I recently received a very interesting e-mail from Dave W8NF regarding a very spiffy looking labeling technique that he successfully used for his latest LogiKlipper prototype (BTW, LogiKlipper is going to kick the butt of the RF clipper manufactured by that other company in the South…). Here’s the details on how he did it: I… Read More A Nice Labeling Technique
Over the last week or so, I’ve been coming home from work nearly every morning thinking about ways to tweak the Clackamas (FDIM 2010 QRP Challenge) rig. I’m sure that Jennifer is wondering if I have OCD at this point. This morning I was able to stamp out the last few bugs in project and… Read More Sweet Success!
Our favorite fashion hacker/ham, Diana Eng, KC2UHB, has posted a new article on the Make Magazine blog with instructions on how to build an End-Fed Half Wave antenna tuner and deploy it with an antenna. (BTW, did you see that she was recently named to the ARRL Public Relations Committee? An excellent choice the League.)… Read More EFHWA Revisited
As I mentioned in a previous post a few days ago, I found a nice 2 watt mono audio amplifier board that’s a perfect addition to give speaker capability to a receiver with headphone output. I purchased four of these bad boys since they were so inexpensive (and I was paying for shipping from Hong… Read More Bench Audio Amplifier
Lately, I’ve found that eBay has been one of the best ways to beef up my junk box with inexpensive electronics components (eBay Stores are my preference, the auctions often aren’t that great). I purchased a nice SMD resistor/cap assortment from a company called Sure Electronics and found that they have some other goodies that… Read More Cheap Audio Amplifier Tip
Software Defined Radio is a technology which has always intrigued me, but something I just haven’t been able to devote a lot of time to yet. I’ve built an early model SoftRock and studied the basics of the theory. Not too long ago, I built up my own little version of a 40 meter SDR… Read More Subharmonic SDR
A little while ago, I got a hankering to work on a SSB transceiver. It’s something that I’ve never homebrewed before, and it seemed it like it might be fun to tackle. The BITX20 seemed like an obvious choice, and W7ZOI recently published an improved bidirectional amp which would be nice to try in the… Read More QRP SSB Transceiver in Progress
Although there are many days when I can barely stand the level of rudeness on QRP-L (and increasingly on qrp-l.org), I am sometimes reminded why I maintain my membership. Some recent events there have helped to boost up the numerator in the signal/noise ratio, and correspondingly, my interest. In case you haven’t followed much of… Read More Push It To The Limit
While I occasionally get a bit worried about ham radio having to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, there are encouraging signs that some hams get it. The two areas in ham radio where this seems most pronounced is in Radiosport and DXing/DXpeditions. Outside of the United States, these aspects of the… Read More This Is How You Do It
The VRX-1 receiver kit uses a TDA7052 audio amplifier IC, which is a bit different from your run-of-the-mill LM386. Because of its push-pull output, if you use a phones jack, you must isolate it from ground. This isn’t something you have to worry about if you use a non-conductive enclosure or if you have an… Read More DIY Isolated Jack