This is the first in a series of blog posts covering a wide variety of topics. In the past, I have used Twitter for my microblogging needs. For a variety of reasons, I’m on a Twitter hiatus right now, so I’ll be using this series to convey some of the disconnected (and possibly connected) random thoughts that I feel I need to get out there. I don’t think I’ll be abandoning Twitter completely, but I will be reworking the ways in which I use it once I come back.

I’m also in the process of disconnecting completely from Google, so I wanted to give fair warning to those who correspond with me via my Gmail account that I will be abandoning that service very soon. I’ve already deleted my Google+ profile, and will be deactivating the rest shortly. I’ll probably describe my rationale for this later, but keep in mind that I’ve been a Google customer data mine for nearly a decade, so this is not something that I undertake lightly. I’ll try to get alternate contact information to those of you who regularly correspond with me.

It is an age of new beginnings.

With the introduction out of the way, let’s get down to the good stuff. Above, you can see the latest project on the Etherkit bench. It’s a re-work of the receiver from the Clackamas transceiver (the rig that I submitted to the 2010 FDIM 72-part challenge). I’ve decided to make this receiver into a cheap & cheerful little kit to get people warmed up for building the CC1. It’s currently for 40 meters only, is a superhet, and is VXO tuned (covers 7.030 MHz plus a bit more). It is 100% discrete component (you can see a TDA7052 IC above, but I’ve abandoned it for a different AF amp) and will be SMT construction. The receiver itself is pretty simple, but you can see there’s a fair bit of other circuitry on there. That stuff is mute and sidetone circuits. It’s easy enough to design a standalone receiver, but most of them will probably just gather dust after being built unless they can interface to a transmitter easily. With this extra circuitry, you can just split off your transmitter’s key line and connect it to this receiver to have built-in muting and sidetone. My goal is to make this project cheap and fun to build. I’ll be fast-tracking this one so I can get back to the CC1 soon.

Oddly enough, another project from the FDIM Class of 2010 is also coming out soon. As spotted on The QRPer, the Cyclone 40 transceiver is based on the rig that Dave Cripe, NM0S submitted as his 2010 FDIM 72-part challenge entry. I recall that the rig had a very unique design and that the specs were impressive. Dave’s a great designer, so be sure to buy one to get a rig unlike anything else you’ve seen before and to support 4SQRP.

Choking off the Internet firehose that I had previously directed at me has allowed me to devote a bit more time to enjoyable activities that I’ve neglected, one of those being reading. I’m currently enjoying a book I’ve had on my shelf for a while now called Seeing in the Dark by Timothy Ferris. It’s billed about being about amateur astronomers, but it does get into the professional side quite a bit as well. It’s a good read and very entertaining, and I can’t help but see a lot of parallels between amateur radio and amateur astronomy.

That’s a great segue to the final item, which is a bit of fun from our favorite Canuck astronaut, Cmdr Hadfield. He’s leaving ISS in a few days and just released a surprisingly touching (although obviously light-hearted) rendition of Space Oddity by David Bowie (one of my guilty favorites). Cmdr Hadfield may not be on the level of Neil Armstrong or Yuri Gagarin, but he’s definitely making a play for Coolest Astronaut Ever.