I’ve got a quick grab bag of OpenBeacon updates for your reading pleasure tonight. First off is the wonderful find and awesome mechanical construction skills of WA4KBD. He posted a message on the Etherkit forum about an extruded aluminum enclosure that he found on eBay that works perfectly for OpenBeacon. He brought pushbutton S1 and… Read More OpenBeacon Miscellany
Even though I’ve been insanely busy with home life and running Etherkit, I felt like I needed to get out and do a bit of operating to get back in touch with that aspect of amateur radio. In the past few years, Dave W8NF has invited me to come up to the OTVARC Field Day… Read More Field Day 2012
My apologies for being a bit neglectful of the blog. Since a few weeks before FDIM, I’ve been in a mad frenzy to get OpenBeacon kits into production, get the Etherkit website up and running, do a better job of completing OpenBeacon documentation, supporting the inevitable hiccups that come with a new product release, and start… Read More OpenBeacon In Production
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
Update Here’s a quote from Wes describing the equipment that he was using on his end: I hope that my signal was OK when we worked. I was in the midst of wrapping up a frequency synthesizer project and had it running on the rig for the first time. When I heard you… Read More Respect
I feel pretty guilty that I’ve let the blog content slide in 2011. As you can imagine, between having a near-toddler cruising around the house, doing a major redesign of a QRP transceiver, and trying to bootstrap a new small business, free time is at a premium (and my wife and kid owns what little there… Read More That Which Does Not Kill Us
Things have been a bit quiet on the blog front as I work to get the CC-40 beta up and running. Last month, I had an initial set of beta PCBs manufactured, but I made a really big mistake. Somehow I bungled the footprint of the ATmega168 microcontroller, and it ended up much smaller than… Read More What’s Going On With The CC-40?