I had a lot of requests for the Manhattan Layout Template that I mentioned in my FDIM seminar. Here’s a quick & dirty link to the file. I consider it licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA, although I haven’t indicated it on the document yet. Hope you enjoy and put it to good use! Manhattan Layout… Read More Inkscape Manhattan Layout Template
..but I’m raising more capital for Etherkit, so I need to sell off some more gear. Please see my For Sale page for an Icom IC-V8000, a new Tektronix bench DMM, and a lower price on an Xbox 360.
After a marathon session of hacking firmware, writing documentation, fixing bugs, and setting up my Etherkit shopping cart software, I was finally able to get the OpenBeacon project to a ready-to-sell state. I had enough parts on-hand to make 10 kits, so I spent a good portion of Sunday night getting them all packaged up… Read More OpenBeacon Pre-Release Sale Successful
My single HF antenna (a ZS6BKW) is pretty good for multi-band use, but it is fairly lacking in the 30 meter department. So any 30 meter OpenBeacon captures that I’ve been getting have been pretty exciting to me, given that I’m running 300 mW maximum power out of the transmitter. God only knows what my… Read More OpenBeacon to ZL-Land
Now that we are starting to get settled into a routine life with our new baby boy Eli, I’ve been able to sneak in some more work on the OpenBeacon project. The beta test is going fairly well, but I made a poor design decision in choosing a USB Micro-B connector and also made some… Read More OpenBeacon Update
I’ve got another grab-bag of miscellaneous news for this post, but I’m going to lead off with the big one: I’m going to be a presenter at the world’s preeminent QRP convention: Four Days In May 2012. The tentative topic for my presentation will be about the free and open source tools that I use… Read More Dayton Or Bust
The year is not starting out as well as I had hoped. Back during the beta test of the CC-20 I had set a goal to complete my revisions and be ready to sell production kits by 1 January 2012. Obviously that date has come and gone and I’m still not on the market. A… Read More Catching Up With Etherkit
This post is a bit late, but I wanted to be sure to document my first attempt at a SOTA activation and what I learned from it. The title is probably a bit harsh, but the eternal pessimist in me couldn’t help it. I decided to attempt a SOTA activation after seeing a lot of… Read More SOTA Fail on Clatskanie Mountain
I’m in the process of selling off some of my ham radio stuff so that I can fund further development of the CC-Series. Right now, I’ve got a Yaesu FT-817ND along with a few other items for sale. I’ve also got a very lightly used Kindle with the leather case with integrated reading light. Occasionally… Read More Liquidation
Progress on CC-Series development proceeds at a reasonably-good clip right now. One of my last big hardware bugs to stamp out is some nasty microphonics that seem to be generated by the combination product detector/BFO. Today, I believe that I made some significant progress towards solving it and wanted to share what I learned. I’ve done a… Read More Single-Ended Mixers and Reverse Isolation