, what's wrong with the notebook?. Searched arounf for clues on the web, but couldn't find any. Logically the book should be seeing the pen drive as a boot disc.

Looking at the Properties on the onboard drive, I noticed it was formatted as ntfs, as opposed to fat32, which is on the pen drive. Thinks!. I wonder of that's the problem?. Never gone into the ins and outs of formatting before so just relying on logic here. Anyway, I tried formating the pen to ntfs. Naturally a snag arose. The pen drive was write protected. Would you Adam it! No switch on the pen either.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, after trawling the net again, I finally managed to un write protect it and re-installed 'Puppy'. Rebooted, and guess what. It still wasn't recognised, damn it!.

Tell you the truth, I can't now remember if it was the first install (fat32) or second (ntfs) that worked on the desk top. But I managed to waste a couple of days yet again, playing with Linux Hi!. I really wanted the choice on my notebook, not the desk top.

Probably the only way to install Linux on the notebook, is to use a ready made disc via an external drive. Anyway, that's it until the next time I get bored enough to try again.

Back to SSTV, Opera and Broadcast I guess.

Yet another mod to the desk last evening. The latest addition didn't help much, however.

Thought I would get the shortwave listening section as 'up together' as possible whilst I'm waiting for my ultimate set up, ie something on the lines of 'Excalibur'.

The PCR-1000 is driven by HRD on the notebook. Audio out, speaker wise, is via a NES10-2 MK3 Noise cancellation unit, which in turn goes to a pair of amplified speakers (Seen either side of note book).

Audio to the Heil phones is from radio via an MFJ tunable DSP filter (underneath the notebook). This bought at a Rally about ten years ago.

That takes care of the audio out. Now for noise in. After months of deliberation re do I take a chance on the MFJ-1025 Noise cancelling unit or not, I decided to go for it.

Spent most of the evening trying different combinations of the antennas I have here to try and get some indication of 'phasing' out some background noise. I must admit I did expect to see a deffinate indication of something happening at some point of the 'phasing' adjustment, but dissapointingly I found pretty well damn all happening.

The only benefit, I found, was an apparent pre amp effect of weak Broadcast signals. At no time was the background noise 'hash' reduced, whatever I did.

What I did notice, was that what I asssume is the resulting noise from a neighbour's plasma tv would dissapear when the unit was turnd on at certain adjustments. This interference would only show up in between signals (broadcast transmissions) however, so no actual benefit was found there either.

All in all I wished I had gone for the alternative kit I had my eye on in the emporium, ie the Comet CAT-300 or LDG AT200PRO ATU's.

Oh well, can't win 'em all as they say. I expect I'll have another play later today, but I don't hold out much hope of being overjoyed with what I did come away with. Life's a bitch, right Hi!.

That's interesting. I was just monitoring Richard (M0UOO/P) parked up next to the Solent near Southampton and realised he was also live streaming video fro his van.

Here's the screen shot from 'USTREAM'

SM5EEP is one of the few stations that I can decode digi sstv from.

Stone me!, look at all the VK's (Australia) coming in today using wspr. VK2UX VK2IJC VK4FLR VK7ZL VK4NFZ VK4ZBV VK4ZRL.