There do seem to be folk who actually read this / stumble across the blog perhaps through searching for random tech stuff in spite of me rarely promoting it I thought I’d post an update and what I hope to do with this space..
Unfortunately last year I had to deal with a family bereavement as well as health problems/tiredness/burnout; often after I have finished with work-related tasks (which I try and prioritise my energy towards as I am lucky to have a very understanding and accomodating employer) I am way too tired for much else, such as music/creative stuff such as photography and tech/electronic projects.
Also slowly realising I am getting older and have had to make some different lifestyle choices; much less partying and late nights compared to my nearly two decades as a raver, DJ, party promoter etc. All good fun but starting to get a bit much in the end.
This has slightly reduced my enthusiasm for “harder” electronic music, so I have temporarily removed the online radiostation VFR Europe from here (as I hadn’t got the time to curate, upload and schedule content, let alone work on my home studio) although it will hopefully return in the future.
The good news is I am slowly regaining energy as well as getting into a better routine of sleep patterns, eating etc than in my “youth” (I still don’t consider myself to be old!) and there are still things I get up to I can blog about so hope to be posting here more often.
I don’t do “social networks” much – I (re)tweet occasionally at @vfrmedia (when I get round to it will add the twitter sidebar) and have no desire to become a “social media star” so this blog isn’t going to contain the latest “hip” technology; but will reflect my diverse tech/engineering interests (including “retro” stuff such as my reignited interest in fountain pens) as well as nature/and environment related content….
Since putting this project on Youtube I’ve had a surprising amount of interest from across the world about the modifications I made to the original code from ON1ARF ( a radioamateur in België) to allow 1200 and 2400 bps pager transmissions as well as the default 512bps (I wanted to use the circuit to test commercial POCSAG pager receivers used at one site at my work).
the rest can then be used as normal – remember to alter the main Arduino sketch code to select these new bps rates.
NB: I am based in the UK/Europe; we always use wide deviation for POCSAG signals (although much other PMR traffic is now on narrow deviation).
If your country’s Communications Ministry requires narrow deviation to be used you will have to recalculate the modem settings using the spreadsheet referred to in the library files. (Its not as bad as it might seem; I had to use it to get the 1200/2400bps settings and I am not an RF nor a coding expert by any means)
I used the Japanese Multimax program + two obsolete XP PC’s. The PC also has a second soundcard connected to Ekiga on auto answer so dialling extension 338 will allow announcements to be made on the PA amp (it is connected to an input with auto vox volume ducking).
This PABX is now sold as an improved version with a better translated manual; but (as I have some Chinese ancestry on my fathers side) I prefer the “Chinglish” version 😀
gcc can compile either c source or assembler (.s extension) or even a combination of both.
As I had the assembler source, decided to experiment with altering the string data (I don’t yet know enough to do anything else).
it still worked 🙂
note how the addresses of the array pointer change, as the strings have grown by a few characters…
below is the original code
of course this is basic easy stuff; those strings are static/constant data and declared at compile time. if your code is dealing with strings that can change their length, it must always have sufficient free memory allocated to wherever the string data ends up, enough for the largest of the data. Otherwise you get a buffer overflow and your goose is cooked…
