A view of the home office. There are a few computers and servers, all doing their thing. All machines run Kubuntu and yes,
the Commodore 64 still works, including the disks that were made in the 80s.
This computer and two others in the house have virtual machines that do protein folding simulations for
Standford University's Folding@Home distributed computing project.
The project studies how proteins misfold and how that leads to diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer.
Besides radio, computers, and electronics, I also study biology, specifically how genetics and epigenetics
are implicated in various forms of cancer. In the US, 1 of every 2 men and 1 of every 3 women will get cancer
at some point in their lives. That alone should encourage us all to live a healthy lifestyle and and get a
checkup annually.
At left is part of my G5RV antenna which I use on most all bands. Although it's
not very high up, the performance is excellent. I have it hanging between two trees and used a
fishing pole to get them up there.
Below is shown a dual-band J-pole along with a
10-meter dipole that are mounted on the roof.
A close-up of the radios, not including the HTs. To the right is a dongle and home-made preamplifier I use for exerimenting
with software-defined radio. I'm currently using Cubic-SDR and plan to test some others made for Linux. I've also taken up
an interest in radio astronomy so I'm learning more about that as well.
A close-up of the two Dell servers (no longer in use), a switch (has also been replaced), and an appliance computer called a "Clearbox" which has been re-purposed
to serve as an APRS gateway. I really should update this picture some day...
Spare time is something I don't see much of but on occasion, I like to fire up the old Commodore. It's amazing that this
machine, built in 1983, still works. I have a second 1541 floppy drive that's connected to an old '386 computer. That
setup allows me to download old Commodore software from the internet (yes, it's out there!) and save them on the 5-1/4
floppies. I find it even more amazing that the floppies still work after all these years.