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I have been working on a homebrew 40 meter CW transceiver for over a year now. It’s a superhet design, with all discrete components built ugly style on copper clad board. I’ve taken various circuit designs I’ve built in the past and added some new ones. The project has been a great opportunity for me to use and learn about the NanoVNA. Every stage I built, tested, and tweaked with the NanoVNA, and recorded results in my lab notebook. The rig features a 4 Mhz IF, mainly due to me having a ton of these crystals. I built wide and narrow filters, just futzing around with various crystal and capacitor combinations, and implemented diode switching of the filters. The filters aren’t commercial grade, but they’re definitely good enough. The final PA uses an IRF510. I had to do several iterations of this before I got something to work. At 12 volts I get 4 or 5 watts, but I normally run it at 24 volts to get 10 watts. I’ve had it up to 36 volts, outputting 20 watts. I’ve been wanting to try 48 volts.

For the longest time the rig was just PC boards on my bench interconnected with alligator clips, but a few months ago I made it a bit more respectable and mounted the PC boards on a pine board and completed some permanent wiring. There are still several alligator clips jumpering things to make it work. I tend to leave the rig on all the time and just listen to it in the background while doing other things in my office/lab/shack. I even leave it on when I’m experimenting with or adding a new circuit, if possible.

I’ve made several contacts here and there when I stumbled upon someone calling CQ for POTA, a contest, or SKCC. I honestly haven’t been doing any logging or any paper code copying. There’s something satisfying about just walking over to the rig, tapping the alligator clip-connected straight key, and having a quick contact. There’s no keyboard, no waterfall, and nothing to navigate with a mouse. It’s just me and a bunch of components communicating over the ether.

The ARRL Ethics and Elections Committee has recused a director for publishing a book that competes with ARRL publications, creating a conflict of interest. I find this strange as ARRL is a non-profit amateur radio advocacy organization, not a for-profit company driven by shareholders’ financial interests. I thought, perhaps naively, the goals of ARRL publications were to promote and enable the hobby, and not primarily be a line of business or product offering that competes in the marketplace.

I find the framing of this really troubling, with the “ongoing conflict of interest” being caused “through the creation and publication of a book which competes with one or more ARRL publications”. If the book was published in the public domain and available for free, it still would compete with ARRL publications, and arguably would still be considered an ethics violation, despite such publication being totally altruistic and compatible with ARRL’s mission of amateur radio advancement. Such competition could perhaps also be claimed for publishing a website of antenna designs, or volunteering for a non-ARRL VE organization.

There is a conflict of interest here, however it’s ARRL’s interest in publication offerings that is in conflict with its primary mission of advancing amateur radio.

This article was originally published on Radio Artisan.

Found in my grandfather’s ham radio stash….

This article was originally posted on Radio Artisan.

My favorite amateur radio event of the year, by far, is Field Day. Each year ARRL issues a new Field Day logo. Let’s take a look at logos of years past.

First, let’s get the mediocre ones out of the way.

Now let’s look at some good logos.

2007 and 2013 had cute cartoon logos. Not bad.

2005 and 2014 were yagi antenna years.

Radio waves are a common theme, as seen in the 2006, 2015, 2019, 2010, and 2022 logos. In 2008 we had Ride the Waves, but with a sine wave representation. (Hey, why are there two of us transmitting on the same frequency?) This logo is nice. It is visually appealing, free-flowing, yet more sophisticated than a lot of the logos. But ditch the yellow. Please.

2016 and 2017 had monochrome style designs. I like both of these as they have a simple, yet cool feeling. 2017 was another yagi year, though we got stacked yagis as a bonus. Are those more radio waves, and emanating from a boot? In any case, I give FD16 an A+ for the outdoorsy color choice and the hiking boot footprint. Well done.

And now for the best logo, evar…

This article was originally posted on Radio Artisan.

Late last year I applied an operating system update to my Macbook and my solid state hard drive peed all over itself. Long story short, I was unable to boot from the drive or read it and I had to start all over with a different hard drive and a fresh OS installation. I was able to recover all my files from the cloud except a recent backup of my logbook. It appears backups of my logbook, which MacLogger DX apparently stored in a hidden directory not in the Documents folder, was not being backed up to the cloud. The last logbook backup I can locate is from 2015.

But honestly, I don’t care. I’m declaring logbook bankruptcy and starting over. I already have some plaques on the wall for DXCC and WAS. I’m not in any race or competition. I’m not contributing any more to the radio art if I’ve made 10,000 QSOs rather than 500.

It’s a new day, and a fresh new logbook. It’s rather refreshing.

This article originally appeared on Radio Artisan.

Late last year I applied an operating system update to my Macbook and my solid state hard drive peed all over itself. Long story short, I was unable to boot from the drive or read it and I had to start all over with a different hard drive and a fresh OS installation. I was able to recover all my files from the cloud except a recent backup of my logbook. It appears backups of my logbook, which MacLogger DX apparently stored in a hidden directory not in the Documents folder, was not being backed up to the cloud. The last logbook backup I can locate is from 2015.

But honestly, I don’t care. I’m declaring logbook bankruptcy and starting over. I already have some plaques on the wall for DXCC and WAS. I’m not in any race or competition. I’m not contributing any more to the radio art if I’ve made 10,000 QSOs rather than 500.

It’s a new day, and a fresh new logbook. It’s rather refreshing.

This article originally appeared on Radio Artisan.

I must have driven past these fells hundreds of times and have always had a want to activate them . Not because they are big or impressive. Some tiddlers just happen to be as much fun as the big ones. Not many contacts but it was windy and getting colder as the day wore on. Here’s the route, you’ll see that my watch went a bit mad at the summit of Sale Fell.Maybe the RF isn’t good for it