The new year begins with the release of the website of Deborah Hödtke, church musician at the cathedral and catholic Diocese of Eichstätt in Bavaria. Being an organist, the website is mainly meant to provide an overview of upcoming and past concerts alongside biographical information. Therefore, I have chosen a layout with a prominent but not disturbing background image which still allows for a good perception of the menu and content. Read more

As Advent begins, people start asking others for their wishes regarding Christmas presents. It’s a similar story when it comes to birthdays. To get around these questions, I started an online wish list a few years ago that is accessible by everyone. Updating this initial version of the list required modifying and manually uploading files. Therefore, I recently expanded the wish list into a web application with a simple interface. Users can easily add and delete entries to their wish list, organized into different categories. Read more

The development and progress in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) also has an impact on many other fields as new applications arise. Near-field antenna measurements, for example, have been traditionally performed in anechoic chambers where the antenna had to come to the measurement system. With the usage of UAVs, a very flexible measurement system can be designed and brought to the antenna under test which enables the measurement of large antennas and also the characterization of mounted antennas in their real operating environment. Read more

Some weeks ago, when I was doing another audio recording, I asked myself if there is an optimal gain setting for the input of the audio interface and what it might be. In general, we can adjust the input gain to any value and amplify or attenuate the signal later in the post processing. However, we all know that low gain settings destroy our recordings as they contain too much noise which is basically impossible to reduce afterwards. Read more

Some time ago, when I was looking for long microphone cables, I came across the idea of using network cables with appropriate adapters. This is a neat idea since you can run four audio signals over one network cable with 8 pins + shield. However, soon questions about the audio quality and other drawbacks came up. Therefore, I did some simple measurements on microphone and network cables of different lengths, which are described in the following. Read more