AmateurRadio.com

After building the “Accurate LC Meter Kit” from Electronics-DIY.com, I turned to their “1Hz – 2MHz XR2206 Function Generator Kit”. All parts necessary to complete the kit were included, though not exactly as pictured on their webpage — two of the WIMA capacitors had been replaced with substitutes and there was no IC socket. All components were through-hole; soldering the kit together went quickly and easily.

If you build one of these kits you’ll need to provide your own power source as well as your own pin-connectors (if you choose to use the pins provided). As with the LC Meter, I used a size M coaxial DC power jack to accept a plug from one of the wall-wart power supplies I have around here. I didn’t bother to install a power switch in either unit since I won’t be using them very often; I won’t leave them plugged in between uses.

The fellow at the local Radio Shack gave me some pin-connectors for free, clipping them off of some battery packs that were in a box for recycling, though he only had two-pin connectors. Since one of the pin-sets has three pins, I just soldered a piece of hookup-wire to the third pin. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t bother with these pins — I’d just solder hookup wire right to the PCB. By the way, if you ever try soldering to a pin make sure you clip a heat-sink to the pin before heating it up. The plastic base of those pins melts pretty quickly!

I chose a plastic project box from Radio Shack to house this function generator. Using a Dremel tool with an engraving cutter (at the lowest speed — 5,000 RPM), I put three notches in one side of the box for the potentiometers, a notch on one end for the two switches, and ground down all four stanchions on the floor of the box since otherwise the potentiometers would have extended too high to allow the lid to fit. That Dremel tool sure is handy! A few knobs from Radio Shack finished off the project.

The two outboard switches allow you to select between three waveforms — sine, triangle, and square. I don’t have an oscilloscope so I can’t tell you how the waveforms look, but I can at least tell you that the sine wave sounded pure when I hooked my headphones up to the output with a matching pad. I am pleased to report that the signal generated by this function generator is very stable. Four DIP switches on the PCB allow you to select between four frequency-ranges, and two potentiometers allow you to tune within the selected range. One of these two potentiometers provides coarse tuning, and the other provides fine tuning. The third potentiometer controls the amplitude of the signal generated (note: amplitude decreases as you turn this potentiometer clockwise).

If you build this kit you’ll want to hook it up to a frequency counter. Two pads on the PCB are provided for this purpose. I have a piece of coax hanging out of the back of the box for connection to my own frequency counter — not that you have to use coax, but it was handy for terminating with a BNC connector. (If I were really classy I would have put this coax through its own hole in the project box, but hey, this is a piece of test equipment — I just ran it through the big hole I made for the RCA connector.) When I hooked up my frequency counter I noticed that the published ranges for each DIP switch were just rough approximations, but I was pleased to see that this frequency generator covered the entire published range and more — up to about 2.4 MHz, if I recall correctly.

Here is a slideshow of photographs I took of the completed function generator:

Click to view slideshow.

The source impedance of the generator is 600 ohms and the output is intended to be terminated in a 600-ohm load. In my next post, I hope to discuss the construction of a minimum-loss matching pad to hook it up to a piece of equipment that has a different input impedance.

Todd Mitchell, NØIP, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Minnesota, USA. He can be contacted at [email protected].

In this episode of Linux in the Ham Shack, our heroes manage to stay more or less on topic, which means there might be some actual content for the listeners. Hooray for small miracles. In segment one, Richard discusses his adventure at the Texoma Hamarama in Ardmore, Oklahoma. In segment two, the boys get all Ham Geeky™ about hamqth.com and all the neat things one can do with it. In the third and final segment, the Linux Geeky™ topic is CUPS and how to making printing easier for those who wish to do it using Linux.

73 de The LHS Guys

Russ Woodman, K5TUX, co-hosts the Linux in the Ham Shack podcast which is available for download in both MP3 and OGG audio format. Contact him at [email protected].

The weather was too nice to sit inside. In the low 70′s with a very slight breeze so after church and a short nap I headed out to try my hand at giving out points in the QRP ARCI Homebrew Sprint. My startup was delayed by curious folks in the lakeside park wondering what in the world I was doing and how I got that string and wire so high up in the nice tall pine trees!

I checked 40m first with an inverted L end fed half wave and my trusty Stuner (KI6S Stu’s kit) and decided to change to 20m after not hearing much activity. 20m was decent and there were a few of the big gun qrp contest regulars shooting it out. N4BP, K4BAI, K0ZK and a few other were running stations while the little guys like me were mostly doing Search and Pounce. Hey it is fun even if you cannot run a frequency, right?

Sun went down about 1745 local and the mosquitos were quick to find the hole in my hat and attack. This time I remembered the repellant and after a few bites I took time to spray my hat and hair and the backs of my hands. The temperature dropped fast and my hands got a bit stiff pounding out the morse code on my J-47 straight key. 50 degrees is cold for a Florida evening. The darkness also brought out the raccoon family and it was fun to shine my flashlight on them and watch them stand on their hind legs and stare into the night wondering what the funny guy was doing in the dark.

40m came to life after sunset and I finished with a respectable 20 contacts for about 3 hours of operation and was able to give some Christmas contacts to the needy fellow contesters who were chasing another certificate. What a great way to spend the afternoon… by the lake in the sun and outdoors playing radio.

Kelly McClelland, K4UPG, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Florida, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

I’m not the first blogger to mention this item of news but it is certainly one topic that I could not allow to pass by without comment. According to the IARU Region 1 website, the EU Commission will be revising the EMC Directive and removing the exemption of amateur radio kits and modified equipment from its provisions. Products that are currently exempted would be subject to inspection and certification, a process which would make the production of kits hopelessly uneconomic. It would also potentially spell the end of home building and modification and prevent the importation of kits from the USA and other havens of relative sanity. No, this isn’t one of my April 1st spoof stories released from the Drafts folder by mistake!

I would hope that the IARU, the RSGB and other European amateur radio societies will make urgent representations to the EC to stop this proposal. But this is just one scary example of why I and many other like-minded people feel that we in the UK would be better off out of the European Union.

In fact, most of Europe would be better off without it in my opinion. Could somebody explain why, at a time when European governments are supposed to be cutting back on public expenditure, they continue contributing billions every year (only recently having voted an increase – the UK alone contributes £51 million per day) in order to fund this unelected and unaccountable Commission to employ people who live in cloud cuckoo land to produce unwanted, unnecessary and unasked-for legislation?

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

One of the blogs I read this morning contained a link to this article in the Mail Online “Stocking up for Doomsday.” The scenario it describes might seem to many of you a bit far-fetched but there are quite a few Americans who wouldn’t think so. You don’t have to look far to find web forums where people discuss survival plans. These people have guns to defend their families and their food and fuel store. They will use ham radios to communicate when the phones and internet are down.

This Doomsday picture doesn’t seem so far-fetched to my wife Olga. Few people in the West even know about this as it received hardly any coverage in the media at the time but in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union Ukraine went bankrupt. Ukrainians who had money in the bank lost it all (and most have still never been compensated for it.) Food disappeared from the shops – not that there was much to start with. People stood on station platforms and begged for food from trains travelling through to Moscow. For years Olga suffered from stomach problems as a legacy from that period when she almost starved. Yes, this happened in a developed country that is right next door to Europe.

The Ukraine government allocated plots of land so people could create kitchen gardens and grow their own food but these were usually a long way from where people lived and anything you did manage to grow got stolen. Olga and her mother avoided complete starvation only because her mother had food coupons as a war veteran which entitled her to obtain military rations.

It’s easy to think “it couldn’t happen here” but the number of economists who are starting to predict a complete economic collapse is enough to make you start wondering if that is just being complacent. Most of us older people who have savings for our retirement have already experienced anxiety about the security of those savings. We naively trust that the British government will honour its promises to guarantee the first £50,000 of individual savings held in British banks but how do we know it could afford to? And how long would it be before we received that compensation? We’d have starved long before, I’m sure of it.

And what about businesses, whose deposits are not guaranteed: businesses that we imagine would provide the food and services that we would need but which wouldn’t have the money to keep trading? Panic buying will have long since emptied the shops of food. What would we do then? Make soup out of five pound notes?

Happy New Year? I wonder.

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

Series Four Episode Twenty-Seven of the ICQ Podcast has been released. News Stories include :-

• SwissCube update
• Experimental D-Star repeater
• Miracle Antenna suspends order-taking
• Digital pictures sent from balloon
• Vietnam operation
• UZ7HO Soundmodem software
• Russian Military OFDM in 40m
• ARRL to inspire Hackers and Innovators
• German CBer's get 12 watts SSB
• 70cm to help paralyzed patients?

Your feedback, Ed Durrant (VK2ARE) provides a Christmas Australian report and Chris Howard (2E0CTH) reports from the London Science Museum for Amateur Radio Operators.

Colin Butler, M6BOY, is the host of the ICQ Podcast, a weekly radio show about Amateur Radio. Contact him at [email protected].

Some weeks ago I blogged that I was installing Ubuntu on my laptop as I was going to give another operating system a try. It's been over a month now and the learning curve has been slow. It's not because Ubuntu is difficult and arduous it is Bill Gates who has a firm hold on me.  We all learn new things different ways and the trick is to find how best you learn.  As for me the best way I learn things depends on what I am trying to learn. When it comes to operating systems...well.... it has and always been the Windows systems.  When one of Bill's OS's where changed there was the frustration factor of just trying to make it work. This is where I am at with Ubuntu; I have downloaded some programs and once downloaded for the life of me I can't find them. It occurred to me the other day that I am looking for these programs with a Windows mindset.  I began to head over to Youtube to check out some learning videos. The problem here was I would have to keep stopping,
trying what they said then getting back to the Youtube video and then back to the same spot in Ubuntu again. That was just a receipe for frustration as this game plan was far from smooth going. It was off to some user groups but that turned out most of the time to be a hunting trip. I would end up going to so many links that the original question was forgotten and at my age that process does not take  long.  I came to the conclusion the written word in the form of books was the way to go to solve this monkey on my back.   I hope to become more familiar with the Ubuntu OS now and get past the wall I have come up against. Over the Christmas break I will be taking a leisurely approach with the help of some books and hands on learning to get Ubuntu in check.
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].