These disks were designed to self-destruct in the presence of oxygen. They literally rust away.

Oxygen and its O2 form does like to sneak into everything. Even sealed in the original packaging, there’s a limited shelf life. Flexplay claimed stability of only one year, which isn’t much given it comes sealed in a plastic bag.

You’re probably decoding noise or in the middle of the bit stream.

What you’re looking for is called “preamble.” That’s a sequence of bits used to synchronize the decoder (marks the start of data, useful in modulation schemes for clock recovery, and a few other things).

Looking at minimodem’s manual, try using the sync-byte option. Prepend your tar stream with a string of bytes, like 0x01, before sending to minimodem for encoding. Then use the sync code option to mark the start of the tar bit stream. This is as simple as cat preamble.bin myfiles.tar | minimodem --tx …

Other things to consider: start small with 300 baud BFSK before speeding up. Test with wav files before attempting physical tape or speakers and a microphone.

Oof. You definitely were taking a risk with that drive train. I’m glad the worst of it is a few broken spokes.

That’s clearly have a working bike, not some sort of weekend roadie show piece. Put a dork disk on there! There isn’t any shame in favoring function over form.

Awesome call-out on zip ties. They’re the duct tape of the bike world.

One small thing I noticed is how your fender and rack are mounted. It’s fine to share a single eyelet to mount both, but it’s best to mount in the order of frame, rack, fender, washer, and bolt. That ordering shortens the cantilever of the rack load, a much higher load than a fender, on the bolt.

Shooting up or down is hard and takes extra work to understand the ballistics of such a shot.

If you’re really curious, check out Ted’s HoldOver video on the topic. He shows both the theory and practice it takes to shoot upwards.

For sure. These fuses have been a scourge.

Here’s a video by a radio fan who’s circuit is designed to blow fuses just didn’t.

https://youtu.be/apQU_VuJlFU

Not a problem. In that case you’d also have theft charges and would be liable for the car’s value in civil court (or whatever the Danish equivalent is).