W8EMV - Whiskey Eight Echo Mike Victor

W8EMV call sign issued

I navigated the FCC dance successfully and now have call sign W8EMV, replacing the previous call sign KD8OQG. There's no charge for a "vanity" license any more, just a matter of filling out the simple online forms and waiting 2 business weeks.

I've had the emv login for many years, starting in 1985 with umix!emv and proceeding through [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], and now [email protected]. So W8EMV is easy enough to remember.

I've updated my links on this site and changed the blog name. That will inevitably break a few things, and I am not aware of how to set up Typepad to transparently redirect an old name to a new one.

thanks and 73

Ed W8EMV

back on the air soon

I'm on an email list that tags along on the side of a daily morning 2 meter net. At various times I've been more active than others on that net, but I stick with it as best I can. There are some regulars who are on every single day, and a broad bunch of folks who show up from time to time as the seasons (and propagation) permits.

A regular on one of these nets has been absent at the usual time. People notice and check in on you. The demographics of ham radio being what it is, this can be of some concern - most folks who have an hour every day to play radio are retired, some for long enough that retirement is a second career.

The message back from the son, relayed a couple of times via net control, reporting on the hospital stay: "Hopefully, we’ll get him back home and back to being on the air soon."

Operating notes 2023-09-17: Hams over IP and Hamshack Hotline on a Cisco SPA525G VOIP phone

Writing this down before I forget it all....

I spent a few hours this weekend setting up a Cisco SPA525G IP phone to get it on the air with the public switched phone network and with two ham radio PBX networks: Hams over IP and Hamshack Hotline.

The first part of the setup really didn't take very long, but it's what had stymied me in the first place: getting the Cisco phone onto our wifi. Turns out you need to match the encryption type of the phone with the encryption type of the router; in my case that meant selecting WPA2 PSK AES. It's all spelled out on page 30 of the Cisco docs - the Cisco 525G user guide - but of course I wasn't looking at the docs as I was fumbling through the various options trying to just make it work.

Once the phone was on the air, the next thing to do was to get it connected to the various VOIP networks I have access to. The helpful thing about this phone is that it has a web server built in, so it's not necessary once you get it online to punch buttons the phone to get all of the details.

I started with Voip.MS which is a subscription based VOIP network that connects you phone to the public switched telephone network. The Voip.MS wiki page for the SPA525G has the necessary information for connecting a line. I had previously set up a line with my cell phone and my MacBook Air using Zoiper, so the configuration involved adding an additional extension to point to the Cisco phone.

The "Phone" tab on the Cisco's web server lets you map lines to extensions. When I had first set things up, all 5 of the extensions pointed to the first line. Map "Line key" to "extension" as appropriate, or keep some lines disabled.

The second system to set up was Hams over IP. This is a "bring your own device" VOIP network for hams. Again there is a wiki page for the Cisco 525g which answers all of the necessary questions for configuration.

Finally I requested and got a link to Ham Shack Hotline or HH. This was a little bit more complicated than the first two. Ham Shack Hotline has a very helpful standard configuration for these devices that fully provisions them according to their specifications, but in the process it wipes out all of the other configs on your phone. If you want to support multiple networks at the same time, you need to get an "experimental" line on their HHUX server. Fortunately, the actual configuration I had been through twice successfully on other providers so even though I was "on my own" to configure things I basically followed the previous setup pattern and all was well.

What can you do with this VOIP configuration?

With the VOIP.ms line I can make regular phone calls. I called and talked to my Mom, the sound quality was fine, the caller ID came through with my name so she knew it was me. I'm looking forward to porting over our home phone line to this system so I can dial out directly with a well-known number.

With Hams over IP and Ham Shack Hotline, I can patch into what is a bewildering variety of linked digital networks. Most of these connections go in some way to linked Allstar nodes, and the corresponding sound quality is quite good.

As an example, I had a QSO with Lucille KD8PTE through Ham Shack Hotline on the K8LOD 147.27+ repeater in Marquette. She was connecting via RF to the repeater, and there's a Ham Shack Hotline interface to the Allstar node, using HH extension 94026. Sound quality was good with none of the "robotic" sorts of sharp edges that you can sometimes hear on DMR connections.

The other connection I made tonight was to Christopher M0YNG who dialed me direct on Hams over IP. The connection was from his PBX in the UK to a softphone running on my MacBook Air (Zoiper) and the sound quality was excellent. (But was it amateur radio? Neither of us were using the ham bands so there was no need to limit our conversation to ham topics.)

All things considered quite some progress! My next step is to take all of this hard-won experience and venture into porting a phone number to my phone, moving the land line number to a new provider. How hard could it be? (And this is definitely not amateur radio.)

Ferrite, an introduction

"Ferrite" is the working name for an amateur radio focus containerized desktop. It is to be based on Universal Blue https://ublue.it/ and is inspired by Ham-Pi, PiSDR, and other related projects that try to corral a whole bunch of ham radio software into a single distribution. The underlying distribution comes from Fedora.

Target hardware includes the RTL-SDR and Airspy HF+ software defined radios. I hope to be able to tune and process and decode ADS-B, APRS, AM, FM (narrowband, wideband, and stereo), SSB, a variety of digital voice modes including DMR, and to decode slow scan TV and radiograms. I'll do the receive side first, and then look at transmitters.

Universal Blue targets a wide range of hardware, so I'll let that project shape my selection of what machine this runs on. The Raspberry Pi would be great to get everything running on, but I'll also hope to get a Chromebook ready setup to better support mobile and portable operations.

(This is from issue 1 in the "Ferrite" repository. I don't have a working version just yet.)

KiwiSDR sites with Beverage antennas

A Beverage antenna is a long horizontal wire antenna pointed in the direction of the signals that are intended to be received. Patented in 1921, it was used for transatlantic reception of radiotelegraphy signals with antennas of up to 9 miles long. Of course not everyone has 9 miles worth of real estate (or for that matter 9 miles worth of wire), but there are contemporary receive antennas of the Beverage design used to good effect on KiwiSDR receivers.

Bob NH6XO has a 220 foot long Beverage antenna on his KiwiSDR in Hawaii. He writes on QRZ:

The Beverage antenna is made of about 220 feet of insulated #12 solid copper installed an “average” height of 6 feet. The Beverage antenna orientation is approximately 190 degrees true. For what it is worth, the Koolau Mountain Range blocks most signals from the West. As my interest is North America and Europe, leaving the antenna unterminated allows it to work well to the North and East.

W3HFU has several KiwiSDR systems set up, including one with a 500 foot Beverage antenna pointed towards Europe from his location in Maryland.

I live in a low noise rural area, and have lots of antennas :)

The "Pembleton Farm" KiwiSDR, located north of Ann Arbor, MI in Northfield Township, has a 230 meter / 750 foot Beverage antenna, pointed to the north. This is the closest SDR to my location, and it routinely gives me better reception results than any antenna I've been able to put up at home.

I haven't found an easy way to search the KiwiSDR database by antenna type, and if the operator doesn't include the antenna in the description it can be catch as catch can. One that I haven't tried yet but that looks promising is the VE6WZ Beverage array in Alberta - it promises 15 wires covering 9 directions from the Canadian prairie. Lots more details of construction and design on the VE6WZ QRZ page, almost 4 km of wire all told!

Why do these Beverage antennas work so well? It's a good design for long distance directional reception, and has been known for that for a very long time (100+ years). These antennas tend to get installed in low noise rural environments because where else can you get enough real estate to put them in? And perhaps most important, if you see a 500 foot antenna in active use you know that someone has made an investment in the hobby, and you really can't count on that for every KiwiSDR out there on the net.

Skywarn Recognition Day on Saturday, 3 December 2022 0000z-2400z

The National Weather Service has announced that Skywarn Recognition Day 2022 is Saturday, 3 December 2022. Trained Skywarn spotters are encouraged to register on the event web site and check in for their location, get assigned an SRD for contact exchanges, and upload their contact logs to the NWS after the day. The hashtag of the day is #skywarn2022 but I have also seen #skywarn22 and just #skywarn .

ARRL has SKYWARN Recognition Day Operating Instructions. Participating stations are asked to exchange QSO information with National Weather Service stations from 0000z-2400z (700p Friday night to 700p Saturday night, US Eastern time). The exchange is Call sign, signal report, QTH, and a one or two word description of the weather occurring at your site ("sunny", "partly cloudy", "windy", etc.). (e.g. W8EMV 59 Ann Arbor windy). If you register with the NWS ahead of time you can get an SRD number - mine is SRD-DTX-1226. NWS stations will work various modes including SSB, FM, AM, RTTY, CW, and PSK31. Contacts via repeaters are permitted.

Locally here in Ann Arbor, the Skywarn repeater for Washtenaw County is the N8DUY repeater on 145.15- PL100.

The current Hazardous Weather Outlook for the Detroit/Pontiac DTX region is a wind advisory tonight through Saturday morning for wind gusts of 40 to 50 mph.

On the net, two Mastodon servers of interest are mastodon.radio and wx.social. The first is of special interest to ham radio operators, and the second is a new system for weather and weather adjacent (climatology, geography) enthusiasts, professionals, and students from the good folks at StormDig.

I plan to be tuned to N8DUY locally, and hope to pick up some DMR contacts along the way. I'll be checking the Fedihams network as well.

The map of the Maine Skywarn network for station WX1GYX Gray, ME lists TG 759 (SKY) on the DMR-MARC network for "SKYWARN for ME & NH". The Brandmeister DMR network lists TG 31206 as the "Central Kansas Skywarn" channel; please note these are not rag chewing talk groups .

Quartz crystal controlled radios in World War II

Some notes on the World War II supply and demand for quartz crystals for precise radio frequency control, in preparation for reading "Crystal clear : the struggle for reliable communications technology in World War II" by Richard J. Thompson, Jr. (Wiley, 2007). I have the book on its way on inter-library loan from MeL, via the Ann Arbor District Library.

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Crystal+Clear%3A+The+Struggle+for+Reliable+Communications+Technology+in+World+War+II-p-9781118104644

The table of contents from the book:

Introduction : "We were heavily armed, and we had crystals" -- From wire to wireless : the development-- and acceptance-- of tactical radio -- Crystal control-- the great gamble -- The Signal Corps lays the foundation -- Nothing else to do but grind crystals -- Riding the "Flat Wheel Limited"-- overseeing a mass production industry -- Supplying a mass production industry-- the civilian government steps in -- "The whole radio crystal program of the Armed Services depends upon the success of the procurement program in Brazil. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with it" -- "God made lots of small crystals" -- The aging crisis-- stopgap measures -- The aging crisis-- physics to the rescue! -- "Without crystals, you have radio; with them, communications" -- Appendix 1 : Crystal-controlled equipment -- Appendix 2 : Crystal manufacturers.

The US Army's history of the Signal Corps is told in "The Signal Corps: The Outcome". Chapter 3, "The Signal Corps in the ETO to Mid-1944", has this to say about the use and preparation of the crystals themselves at p.89:

https://history.army.mil/html/reference/Normandy/TS/SC/SC3.htm

Over the strenuous objection of General Vulliamy and the signal staff, the committee took frequencies from the ground forces and reduced the already narrow separation of channels in the 1- to 5-megacycle band from five kilocycles to four. That meant grinding more crystals, and on extremely short notice, for it was 10 May when the revised frequency allocation list was issued. But in this specialty the Signal Corps had become proficient, even to the point where what had once been a most exacting laboratory technique was now transported into the field, and mobile crystal grinding teams were at hand. The task of providing crystals by the thousands, meticulously prepared, emphasized the one drawback to their use. Nevertheless, the American decision to use crystal-controlled mobile FM radio greatly simplified the job of frequency control in the jam-packed spectrum of sky over Europe from D-day on.

Where did these crystals come from? Before the era of lab-grown quartz, the predominant supplier of suitable quartz crystals comes from a few large quartz mines in Brazil. A 1943 US Information Agency short, "Brazilian Quartz Goes To War", is available from an exhibit at the University of Indiana.

https://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/IULMIA/exhibits/show/world-war-ii-propaganda-films/item/1450

The value of Brazilian quartz to the allied war effort is shown as narration proclaims "two-way radio is the one really new instrument in the armory of warfare." Explains the value of quartz in radio communication, showing how a wafer of its crystal makes possible the simultaneous broadcasting of many stations without overlapping. The film emphasizes the necessity for international cooperation in the war effort.

After the war, the supply of war surplus crystals entered the ham radio market. Dennis Monticelli, a Fellow at National Semiconductor, tells the story in an article in EDN.

https://www.edn.com/crystal-grinding-when-electronics-were-really-hands-on/

During WWII crystal making took a leap forward in the US and turned into a big cottage industry supplying the wartime needs. There is a wonderful new book out on that subject that goes through the history and basically makes a “how we won the war” claim. Following the end of hostilities, the cottage industry collapsed and huge numbers of used and NOS crystals in screwed together non-hermetic holders flooded the market. Hams began grinding again and didn’t have to move the freq as much as before because the selection of starting material was huge. Hams could then use mild abrasives like comet or even milder like toothpaste powder. Today you could use wet silicon carbide sandpaper if you wished. I actually succeeded at etching them to freq using a very dilute HF solution when I was 15 and didn’t know how dangerous HF acid was.

You will still hear radio amateurs who talk too long on a local 2 meter repeater to the point that the repeater times out refer to this as winning the "purple crystal award". I wasn't able to pin down any origin story for this phrase, or even to know if this is a regional Michigan thing or in common global use.

updates

A few bits of additional information:

IEEE TV: Richard J. Thompson. A 9 minute 2007 interview with Richard J. Thompson, author of "Crystal Clear".

A brief history of quartz crystals and their aging problem, Planet Analog. A 2021 discussion of how quartz crystals fail and drift due to aging from cracks and microparticles, a problem solved by smoothing the surface with acid etching.

Crystals Go To War, US Army Signal Corps, digitized by Reeves Sound Laboratories for the Prelinger Collection at the Internet Archive. 1943. "A story in pictures of the preparation and manufacture of quartz crystals for radio communication."

second updates

Thanks to Jacek KW4EP.

Quartz Crystal Growing, Western Electric / Bell Telephone Labs / AT&T Archives, 1962. A video showing postwar innovation in synthetic crystal growing technology, using a high temperature, high pressure vessel to dissolve and then redeposit quartz onto precision cut seed plates for crystal growth.

UFFC-S History, IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society. The "frequency control" portion of this professional society's archives include records from the 1944 Crystal Conferences. "This period was one of considerable growth, both in the quantity of crystal units produced and in advancing the art in crystal theory, design, and manufacturing. There were approximately 15 companies before the war who were making, at most, 100,000 crystals per year. During the war, this number grew to about 115 companies and 30 million crystals per year."

FediHams, a multiprotocol digital voice interconnect from DK1MI for Mastodon and the Fediverse

FediHams is a digital voice interconnection with support for multiple ham radio networks, put together by Michael DK1MI to support amateur radio use and experimentation for the Mastodon network.

For more info about FediHams and instructions on how to join, see its home page at https://fedihams.net . For details about Mastodon.radio - one participant in a federated set of servers sometimes known as the Fediverse - see https://mastodon.radio .

The network as it's currently constructed allows use by amateurs coming in on the Echolink, Allstar, Yaesu System Fusion, and Peanut networks, as well as to two different DMR networks (Brandmeister and TGIF). All of these nets require proof of amateur status to join. Not all of them require a purpose built hardware radio to connect; in particular, Echolink and Peanut were both tested with apps running on my Android mobile phone.

I connected to the FediHams network with three different configurations - Echolink (via phone), Peanut (via phone), and DMR (Brandmeister DMR via a DMR radio and my MMDVM gateway).

For Echolink, the configuration was easy because I already had the software running on my phone to support connections to the regular Sunday night net run by the University of Michigan Amateur Radio Club. Use node DK1MI-L (963110) and you'll be added to FediHams. Please note, the Echolink use of Internet protocols doesn't always play nicely with modern firewalls, and I nearly always have to turn off wifi and connect through the data plan on my phone; your results may vary. If you don't already have Echolink installed, after you download it you'll need to validate your license via instructions at https://www.echolink.org/validation/ .

For Peanut, you'll want to download a client from the home base of David PA7LIM at https://www.pa7lim.nl/peanut/ and send in your proof of license via provided instructions. The software is provided for Windows (not tested) and Android. Once that is all set (it took a day for me), you can configure the app to connect to the channel of your choice and away you go. Please note that channel listings are provided via a drop-down menu keyed by country, and the YSF-FEDI channel is listed under the DE (Germany) menu. The user interface is a simple push-to-talk, and I found the sound quality quite pleasant especially because I could use a good headset on my phone.

I'm using the Brandmeister DMR network on my MMDVM hotspot, and a Radioddity GD-77 HT. Program your HT to connect to TG 2630002, and then check the Brandmeister network info page at https://brandmeister.network/?page=lh&DestinationID=2630002 to see your traffic. On my MMDVM hotspot status page, the connection shows up as TG DK1MI. MMDVM will start monitoring FediHams once your first transmission goes through. If you want to always have traffic to FediHams key up your radio, you'll need to connect to the Brandmeister "Self Care" page for your hotspot and add 2630002 as a static talkgroup.

My first test on FediHams was to use Echolink and DMR to both connect to the network at the same time and to talk to myself. Sound quality was fine, and the delay in transmission was about 4-5 seconds. (Delays come from the distance of the Internet connection from Ann Arbor to SW Germany, but also from delays associated with voice transcoding.) I even had a pretty respectable echo loop set up as the phone and the radio listened to each other.

More fun of course is an actual QSO with an actual person on the other end of the line. Michael DK1MI and I had a few nice conversations on 2022-10-11 - one part "how do I sound" of course, and also a discussion of how the network is put together and some hopes for future use. DK1MI has a blog at http://qrz.is which has details on a number of projects (hardware and software) with a ham radio theme.

This is my second go at getting a useful repeater configuration for use with Mastodon.radio. You can see my notes on the first try at https://vielmetti.typepad.com/w8emv/2020/07/feditalk-qso-dmr-brandmeister-tg-23514-with-m0yng.html where Christopher M0YNG and I both made a connection through a Brandmeister DMR TG. My hope is that the new FediHams setup will work with connections from a variety of networks and will also help discover new connections.

73!

Listening to Florida Hurricane Ian traffic via SARnet and HWN

SARnet is a linked UHF repeater network with coverage throughout the state of Florida. Keying up one local repeater brings up every repeater throughout the state, and so it's useful and used for wide area coverage for weather situations like Hurricane Ian which as of this writing is heading for the Tampa, Florida area.

Traffic so far has included readings of National Weather Service forecasts for Hurricane Ian, as well as tornado warnings for areas affected by the outer bands of the storm.

Get more information about the operations of the network at http://www.sarnetfl.com, and listen to a feed via Broadcastify at https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/35392 The stream is monitored by KO4EFS on the Lee County NX4Y Repeater in North Fort Myers, Florida on 444.225Mhz.

Hurricane Watch Net is held on HF on 14325 MHz and 7268 MHz. The associated web site, https://www.hwn.org , has current information about hurricane and tropical storms using information out of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida. Monitor these frequencies via your favorite KiwiSDR receiver, or through WebSDR receivers at NA5B in the Washington, DC area at http://na5b.com:8901, or through your own HF receiver.

Remote access to GQRX and an Airspy HF+ SDR on an old MacBook Air

A description of my current remote listening post, which lets me tune over quite a range and listen to radio through my laptop from wherever I am to a home receiver.

The computer is a 2014 MacBook Air running MacOS, which I bought new and which was a daily driver for quite some time. The power cable gave out at one point so I replaced that, but otherwise it's been quite reliable. It's not fast enough to handle a modern workload of dozens of tabs open in a browser, but it's plenty fast to be an SDR front end.

The SDR software is GQRX 2.15.9 from https://gqrx.dk , downloaded via Homebrew. This is an open source tool from Alexandru OZ9AEC with support for Linux and Mac, using GNU Radio for processing, the Qt toolkit for a user interface, and the gr-osmosdr library for SDR support. Like any good usable SDR it decodes AM, FM, and SSB. Helpfully for my task it can also relay an audio feed over UDP.

The SDR hardware is an Airspy HF+ Discovery SDR, paired with a Youloop antenna, purchased from Airspy.US last year. This setup covers 0.5 kHz to 31 MHz plus 60 to 260 MHz, i.e. broadcast AM and FM, 2 meter VHF, air band, HF and shortwave bands. The Youloop is hanging from a curtain rod - I have not yet done anything fancy to try to tweak positioning for best reception.

All that plugs together pretty nicely, but it's all plugged into an old laptop that's tethered to a power cord, and as such that doesn't do so well for listening to radio around the house. So I have a few more pieces in place to enable remote tuning and remote listening from my M1 MacBook Air that's my new daily driver, either around the house or wherever.

The first bit of the remote access puzzle has been to install Tailscale everywhere I ever need to use a computer. This VPN software lets you put together a private network of machines that can talk to each other over an encrypted (Wireguard) connection. Tailscale takes care of poking holes through firewalls so you can put endpoints anywhere - around the house, at the office, in the cloud. It also has DNS support that gives systems meaningful names so you don't have to memorize IP addresses.

With that in place, the remote access piece is provided by the built-in MacOS program called "Screen Sharing". This software (based on VNC) lets you remote in from one Mac to another. I found that it handles keyboard and mouse events really well, but surprisingly doesn't have any options for sharing sound coming off of the machine. A quick look at general purpose sound sharing options got very complicated very fast, so I stopped looking.

What got me going again was curiosity about the "UDP" button in the "Receiver options" menu of GQRX. It turns out that for some time now, GQRX can stream audio to a local (or a remote) UDP socket. This is helpful for interfacing local audio data decoding or analysis tools on the same machine (e.g. setting up an image decoder to display SSTV images), but it also can be used to stream audio over the network.

The final piece is software to catch that audio stream, which I already had installed. The venerable VLC tool lets you point at a UDP stream and pick audio samples off the wire for playback. The tutorial on streaming audio over UDP has everything you need, including this magic incantation for starting up VLC with all the right configuration options:

vlc --demux=rawaud --rawaud-channels=1 --rawaud-samplerate=48000 udp://@:7355

The end result is a remote radio in a window with a waterfall display and a reasonably responsive audio stream. Thanks to Tailscale you can take this combination anywhere and it will still work, though if your network is slow or lossy there will be lag or dropouts.

Some alternative options if you don't have the exact combo of things that I have.

GQRX runs on old and new Macs, as well as on Linux systems like the Raspberry Pi. A Pi 4 has plenty of oomph to decode a signal, and there are videos of people building Pi 3 based systems using a lower FFT size and rate.

If you do run this with a Pi as a remote, you'll still use VNC as the screen sharing protocol. RealVNC has a "VNC Server" for Raspbian, and there are indications that this is easy from a Mac using the built-in "Screen Sharing" client. I have not tried this myself.

GQRX is not the only SDR software out there! If your remote machine is a Windows machine, and if you have figured out how to remote into it, then SDR# (SDRSharp) is an excellent tool with lots of signal processing capabilities and a plugin (sdr-UDPAudio) to let you stream audio as UDP. My old Windows on Arm machine didn't have an obvious way to remote into it, so sorting out these details is up to you.

There's other SDR hardware out there! I got my start with an inexpensive RTL-SDR tuner stick which uses repurposed European DVB-T television hardware (RTL2832 + R820T) to pick up signals. Spend $25-$30 for a nice RTL tuner at Nooelec or RTL-SDR.com, or take your chances and spend about half that for a similar part of unknown quality from AliExpress. The RTL based hardware has a smaller frequency range, so you won't get AM or HF or shortwave reception, but you will pick up 2 meter ham band and broadcast FM even with the inexpensive antennas that come in these kits.

If you want to listen to SDR and don't have any hardware at all, try the KiwiSDR or WebSDR networks. WebSDR supports dozens or hundreds of simultaneous listeners at each of a few listening posts scattered throughout the world. The KiwiSDR network only handles 1-8 listeners per location, but there are hundreds of these receivers out there in dozens of countries.

Successful reception of German DRM shortwave student radio station "Funklust" via KiwiSDR Vilradio

Funklust is a German student radio station from Uni FAU that broadcasts online and via shortwave radio. The shortwave signal is 24/7 on 15785 kHz from a transmitter in Erlangen, Germany. I was able to tune in via a KiwiSDR receiver Vilradio nearby, the above screen capture shows the settings to turn on DRM reception.

RedTech has a May 2022 story, Funklust is back on air with a boost, which describes their new transmitter, "a new RFmondial 250 watt transmitter, which feeds the signal into a vertical lambda/four-monopole antenna mounted on a concrete mast at a height of 58 meters". The story describes how the students handle the programming for the station, and the nearby Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits handles the technology.

Additional technical details are in a blog from Fraunhofer, funklust broadcasts in DRM on shortwave. There is apparently a text-only sideband "Journaline".

I'm a fan of college radio in general, and the Funklust programming that I've heard to date has been a great stream of music that I have not heard elsewhere. Worth a listen.