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Years ago I inherited two Loral Coax switches from a friend. I have been trying to find a good use for them for a while now. Like so many older pieces of equipment, there is not a lot of documentation available for it. Thankfully after spending some time searching the internet, I was able to…

Some of you may recall my earlier post about a “homemade” 12VDC power cable for clean cab locomotive radios. I have since gone further and developed and 3D printed a plug for these radios. A few people have reached out to me about reproducing them. I have decided to offer them for $25.00 shipped. USPS…

Ever woken up in the night to that familiar buzz of a stalled electric motor? Perhaps the power got knocked out by a storm as you slept and quietly overfilled the dark hole in your basement floor? Well, I know plenty of people that have had that happen. Me being me, I decided to come…

The Raspberry Pi board is an amazing platform. Through the creativity and experimentation of many people, endless possibilities await. One of the coolest features, to me, is the fact that the Pi can transmit radio signals using one of its 40 GPIO pins. I have tried this with a Pi 2B, 3B, and 3B+. I…

One of my good friends suggested I make a device to automate the lifting and lowering of the plow blade on his ATV (and mine). Most ATV plows use the winch attached to the front of the vehicle that lifts (pull in) and lowers (let out) the plow. To control the winch there is usually…

It’s waterfowl season! So what does that mean? Maybe a little work on the old jon boat? Well, yes it does. This year I upgraded a number of things on my boat. The one I am going to talk about today is the lighting. When I upgraded the motor from my little 4HP Johnson to…

What is a clean cab radio? It is a two-way VHF radio that fits the standard AAR (American Association of Railroads) locomotive control stand. Most of the stand have a standard size opening to hold the radio. There are a number of manufactures that have produced these radios in the past (Motorola, GE, Ritron, JEM,…

I have been falling way behind with the project blog. Hopefully some new content will be coming soon. I have, however, been working on projects and will talk about one in partciular in this post. I started expanding my skill set of Arduino boards around two years ago. Originally, my projects did simple things. Many…

As some of you may have recall, in the past I wrote up a simple radio recording setup for VHF using a Pi and Motorola Maxtrac Radios. In the spirit of improvement, I decided to try it with a RTL-SDR Dongle. In recent years these inexpensive USB dongles have taken off in popularity. I chose…

For duck hunting I often use my passed down Alumacraft 14 foot jon boat. A few years I purchased a small 4 HP Johnson for pushing my NuCanoe around in the swamp and eventually I started using it on the jon boat. This particular motor has the weedless drive, and is a great little runner.…