Adding an aftermarket amp and sub to my 2015 Ford F-150, trials and tribulations.

My New adventures into Ham Radios using SDR and my computer

A week ago I purchased a SDR dongle for some radio experiments. With the idea to maybe receive weather data or maybe plot airplanes. I got this little guy. A SDR made by adafruit. It was sold out on their website but linked to digikey who happened to have it. So far, I’ve been able to pick up regular local FM radio stations and the local NWS using CubicSDR on Linux.

So I don’t really use my big Dell Poweredge R710 much anymore aside from just using it for heating the room in the winter. It’s just too slow, data transfer wise, for me to enjoy it anymore. maybe it’s my config but idk. I don’t want to put any more money in it if it’s not gonna help with that. Maybe if I can get a few TB worth of SSDs for a low price and replace the two Sun F40 SSDs in the rear as they run too hot for what speeds I get out of them.

Where to start… First, the hugo site is stored in a git repository. I’m using Cloudflare’s Pages feature to host the generated code. My domain and DNS is managed there as well. You need a domain name of some sort. Buy one from places like godaddy or namecheap. I’m not going to cover that part. You can also register one with cloudflare. Then you’ll need to create an account at cloudflare where you’ll add your domain, obtain the nameservers to point your domain to, and once that’s done, you can start adding your dns records.

This marks the move to Hugo, replacing the old Octopress powered one that I just couldn’t bring it up to date. That, and I grew tired of the old theme. Time for a change.

It can drive a person mad…

and these are my thoughts…

Turns out, it’s bottom tier but has just enough features and fanless… :)

Reconstuction and Planning My home servers need some attention and this is my thought process. The plex box I’ve noticed that my plex server has been running low on ram after deciding to deploy radarr and sonarr to help organize things. Between a small handful of docker apps, plex, and a 4GB transcoding ramdisk; things feel a little tight. I had to add some extra swap space to avoid crashing and wind up using almost 4GB of the 5ish GB it has total; I added a 4GB swap on top of the 1gig or so the ubuntu installer added or maybe I did.