April AI6YM Project Updates

I had two goals for this month. 1) Ship the dang FoxSniffer. 2) Send this email on time. I accomplished both!

If you’ve been thinking about pre-ordering FoxSniffer now’s the time, they’re $50 off right now but they’ll be full-price tomorrow.

Before we get into the project updates let’s talk about upcoming events.

• FDIM & Hamvention are next month. I’ll be at FDIM as a vendor, Hamvention wandering in the crowd. Eyeball QSOs are always welcome.
• I tried fitting in SeaPAC but couldn’t make it work this year. Maybe next year, hope everyone has a great time - I’m sending some goodies for the raffle.
• If you’re going to DefCon 34 you might see some of my gear at Ham Radio Village, I’m going to try to be there too.
• Pacificon is in October. I’ll be there as a vendor, a volunteer, and a speaker - presenting a project I haven’t finished yet.

As always feel free to share this email, if you post part of it somewhere just include a link back to my site.

FoxSniffer Update

The first pre-orders have shipped! I’m building and testing each one so it’ll take me a few more days to get through the whole batch. Pre-orders from my old site and Pacificon (order numbers in the 3000s) will ship first. I expect to get through orders on the new site up to 1029, but that assumes a low defect rate in this run. If your order number is > 3000 or <= 1029 you’ll receive a shipping notice or an apology next week.

The first batch is going out with 3D printed plastics. Like I said in my last update - I’m happy to send out production plastics as an upgrade to anyone who wants them. The print quality is really nice on the enclosures but the text on the buttons is a little messy.

There’s a full write up to do on this project, just the bring-up process alone deserves a post. I’ll give you the short version for now - everything pretty much just worked. I made some small mistakes (backwards LEDs again) and I’m not too happy with performance above 400MHz. Talking to a few folks that placed pre-orders it seems I’m the only one that cares about that so I won’t delay shipping orders just so I can tinker with filters. For anyone that does care about UHF performance I’m happy to upgrade your FoxSniffer once I have a good solution.

The software is working well, there’s even a setting menu and programmable memory. There’s some tuning left to do but applying software updates is easy. The circuitry can do USB memory programming and AM/FM demod but software for that will come later.

You’ll see details added to the FoxSniffer page shortly, including a user manual. I greatly appreciate everyone’s patience with me on this project. It’s been a wild ride!

T42 Mini Update

I’m not going to have this project ready by FDIM. FoxSniffer took all my free time. One day maybe I can do this for a living but today is not that day. I’ll finish shipping the FoxSniffers this week, take a good nap, and then the T42 Mini will be my focus.

The key components are done, it’s layout, testing, and sourcing parts now. If I’m very, very lucky I’ll have a prototype to show off at FDIM.

Request for Comment

My new site doesn’t have a comment section, on the old site I got 100 spam comments for every real one so it wasn’t exactly high on my priority list. I’d still like to foster community around my projects.

Any opinions on how? The major options I see are:

• Integrate a comment system and run it myself. This is well within my technical capabilities but it means you have to sign up for something and I have to keep the spam bots out.
• Run threads, communities, whatever on a social media site. You won’t catch me dead on Facebook or X but I could tolerate Reddit.
• Run something on a decentralized network like BlueSky or Mastadon. I’m a big fan of decentralized systems and privacy on the internet, but it seems fairly few people use these networks.
• Setup something like Discord or Groups.io. Groups.io would make it possible to create multiple lists, for folks that want to hear about software updates on a product they own without having to hear about everything else.

What do ya’ll think?

73, AI6YM