More Musings about Etherkit’s Future As I mentioned in my previous post, we are still undergoing a stage of tremendous upheaval in our household. I won’t really know how our new life will shake out quite yet, but I am certain that my time will be more restricted. I think I’ll have a good grasp… Read More Wideband Transmission #7
CC1 Beta Kit For Sale I ended up having one leftover kit from the CC1 beta test and I thought that an experience builder might like to build it. There are a few minor mods to perform to the PCB, so it’s best suited for someone who feels comfortable with that. The (hopefully) final PCB… Read More Wideband Transmission #2
Last night after the rest of the family was in bed, I was hacking on the CC1 firmware to add the BFO calibration routine so that I could get an accurate readout of my receive frequency. After successfully completing that task at the late hour of 0130, I decided to cruise 40 meters to see… Read More The Thrill of QRP DX
A brief post to show you the CC1 prototype, now inside of its aluminum enclosure. This is the actual enclosure that will be used for production, but I will have the end caps custom cut and silkscreened, so you won’t have to do it yourself. Pardon my questionable metalworking skills, and please note the the… Read More CC1 #1
Two days ago, I received my pack of 10 CC1 prototype PCBs from Seeed Studio. The excitement was too much, so I immediately started building the first CC1 prototype as soon as my wife got home from work. Not surprisingly, I didn’t go to bed until I completed the build, sometime around 3 AM. I… Read More First RF
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
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
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
The year is not starting out as well as I had hoped. Back during the beta test of the CC-20 I had set a goal to complete my revisions and be ready to sell production kits by 1 January 2012. Obviously that date has come and gone and I’m still not on the market. A… Read More Catching Up With Etherkit
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