My Ruyage UV58Plus changed into a completely new radio

New look (M70CM 3.2/P2.0)

I bought the Royage UV58Plus (also called Radtel 890) in August 2023. I liked its display as it would show both the frequency and the name of the station at the same time, and many Chinese handheld transceivers don't do that.

On the other hand, its scanning function wasn't very good, so I was a little disappointed. It sensitivity was also poorer than that of my Baofeng UV-5RE. But at a cost of 34 Euros + VAT, it was OK.

But that was before I found out that its firmware could be updated. I had originally V1.33, 2023-02-10. The images below show it with V1.35 2023-10-20.

The surprising faith of scientists

Equations representing many of the scientists in the book

"The surprising faith of scientists" is the tentative title of a book manuscript just submitted. 

The book stems from a discovery I made some time after I had completed my university studies where I had studied theories named after the likes of Pascal, Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell, and Kelvin. The surprising thing was that all of these were devout Christians. It would turn out that there were many more of them.

The magic of adaptive filters in amateur radio

Examples of a speech signal (top),
a sinusoidal, and noise (bottom)

Radio amateurs have been using adaptive noise reduction and adaptive notch filters for decades. They came with the advent of audio digital signal processing. 

Few however, understand how different they are from ordinary frequency selective filters and for many they appear to do something magic, very different from ordinary filters.

Customize your own list of favorite screens for the Multi-face GPS Clock

Fav 2 subset with 11 entries (Example in text has 9)

The Clock subset menu of the Multi-face GPS Clock gives you a choice already between:

• All, 50 screens
• Fav 1, 34 screens
• Fav 2, 9 screens
• Calendar, 13 screens
• Clocks, 27 screens
• Astro, 17 screens
• Radio, 12 screens 

QMX+ mechanical improvements

My QMX+ has some minor mechanical improvements:

1. Slimmer knobs. I decided to replace the knobs as I often touched the bottom one while adjusting the top one and vice versa. The slimmer knobs solved that. I found knobs on AliExpress with the same looks, only a smaller diameter as the image shows. Unfortunately they don't have screws, so they aren't so well attached as the original ones.
2. Folding laptop feet which I first saw on the AE5X blog.

Why is speech quality so poor in DMR, D-STAR, and System Fusion?

Example of a speech signal which transitions
from an unvoiced to a voiced sound

Digital VHF and UHF communications is increasingly popular among radio amateurs using DMR, D-STAR and System Fusion. 

Very few radio amateurs, however, have much understanding of the signal processing required to compress a speech signal so it can be transmitted with the low bit rates available. Here is an attempt at an explanation.

My favorite faces for the Multi Face GPS Clock

Weekly progress bar with Monday as day 1
in week 9 and yearly progress bar
as of day 56 in the year.

Among the 50 different faces (or screens) now implemented on the Multi face GPS clock, it is hard to select favorites. 

So I start with the latest one that was implemented, i.e. the progress bars for week and year shown to the right. It was new in version 2.3.0 dated 2025-02-04.

A QMX+ coming together

I got an unassembled QMX+ for Christmas this year, and here are pictures of it coming together. First the winding of toroids for the low-pass filters: