Over on Hackaday we've seen a post about Dan's (KB6NU) talk at the HOPE (Hackers of Planet Earth) conference about how Ham radio can be for hackers, and how hackers are the future of ham radio. Hackers in this context mean people who enjoy experimenting with electronics, building stuff, and understanding how things work.

Dan's slides have been uploaded on his blog. The slides emphasize how ham radio is not only about the traditional thought of making contacts which is probably in most people's heads, but also about hacking radios, antennas, microcontrollers, satellites, pico balloons, digital communications, GNU Radio and more. Dan mentions his goal is to promote ham radio to the much younger hacker crowd, where he believes it is underrepresented.

In one of her latest videos on YouTube, Sarah from the SignalsEverywhere channel shows how we can use a program called "IZ8BLY Phase 3D (AO-4) Satellite Decoder" to decode the 'Mid-Beacon' on the QO-100 satellite. QO-100 is a commercial geostationary communications satellite that also contains a popular transponder for amateur radio.

However, there is also an interesting beacon called the mid-beacon that can be decoded, which provides some information about the satellite. In the video, Sarah shows how this beacon can be decoded with the software from IZ8BLY. As QO-100 is only visible from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Sarah uses a WebSDR to receive the signal from the USA, then pipes the audio into the IZ8BLY decoder via Virtual Audio Cable.

Thank you to Ihar Yatsevich for writing in and sharing with us his open-source WSPR beacon project. The WSPR beacon consists of a custom PCB with ATMega328 microcontroller, GPS module, single transistor amplifier, and Si5351 with TCXO.

The result is a very simple, portable WSPR beacon that can be heard all over the world. However, it appears that no band filters are built into this, so you will need to add a bandpass filter for the WSPR band that you are using.

WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter) (pronounced "whisper") is an amateur radio digital HF mode designed to be decodable even if the signal is received with very low power. Because of this design, even low-power transmitters can be received from all over the world. It can also be used to help determine HF radio propagation conditions as WSPR reception reports are typically automatically uploaded to wsprnet.

If you are interested, Ihar has written about his project in more detail over on Reddit.