As a mild winter turns into an unusually nice spring here in Beaverton (last week we had multiple days with clear skies and highs in the upper 70s °F), a young ham’s thoughts turn to portable activations, Field Day, SOTA, and the like. I’ve been looking forward to this summer for the opportunity to take… Read More Stuff ‘n Things
As I mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to try the Google+ Hangouts feature to attempt to do a video chat version of the old EchoLink chat that some of us used to have a few years ago on Saturdays. Today we took it for a spin, and I think I really like how… Read More Homebrewing Hangout
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
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
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
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
As I’ve previously noted, the VRX-1 is a nifty little basic direct conversion receiver, but it has some shortcomings that could be problematic under certain circumstances. Here’s a story of one of those issues and the cure that was found. Dave AA7EE purchased and built a VRX-1 kit a while ago but was never fully… Read More Curing Common Mode Hum in the VRX-1
I decided to make my initial Project X prototype PCBs at home using the old tried-and-true method of toner transfer (via Pulsar Professional paper and foil). Since I’m a novice at PCB layout, I didn’t feel comfortable paying the money for a few proto PCBs from a board house, then finding out that I did… Read More Creating PCBs with “PCB Fab-in-a-Box”
I’ve been absent from the blog for a while because I’ve been knee-deep in developing the prototype for the first radio kit for my as-of-yet-unnamed open source kitbiz. The design makes extensive use of JFETs in cascode configuration. JFET cascode amps and mixers are very solid performers, but the issue of widely varying Idss in… Read More JFET Biasing Investigations
I’m up to my elbows in the design work for the 2010 FDIM QRP Challenge, and I think I’ve come far enough along to give the rig a name. I’m happy to announce that I’ve dubbed this project Clackamas, in keeping with my tradition of naming my creations after Oregon rivers. The receiver is pretty… Read More A Sneak Peek at Project Clackamas