Posts Tagged “electronics”

First Proper Hf Contact

May 20 , 2014
Today I'm at home watching the kids, and I decided to try some 20m contacts. After mucking about a bit with end fed half wave antennas, and not being happy with it, I decided to make the wire as per the instructions for the L-Match tuner I built (based on Peter, VK3YE's HF Portable youtube series), and 22m of wire appears to work much better than the 12m I did have. I made a contact with Ron, VK3AFW portable 4, as he was doing a SOTA activation on VK4/SE105, which is a distance of 1249.8 km from home and I got a report of 5 and 7, which I hope isn't too bad with my 5 watts output. Yay :) (read more...)

Beach40 Better Coverage!

May 12 , 2014
Well, after some help from the [Minimalist-QRP](https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Minimalist_QRP_Transceivers/info) yahoo group and members of the #technest irc channel, I've got my oscillator going a bit better! It now covers from 7.0041 MHz to 7.2405 MHz, a much more useful range of the 40m band! In the end I used two 7.2 MHz ceramic resonators in parallel, with the O leg of a jaycar varicap and a 1 µH inductor in series with that. (read more...)

Beach40 Start

May 1 , 2014
I've started building Peter Parker [VK3YE](http://vk3ye.com)'s 40m Dual Side Band transciever, completing the oscillator Manhattan Style:
I've built it with some 7.2MHz resonators from [MiniKits](http://minikits.com.au), and with the 60-160 pF variable cap I have, it gets me from 6.938MHz to 7.049MHz. Which is not terribly useful for the 20m band (7.0 -> 7.3 MHz). So I'll have to tweak things and work out how to get more swing from the oscillator. (read more...)

Mst2 20m Buildlog Day Something

Apr 30 , 2014
Well, after getting my MST2 in an enclosure and looking Ok:
I went to a friendly ham's workshop and started aligning it. The receive slug tuning and mixer balancing went perfectly well. When we got to doing the transmit tuning, things started to go a bit skee-whiff! The MST2 turned off. So we replaced the fuse, which promptly blew, and another! (read more...)

Mst2 20m Buildlog Day 2 And 3

Apr 20 , 2014
Well, yesterday we continued the odyssey, and got all the capacitors and transistors in, finishing off today with the transformers and chokes, pin headers and crystals, so we're all done for the easy bits!
I had a few oddities, the instructions specified 1.8pF NPO caps, but the kit came with 2pF caps in place. I have a left over 2 pin header (which I just realised should go on the VFO input!), and no 3 pin header for the DDS-VFO power, a bit odd, but easily worked around :) (read more...)

Mst2 20m Buildlog Day1

Apr 19 , 2014
In continuation of my radio building, I have started on my [OzQRP](http://ozqrp.com) MST2, 20m band SSB radio kit. Ordered on Wednesday, it arrived Thursday afternoon! It helps that I live quite close to where they're sent from! (read more...)

Rf Probe

Apr 5 , 2014
Well, I started my radio building journey today, by building an RF probe: (read more...)