Tag: digital

mnicmp: the DECwriter lives again!

I just made and uploaded this to FontLibrary: mnicmp.

This is meant more as an exercise in learning FontForge‘s programming back-end, and definitely showed me that FontForge is incredibly powerful. After the learning comes silliness, so I ended up turning the dots into something like:

I learned you really have to consider a dot-matrix font to be an array of points rather than a glyph, because otherwise you get the dots coming out the wrong sort of oval:

Blue font has been italicized as a whole, while the black dots were done properly

You don’t want to know what it did to the stars …

Local archive: mnicmp.zip

My first FreeDV QSO

FreeDV Digital Voice QSO in ProgressFreeDV is a fully open digital voice protocol; unlike DMR, D-STAR and the rest, there are no patents tying it down. It uses very little bandwidth for voice. I just had my first QSO (thanks K5WH in Texas!) using this mode. While it does make voices sound a little robotic, there’s no static, no hiss, nothing unwanted. That’s what always put me off HF voice: trying to work out who is saying what through all the noise. FreeDV fixes that.

It’s quite a new protocol, so you don’t hear it much on the air yet. I hope to be making some more noise with it soon.

gone digital

I got rid of nearly all my film camera equipment yesterday. Digital was calling, and I was barely using what I had. To Burlington Camera, I traded in:

  • Cosina-Voigtländer Bessa R 35mm rangefinder outfit, comprising:
    • Bessa R 35mm rangefinder body
    • Ultron Aspherical 35mm-f/1.7 lens
    • Nokton Aspherical 50mm-f/1.5 lens
    • Apo Lanthar 90mm-f/3.5 lens
  • Pentacon Six TL outfit, comprising:
    • Pentacon Six TL MF SLR body
    • Carl Zeiss Jena Biometar MC 80mm-f/2.8 Lens
    • Pentacon Six TL WLF
    • Pentacon Six TL metered prism
    • Pentacon Auto extension tubes
  • Voigtländer Vitoret 110EL 110 camera outfit with matching V200 flash
  • Yashica Yashicamat MF TLR
  • Yashica Electro 35 GTN 35mm rangefinder camera
  • Olympus Stylus Epic Infiniti 35mm AF compact
  • Metz 20BC6 Flash

…  all towards a Nikon D70. I like it a lot.

There is some film equipment I kept, like the amazing 15mm f/4.5 SW Heliar lens. I even bought a Bessa L body from Cameraquest so I could keep using it with my Kaidan KiWi panoramic head. I also kept the Zero Image pinhole camera, as it’s too nice to sell.

Coming back from the camera store, the taxi driver was an artist fae Balornock. I guess there’s a lot more people fae Balornock than in Balornock.