AmateurRadio.com

Two things have happened over the last week. The first was that after what must be 10 years I had a decent crash on my mountain bike. Nothing too bad, just a reminder that I’m not 16 any more and that duckboards have 2 parts. One part grippy, one part slippy. The grippy bit is for the tyres not hands, kness, elbows and shoulders. The slippy bits are not for tyres. Enough of that though.

This forced lay off has had me googling rather than building stuff (that occasionally works) and I found what looks like a nice idea. From the video it looks like a simple, portable qrp hf transceiver. There isn’t much detail on the functionality but a quick dig revealed gerbers etc so a build-it-yourself could be on the cards. Without further ado, take it away Mr Colton

There’s a bit more detail here a the hackaday.io project page and a block diagram below

pinched from Hackaday

See https://www.youtube.com/user/ve3cnu

It is always fun to take a peek into other people’s radio shacks. This YouTube channel is hosted by Canadian VE3CNU. He has a nice shack and some nice gear.

I am amazed by how much money some people seem able to spend on the hobby.  This is, of course, a very individual decision and I am not criticizing anyone. Some pay a lot more to play golf, for example.

What I would say though is the hobby can be enjoyed on a shoestring if you build simple QRP radios and/or buy good second hand rigs. My own approach has been a mix of some homebrew and a few commercial rigs.

Others prefer to buy their rigs new (often with long guarantees) and experiment with antennas and peripherals. This is a very individual hobby that can be enjoyed in a number of ways.

Others just enjoy chatting on the air.

Sunday saw the annual pilgrimage to Blackpool for the NARSA rally at the Norbreck hotel in Blackpool. The club has a stand there and its a good place to promote the club, meet up with on air and social media friends as well as selling your old crap valuable things.

There are always a good number of stands with the main suppliers going toe to toe with the the back room business. This year I met up with Dennis from Kanga who helped to remove some of the hard earned cash I made for the new Arduino based Sudden TX, RX and DDS. I’m a sucker for Arduino so it wasn’t too hard for my resolve to crumble.

I also plumped for a desk stand for my IC-7000 from M6TNW at a fraction of the cost of a commercial version (There was a tenner off at the rally as well no contest really) as well as the worlds most expensive separation cable for the IC-7000. I daren’t say how much it was as it brings me out in a cold sweat. Needless to say it keeps the XYL happy as things are ‘tidy’.

It was sad to see that as a forty something year old I was one of the youngest there. But I’m aware that the RSGB are on the case so hopefully we’ll see a reduction in the average age before too long. It’ll be another year before I go to another rally so I’m glad that I went and thanks to Dave and his team for putting on the event.

I don’t really have time to do a full write-up, but I made a “quick” trip to American Samoa over the weekend to plan a future scientific instrument installation and managed to get on the air for a few hours.  Here are some snapshots from my phone.

Well the node is up and seems to be running reasonably well. The software is reporting distortion on the input but I think that is more to do with the close rf during testing. There are now some isolating transformers and a resistor in series to knock back a bit of signal and it seems to be ok when I connect through the web interface. Perhaps some other measures might help. Its still running on vox but until I can work out how to do the ptt easily I’ll stick with that.

I’ll leave it on for a while and see what I get back from the locals. Here’s a reminder of the details

Callsign – MB7IAH-L

Node number – 243350

Freq – 144.9625 Mhz

CTCSS – 103.5Hz

Power – 1.6w (hold onto your rf hats!)

Antenna – 1/2 wave dipole

All powered by a Raspberry Pi, Svxlink and a Baofeng UV-5R.

Enjoy

I’ve used AutoCAD for a while (because I had a work licence) but since being promoted I didn’t need CAD software…boooo (I also had an inventor licence but that wasn’t used as much). Anyway, back to the point.

I made a couple of front and rear panels for the QRPLabs ultimate 3 WSPR transmitter and thought that someone else might like to make one. Well if you do the dxf files are below. You can modify them easily in Draftsight (A free 2D bit of CAD software) that accepts AutoCAD files. The file shows the parts embedded on a sheet that can be used for laser cutting and your local FabLab or similar.

Anyway enjoy

AutoCAD Files

I’ve had a little play about whilst avoiding the household viewing of ‘Strictly come dancing’ aka ‘celebrity showing off’ with the APRS maps you can embed through APRS.fi

I’ve added a little map to the site here

Just a bit of fun but I do like APRS. Great for the fells.

Trouble is it seems to default to Helsinki regardless of the lat / long you put in the script