Thanks to some prompting from a Willamette builder who inquired about some performance issues with his rig, I was able to identify an error in the bill of materials which causes a significant degradation in receiver sensitivity. Fortunately the fix for this problem is very simple. Audio preamplifier collector resistor R49 was incorrectly called out… Read More Important Willamette Update
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
OK, time to fess up. Someone has been searching Google for “beaverton qrp” and has been landing on my blog. I’d love to know if there are other QRPers here in the Portland-area besides me and all of the big QRP luminaries like W7ZOI and KK7B. Please leave a comment below if that’s you!
Disclaimer: For those who don’t know, I’m an employee of Buddipole, and I do speak quite a bit of my positive experiences with some Buddipole products in this post. Yes hams, it’s that time of the year again. Field Day, the Super Bowl of the ham radio world. I haven’t had the best track record… Read More Field Day 2009
I got a few pleasant surprises this weekend regarding ham homebrewing websites. First off, I received a very nice e-mail from Jonathan, KB1KIX. He stumbled upon my documentation for the Willamette transceiver (AKA the qrp-l.org Group Project), and took the time to do a very nice write-up about it on his blog. There’s a lot… Read More New Homebrewing Finds on the Web
Well, I’ve pretty much put the finishing touches on my secret QRP project for a well-known QRP club. The beta testers are currently working on building it, and hopefully the club can make an announcement about the kit fairly soon. It’s not a very complicated circuit, but it’s somewhat novel and has a bit of… Read More Back from the Bunker
Last week, I was informed that everyone in our company would be receiving a temporary (but indefinite) 10% reduction in pay. To make matters worse, it looks like we will be taking more mandatory shutdown days in the current quarter; we’ve got five coming up over the next few months. This is also another open-ended… Read More Watch This Space
As I mentioned in a previous post, I did the calculations to change the AF filter in the Willamette from a low-pass filter with a 3.3 kHz cutoff to a peaked low-pass filter with a cutoff frequency nearer to 1 kHz. I finally got around to implementing the mod last night and got a chance… Read More Willamette AF Filter Mod
I finally got the proper binocular ferrite cores that I needed to build the W8DIZ 5 watt amp correctly. You can see my previous post on this amplifier here. In my last post, I noted that I was seeing some strangeness in the drive level circuitry. I found that I had a very bad connection… Read More W8DIZ 5 Watt CW Amplifier Analysis