A few different things have conspired to bring me back around to finish up the documentation for the Willamette, as well as forcing me to re-examine a few elements of the rig design. One of those things was an e-mail from AA0ZZ (really cool to hear from the designer of the PIC-EL and the IQPro)… Read More Another Look at the Willamette AF Filter
Check this out, if you are interested in launching your own CubeSat into orbit, look no further than this kit: The 10x10x10cm, 1kg CubeSat standard has evolved to become the basis for one of the most widely accepted families of nanosatellite designs. Originally proposed by Professor Bob Twiggs at Stanford University, it and its companion… Read More Turnkey CubeSat
I got my September QST in the mail last week and when I was doing my preliminary flip through the pages, an article caught my eye. Featured on the pages were quite a few screen shots of an application running on the very distinctive Ubuntu Human theme. It turns out that the article is about… Read More Must Be Something in the Water
I use Google Reader to keep track off many of the websites and blogs that I’m interested in, especially the ham radio and QRP blogs. I’ve noticed that QRSS seems to be popping up quite a bit in the QRP zeitgeist lately. I suspect that Bill at SolderSmoke has been the catalyst for much of this.… Read More QRSS All the Rage
Completely by accident, I happened to stumble upon a program that gives you an easy way to learn DSP techniques by focusing on the underlying algorithms and not the hardware details. The program is called BasicDSP and is available as a Linux source tarball or Windows executable. BasicDSP was created by PA3FWM and PE1OIT as… Read More Learning DSP Concepts with BasicDSP
Pardon me while I take a moment to direct your attention to the website of KC5WA, who has been simultaneously working on builds of both my Tualatin and Willamette transceivers. RC does an excellent and really thorough job in documenting his work on his projects, and his web pages are a great resource for those… Read More Another Willamette in the Wild
A quick note to let you know that I’ll be off the grid this weekend for a little “staycation”, as we go camping up at Green Peter Reservoir (hey, no snickering you immature guys out there…LOL). I’m going to pack the FT-817ND, 5 AH gel-cell, the PAC-12, and a few end-fed wires to toss into… Read More Much-Needed Escape
I just got my Summer copy of the QRP Quarterly and got a nice little surprise in the 2008 FDIM Building Competetion and Show & Tell article on page 32. Right down at the bottom-center of the page is a photo of the W8BH entry, his homebrew Willamette rig! Bruce did an incredible job with… Read More Willamette QRP Rig Spotted in the Wild
Today I finished construction on the circuitry for the RMS-to-DC converter described on the October 1992 QST article by W0IYH on measuring receiver performance. This is an article that I found on the EMRFD CD when I was searching for information on measuring the noise figure of amplifiers and receivers. I didn’t find the article… Read More W0IYH RMS-to-DC Converter
What’s going on at the NT7S shack? The project currently taking up most of my shack time is the construction of the W0IYH RMS-to-DC converter so that I can make accurate noise mesurements. I’m probably about 2/3 finished with this project, with most of the components placed on the copper clad but none of the… Read More Mid-Summer Shack Update