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
Yes, a belated Happy New Year greetings! It’s hard to believe that 2013 is already well under way. I figured it was about time to give you a quick update on what’s going on in the shack right now. First up is the discrete component grabber receiver for 14.141 MHz that I prototyped to be… Read More HNY
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 recently did quite a bit of pontificating about the diminished state of our online communities. It’s easy enough to complain, but the real measure of devotion is actually taking positive actions to help move things along. In that spirit, I was inspired by the recent announcement of Google+ Communities (a development that’s been sorely… Read More Community
For the first time in quite a while, I’ve taken a project from start to a complete finish in an enclosure. I wanted to have my prototype SSB QRP rig ready to take with me to Salmoncon, so I busted a move this weekend to tweak the last bits of the circuitry to my liking,… Read More SSB In A Box
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
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
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’m starting to build up the gear for the kitbiz to get off the ground, and the first large investment just arrived at the shack. Thanks to some blog posts from Eldon WA0UWH, I found AmScope.com, who sells all manner of microscopes for low prices. I ended up finding a scope that was very similar… Read More A New Toy for the Shack
Since FDIM 2010 is in the history books, it is my pleasure to finally publicly release my entry into the FDIM 2010 QRP Challenge: The Clackamas 40 Meter Transceiver. The rig is a VXO-tuned superhet that operates around 7.030 MHz. The heart of the design is the BF998 dual-gate MOSFET (which was popularized by W7ZOI… Read More The Clackamas QRP Transceiver