brainwagon

Well, I was kind of bored, so I decided to tack together a little CW transmitter. I had picked up a little 40m kit from Ramsey Electronics. It’s a really simple kit: it took me about two hours to solder the entire thing together, I fired it up, and it works! I only had two problems: one was a molded inductor which didn’t seem to match what was described in the instructions, but it was the only inductor I had left when I had put all the rest of them in, so I wired it in, and it seems to work, and the other was my fault: I misplaced a bunch of 0.01 microfarad caps, and thought they were missing until i found them under my work mat. It’s actually a pretty nice kit, including a case and all the knobs and panels. It looks pretty spiffy next to my TenTec receiver that I built last year. Now, all I need is a key, and I need an adapter to wire it to my antenna, and… well.. I better get practicing on my morse. Pictures and video to come.

For the next week or so, Richard Garriot will be aboard the ISS. Richard’s dad was the first astronaut to use ham radio to talk to radio amateurs from orbit, and Richard will be operating ham radio during his stay, including the ability to send slow scan television images directly from the ISS. To get a bit of a head start, AMSAT configured AO-51 to transmit SSTV images, which I tried to record using my hand held yagi. As you can see, it wasn’t that great, but the ISS should have about 20x the radiated power, so I still might luck out and get some good images.

You can look at images as they are downloaded via the ARISS SSTV blog.