Hobbies or interests?

[Will]

I'd been thinking of posting this for a while, but with the lockdown and most of us stuck at home, perhaps it might be even more relevant?
We all have our interest in cars in common of course, but I thought it might be interesting to talk about any other hobbies or interests we might have. Even if it's something you don't currently do but would like to get into. Just thought it might spark off some interesting discussion and find some common ground among us. To kick off, I have a few interests aside of cars including playing the guitar, boating, astronomy and ham radio, plus a few other things I have an interest in and would like to try sometime.

 

[AmericanThunder]

I used to do radio scanning and had a really nice set of rigs and antennas at one point. But I had to make the choice financially, cars or radios and obviously cars won.
Cars for me along with exercise is about it, but I do plan on revising my youth with a bike at some point.

 

[Will]

Radio scanning is an interesting hobby and a sort of extension of ham radio in away. I've had a few scanners in the past and still have a discone antenna on my house. Shame you had to give it up, but I know what you mean, I have been in that position too.
Can you remember any of the gear you had?

 

[AmericanThunder]

AOR 8200 Mk II, AOR 8600, icom ic-01(?), and one other I don’t remember but it was very powerful in the filters. And an old Netgear scanner I used to use for acars decoding.
The AOR’s shared a very wideband antenna, an AOR SA7000. I used to get very impressive reception.

 

[AmericanThunder]

I might get back to it one day with another SA7000 and an AOR AR5000+3 with analyser.

 

[Will]

Excellent. Sounds like you were well into it, especially with decoding ACARS. I used to have a little PC program for decoding POCSAG transmissions for pagers. There is quite a lot of radio related software available now. But I haven't done much scanning for years apart from the accasional listen. My old Yaesu hand held ham radio has wideband receive. AOR scanners seem to be very good, but I have never owned one. The only desktop scanner I owned was an old Realistic PRO2005! Shows you how long ago that was lol. I've had a few hand held scanners including a Uniden Bearcat (can't remember the model) and a Yupiteru MVT7000. Was the Icom you had an IC-R1 maybe?

 

[AmericanThunder]

Yes, IC-R1 sounds familiar.

 

[TransAmDan]

Chores around the house is taking time from hobbies.

Done a few more tiles around the kitchen in Sponge Bob yellow.

My other hobbies is looking after the car club Web server, also programming. I program firmware, hardware and software also PCB design.

My recent thing i have been toying with is an FPGA with a processor in it, a Xilinx Zynq-020. This chip is on a development board. My aim is to make a display controller much like the Commodore Amiga but far more advanced. The board has various input and output pins. I may buy an old amiga joystick and modify it to work with this board and make some simple games with great display effects. I did like programming on the Amiga, it has a processor running at about 4Mhz, with 512kb of Ram. This board has 2 processors running at 666Mhz with 512Mb of DDR3 ram, the display controller will have multiple layers of transparency merged together in a pipeline at 300Mhz, it's going to be kick ass. Programming on the Amiga was in assembler, I'm actually programming hard ware on this board, so can create a chip inside this chip.

 

[saleen 192]

EBT =English bull terrier as some of you know I lost mine 5 years ago hoping to get another should enjoy his now home with land wildlife countryside. My wives lol pony no. 1 trans am no. 2

 

[TransAmDan]

Made more progress on the Zynq board last night. For the FPGA to talk to the DDR ram it needs to go via an AXI bus, this is a well known standard, but can be tricky to get things going well. Well last week got a stream of data burst pulling fro ram on the 150Mhz x 64 bit data bus to fill up a fifo to stream out to the HDMI port. Got a nice stable display, although its taken a long time to get to that point. Last night configured my data fetcher to do bank swaps on command from the processor. Double buffering is the way to do things as the processor and write to one screen and it cant be seen on the display until the bank swap happens.
So all going well so far. Plenty of things to do next...

 

[TransAmDan]

EBT =English bull terrier as some of you know I lost mine 5 years ago hoping to get another should enjoy his now home with land wildlife countryside. My wives lol pony no. 1 trans am no. 2

Its always hard loosing a pet, they are part of the family. Personally I get more upset when a pet goes than a relative. you should get another Darren, although they are hard to loose when they eventually go they can enjoy your journey of life until then. Don't forget to train him to pee on boots.

 

[saleen 192]

Lol you both won't forget that day in sytne Gardens mybe my EBT will return the experance but you better be wearing wellies

 

[renchero]

i got a lathe and a milling machine so can make a few ranchero bits and a lot of mess .