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My private repos would contaminate the Copilot LLM for life. Haha.

Have fun Microsoft getting that foul apple out of your system again.

Catbert59on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

GitLab is great - but super fat. The performance will suffer heavily if you don't give it the resources it wants (all RAM you can find, lol).

If you only need Git plus project tracking Gitea is super mature. It runs happily on small VPS.

Catbert59on Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub

I always have a private Gitea instance running for my private projects. VPS are cheap in 2025 and it doesn't eat much resources.

Catbert59on Testing Bitchat at the music festival

I work with raw LoRa a lot and it works great.

Reticulum is pretty much a one-man-show that got a lot of press. Never saw a real network with that thing.

Meshtastic is great for communication with up to two hops. But it can become very unreliable if people use configuring wrong roles like Router/etc. in wrong position.

Catbert59on Show HN: Engineering.fyi – Search across tech engineering blogs in one place

First thing I saw was an annoying Cloudflare captcha.. ugh

Catbert59on Testing Bitchat at the music festival

Meshtastic works great up to two hops.

Catbert59on Testing Bitchat at the music festival

I worked with BLE Meshing in industry products. With a lot of hops and a bit of traffic it becomes very unreliable quickly.

Introducing something like TCP o top most likely will kill it because of the network load over a very thin and unreliable connections just causes more mess.

Addendum: this "experience" is a few years old. Maybe newer BLE revisions improved this.

Catbert59on Windows XP Professional

Will call our IT support tomorrow and start this as a full screen.

That will be fun in the office :-)

Catbert59on The 1090 Megahertz Riddle: A Guide to Decoding Mode S and ADS-B Signals

That was a huge drama during Covid-19 as weather forecasters heavily rely on these automated weather reports for feeding their models. In Europe there are also special equipped Airbus/Boeings for collecting WMO-grade weather data while flying their standard routes - they were mostly grounded during the pandemic.

They partially replaced the data with the experimental Aeolus satellite which made its data into the productive forecasts within months due to their high quality.

Catbert59on The 1090 Megahertz Riddle: A Guide to Decoding Mode S and ADS-B Signals

https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005009311806479.html

Plus

https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005009237905498.html

Maybe you can find an antenna with both integrated.

Catbert59on The 1090 Megahertz Riddle: A Guide to Decoding Mode S and ADS-B Signals

Also very interesting is the data which can be extracted from ADS-B.

There have been several attempts from meterologists to extract wind data from through the actual and target direction values.

Other sites use it to locate GPS-jammed areas because ADS-B can indicate when the reception fails (but still is able to transmit its position due to inertial fallback mechanisms).

Catbert59on The 1090 Megahertz Riddle: A Guide to Decoding Mode S and ADS-B Signals

Better also add a SAW bandpass and a properly designed amplification (LNA) stage to this.

The RTL-SDRs are great - but heavily limited in their dynamics (8 Bit ADC). They get deaf quickly if you are located next to strong transmitters like FM/DAB/DVB-T/etc.

Aliexpress has cheap antennas that include all of this.

Catbert59on $83B Wasted: Showing Up at the Airport 3 Hours Before Your Flight

Only works with the "premium" airlines.. usually not with the budget ones.

Catbert59on $83B Wasted: Showing up at the airport 3 hours before your flight

In Germany as soon the Deutsche Bahn is somehow involved you better make it even longer than 3h as soon as the long distance train network is involved.

The punctuality of the trains is incredibly poor. And the chances are above zero to end up at a train station in the middle of bmfck nowhere.

Not my first time spending a night at Frankfurt Airport. But not within the comfy sterile zone after check-in... more like sitting in front of the small overpriced 24/7 supermarket.

Catbert59on Ubiquiti launches UniFi OS Server for self-hosting

They support ONVIF now in their backend.

Catbert59on Matrix Is Not Safe for EU Data Privacy?

A lot of people metion "Reticulum" in this regard. But that's a one-man-show project.

The only project that got some serious momentum is Meshtastic. That's decentralized LoRa with flooding/next-hop-routing that can be backed with MQTT.

I think a huge step forward would be a decentralized BLE LE (a super robust Bluetooth Low Energy mode) Mesh based application as it can be used on smartphones.

Catbert59on Matrix Is Not Safe for EU Data Privacy?

DPI firewalled states like China show that they are extremely effective in adapting to new protocols.

Having a second diverse link that is cheap to setup would be an alternative.

Catbert59on Matrix Is Not Safe for EU Data Privacy?

The only safe communication is decentralized communication, capable of multiplexing multiple techniques (IP, BLE, LoRa, etc.) under the hood of cryptographically safe routing and messaging algorithms that work over unreliable links.

Maybe even with small-range offline radio mailboxes so you can deliver and gather messages from/to highly suppressed people which then can be send back into the "online" network automatically without further interaction.

Catbert59on Maintaining weight loss

I prefer calling it "Hidden sugar is poison for your soul and body".

If you are aware of it you can avoid it.

Catbert59on Show HN: A High-Altitude Low-Power Flight Computer for High-Altitude Balloons

The Semtech modems have several modulation modes which can be configured in great detail.. the datasheet is quite verbose about them.

The latest generation of chips (AFAIR not yet released) integrated a mode that allows them to receive on all LoRa speed grades in parallel. Bit like the existing LoRaWAN basestation ICs.

I remember reading a datasheet that one (already released chip) is also able to work on 144-146MHz. But that's not what standard Asia (ESP32+LoRa modules) offer. TTGO has AFAIR recently released a super new board that allows this band.

Catbert59on Show HN: A High-Altitude Low-Power Flight Computer for High-Altitude Balloons

LoRa is absurdly robust.

Someone maxed out the ranging mechanism of the Semtech SX1280 with a 5dBi rubber antenna. He reached 60km with LoS. And there's a report of 90km in a ballooning project.

(https://github.com/StuartsProjects/SX1280_Testing)

Catbert59on Show HN: A High-Altitude Low-Power Flight Computer for High-Altitude Balloons

I have at least 10 of them in my lab :-) Thanks for the hint!

Catbert59on Show HN: A High-Altitude Low-Power Flight Computer for High-Altitude Balloons

Interesting!

I'm thinking of building a small PCB for ballooning too.

But I most likely will shift the design decisions a bit:

- 2.4GHz LoRa for high-rate telemetry as reciving can recycle Wifi-Antenna gear. The Semtech SX128x chips are easy to handle.

- Low rate telemetry on 433MHz with a SX12xx or SX17xx.

In terms of chips most likely something around the STM32U series.

The company ePeas has very interesting energy harvesters. Not super cheap - but still affordable. They have special profiles for supercaps which are very resistant against freezing.

Catbert59on Low cost mmWave 60GHz radar sensor for advanced sensing

https://github.com/dm5tt/LD1125H_ReverseEngineering here.

Catbert59on Low cost mmWave 60GHz radar sensor for advanced sensing

60 GHz is pretty much Line of Sight. If you can't see it - it will not work.

Catbert59on Smallest particulate matter air quality sensor for ultra-compact IoT devices

The problem is not condensed water. This can be solved with heating.

It's that fog is being detected as a particle. This distorts the measured values.

Catbert59on Smallest particulate matter air quality sensor for ultra-compact IoT devices

Many particle sensors are useless in foggy/hazy conditions, which ruins many citizen science projects in terms of data quality. Currently, the best solution is to calculate the dew point and then switching them off once you hit a specified limit.

How does this model deal with this?

Catbert59on Low cost mmWave 60GHz radar sensor for advanced sensing

Have a look at Hi-Link from China (on Aliexpress).

They offer 50GHz, 10GHz, 24GHz and 60GHz FMCW radar module boards for 10-30€ which are easy to reverse engineer on firmware and PCB level.

A lot of them are CW radars, a few FMCW and they also use the Infineon 60GHz radar chips. Very unusual for Infineon: with all tools and datasheets available without signing a NDA. Down to the register level.

There's an interesting Chinese company around (ICLink with their ICL1122/ICL1112) which offer highly integrated radar ICs. They can spit out raw ADC measurements of their downmixed baseband using Quad SPI at 20 or 40MHz when switching on their debug mode. Price range: ~10€. But datasheets are difficult to find. Example board: LD2410S.

The analog ones are easy to play with. You just need a DAC to drive their VCO and then can sample the I/Q pins with an ADC. That how a lot of the 24GHz modules (like the LD1125H) work.

Catbert59on A low power 1U Raspberry Pi cluster server for inexpensive colocation (2021)

In 2025 I'd go for an Intel n100/n150/n305 with 32GB RAM (in officially supported). If nothing rotates nothing can break.

At work we have ~10 of these passive cooled TopTon n100 with their 5x Intel i226-IV 2.5GE interfaces laying around for emergency router setups. They are great for a lot of things.

But be careful: starting with the n150 you will need active cooling.