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That's huge.

Ham radio operators are still waiting for a full direct transatlantic QSO (=confirmed both-ways radio contact) on 2m/144MHz.

Beacon stations are on both sides and they are blasting with a lot of power for quite a while now. But far away from the x kilowatt powers radio stations are using.


If it's functional: that's a breakthrough.

But: the PCB itself is not looking beautiful in terms of routing and a lot of schematic details yet. Horrible to to be more honest. But that's a minor issue.

I'm not overly shocked. 90% of creating PCBs is copying reference schematics from vendor datasheets and connecting them. That's LLM territory. This mostly failed for now as they just did pdf2text and killed all documents.

The last 10% are brutal (HF, EMC, high frequency multi-layer designs, etc.). But I managed LLMs to automatically create ngspice models using vision onto datasheets.. lol


Shameless plug for the slop coded CLI I use in my workflow: https://github.com/akiselev/datasheet-cli

It just sends the PDF to Gemini Flash and asks it to extract semi structured data (semi structured in the sense that it's not fully structured extraction, but its a JSON file to feed into the next step of the LLM design process).

Works pretty well in general, though I should update to the latest Gemini version.


That's pretty cool! How reliable has the footprint extraction been?

I tested it With Gemini 2.5 Flash. Works great.

You can use Deepseek from EU-only hosters. DS is openweight.

You can use Asian Opensource models from EU-only hosters. Zero problems - they are around for a while now.

You still can use EU-Hosted Opensources models like from Tensorix.

LLMs are fun until you have to break up a devices that use encrypted firmware files and non-documented interfaces.. that you are back in the past ;-)

But for the rest: Yes. They will be eaten alive by the latest generation of LLMs. I use DS-Flash 4.1 a lot for this. A big helper.


Make a custom harness, literally give the AI access to as much data as possible in terms of the device and it will crack it wide open like an egg.

AI is driving digital ownership again and its formidable


Clearly you are in the past. I have reverse engineered some very difficult undocumented things. I can not go in to details but these were heavily hardened hardware. Custom SoC. of course without datasheets, involved multiple different levels of encryption and architectures of connected devices, broke all of it. All that is left is cryptocell pwn.

With very little steering from me

eta: passive aggressive winky face


All European car manufacturers pull a crazy amount of telemetry data from your car.

Either via permanent 4G/5G link or during service intervals in the shop.

Source: I analyzed these data as an intern for one.


Can you describe it? I'm assuming speed, acceleration, GPS, infotainment use.

Surely its not sending backup camera footage, chair recline position, turn signal usage.


Ah good old Tuya.

Played around with them a while go.

Found out you could do code execution while staying in the bootloader mode.. lol.

But wasn't able to extract the keys I wanted.


5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?

I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM.

Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are famous for suffering this much.


These industries are pipelined. When generation N is in operation, N+1 hardware and software must be in development, N+2 specifications must be in endless committee discussions phase, and N+3 techs must be worked on in labs, etc.

This is an underrated point. PCIe, DRAM, and WiFi standards are similar. I watched a YouTube video about how PCIe 6.0 was developed, and, damn, the pipeline is long and very complex. Even test equipment has a separate/parallel pipeline.

I'm in Slovakia. We have 4 networks here and they basically have hidden non-compete agreements where no-one launches new tech for masses without at least one other providing it launching it too, sometimes they even coordinate the launch so that all 4 of them launch at the same time...

This same shit happened with launches of 5G NSA, eSIM, Apple Watch eSIM, RCS, and lots of other telco technologies...

At this point all the operators have 5G SA networks up and running for parts of Slovakia (Telekom even claims it covers 99% of Slovak population with 5G SA), but it's only available for business customers in private networks...

They all claim the same stupid reason for this - "most customer phones don't support it, and there are additional benefits for businesses"...

And there are rumors from all of them that they plan to launch it for regular customers by the end of this year...

I mean come on... In a fair market competition the first one to upgrade its network would launch first and heavily claim that they're the fastest innovator in marketing...

And when the network is up and running, why not open it up to regular people? And why it's always the same bullshit type of excuse that's basically trying to say "people don't want/need this"?


> I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free.

Interesting, where can I learn more about that?

EDIT: This looks promising: https://hilfe.o2online.de/o2-mobilfunknetz-einstellungen-zur...


I'm not sure what the "SA" part means but my phone says it's on 5g right now and has done most of the time for a couple of years now.

The 5G standard is a bit of a mess. In the US we heavily rolled out 5G NSA, which means you still have a 4G network core with both 4G and 5G radios at the edge. You get a chunk of the performance benefits without having to replace the network core first.

This usually has similar (in practice) performance characteristics to LTE Advanced.

5G SA is an actual, end to end 5G network. The two biggest wins here for an end user are reduced latency (a big focus in 5G) and reduced power usage (the phone doesn’t need a simultaneous 4G connection).


Yeah. In india jio was SA from the start. Airtel began NSA then I think now they have mostly moved to SA.

Hah, I was aware of 5G vs 5G mm-wave, didn't realize there was another way in which most 5G was "kinda fake" too.

26ghz mm wave was a bungle as well. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49675724

5G SA means real 5G. 5G NSA means 4G over 5G NR.

They created an option to use just the 5G radio modem parts with 4G tower equipment to run them in the "Non-StandAlone" mode, so that telcos can start deploying 5G before even it matures. And the modem parts and their specs are called "5G New Radio", which is one of names of all time.


SA means standalone meaning real 5G.

NSA is non stand alone meaning basically 4G with some 5G backwards compatible improvements.


Just because your phone shows 5G doesn't mean it's connected to a 5G station. It also can only be a signaled flag from a 4G station.

> 5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?

Talking is one of the steps towards making things available to the broad masses. You have to start these things ahead of time so they are ready to deploy when the time comes.


And companies are selling electric cars even though not everyone has a petrol car…

I remember people saying the same thing about 4G relative 3G and 5G relative 4G.


2G -> 3G -> 4G were all massive jumps that all enabled new use cases.

I doubt majority of phone users who have a decent 4G connection would notice the difference if they upgrade to 5G.


It's either that or people complaining about "Now I can run out of data much faster". But what people forget is that not all the new tech is to improve it for a single subscriber. A lot of it is to utilize the spectrum better and in that way get more capacity for everyone. Basically, if everyone was on 4G, it would be clogged and slow for everyone.

In Germany telcos using 700MHz for 5G a lot (also for LTE in non-5G regions and sometimes with DSS). So they can create a lot of coverage on rural areas or building penetration.

Telefonica didn't set their signallevel-to-bars-parameters on their SIMs correctly yet. Even directly next to a antenna you only see 1-2 bar although the signal level is maxing out.


700MHz is a mixed bag for rural coverage. Great for punching through trees, but need very tall towers to overcome destructive fresnel lens losses. Higher frequencies are usually better here + more gain!

For rural areas, lower frequencies are better because they mean longer distances ↝ fewer cell towers but also less density.

Conversely, higher frequencies mean more density, shorter distances and more cell towers. The ROI in the rural scenario in this case is lower.


I feel like 5g is worse

In terms of signal level?

Well.. that amount of bars you can see depending on the real signal level is just a SIM configuration. In the "newer" networks they aren't configured properly yet.


Very Cool! I have a lot of 40MPx RAW pictures from the almost unreadable historic written walls in Delphi, Greece.

Let me test this with them.


How'd it turn out?

I played around with the LLM-Generated website (see past posts here) of this algorithm and the Gimp method.

It actually doesn't improve the readability of the letters carved in stone nor does it show any hidden details on the surroundings (at least in my very small amount of pictures). But that's not unexpected as they readability depends on the angle of light and shadow.

I have to look into my archives.. maybe there are some wall paintings on which this kind of algorithms excels.

Surprisingly it's working very good in finding living plants and separating it from hay.


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