This morning we had the first Portland-area version of the Pie & Coffee, which we have informally dubbed the Eggs & Coffee since we are meeting at breakfast time. The meeting (and I use the term informally) was at the Peppermill restaurant in Aloha. In attendance was Dave W8NF, Carl WS7L, and myself. Not a… Read More Inaugural pQRP Portland Eggs & Coffee
OK, maybe not the ancients, but it has been a lot of fun listening to the old Jean Shepherd clips that Bill from SolderSmoke has been posting on his blog. I guess that I didn’t really get all of the raving that Bill was doing until I listened to one of the shows for myself.… Read More Wisdom of the Ancients
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it… Read More It Was the Worst of Times
Much to my chagrin, posting here has come to a screetching halt while I do my best to put out a big fire. I assure you that I shall return to more regular posting when I get things sorted out. Calgon, take me away…
Even though a homebrew return loss bridge is a relatively simple piece of gear to build, I’ve never gotten around to building one until now. Which is truly a shame, and something I don’t really have an excuse for, except perhaps laziness. I’m excited to add this essential gear to my stable of test equipment,… Read More Dual Gate MOSFET Investigations – Return Loss
Some days I feel like I can’t see the forest for the trees. After submitting my last dual gate MOSFET experiment to the EMRFD group for review, I got a nice note from Henning suggesting that I needed to bypass gate 2 directly. Of course, like a three-year old who has to constantly ask “Why?”,… Read More Dual Gate MOSFET Revelations from W7ZOI
Having determined some basic characteristics of the biasing of the BF998 dual gate MOSFET in a previous experiment, it was now time to look into the gain and AGC performance of the amplifier. A few changes were made to the original circuit to turn it into a proper RF amplifier. Test Equipment Power Meter: M3… Read More Dual Gate MOSFET Investigations – Gain and AGC
Lately, I have been using my Ubuntu Hardy Heron box for coding and programming my AVR projects using the simple combination of gedit, the avr-gcc toolchain and the USBtinyISP. It’s a little bit of a pain to get set up correctly, but it works very well once it’s up and running. I’ve been pretty happy… Read More Programming AVR Microcontrollers in Eclipse
A quick update to show that I have completed the pQRP LC meter and placed it in a really nice enclsoure. I finally made it down to Norvac to pick up a few enclosures and found that the Hammond 1590CBU was just about a perfect fit for the meter. It’s made of die-cast aluminum and… Read More pQRP LC Meter Complete
I’ve been a big fan of the 7th Son podcast novel trilogy since I first started listening last year. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, allow me to quote the synopsis from the 7th Son web site: The President of the United States is dead. He was murdered in the morning… Read More Post-Apocalyptic Ham Radio