Having completed my little 40m QRP transmitter (pictures to come sometime soon), I was scouting around trying to find the most appropriate keying options. While a straight key is the obvious choice, I can’t help but thin that a little bit of electronics in the form of a keyer would help me make better sounding Morse. There are some excellent choices out there, such as the Norcal QRP keyer and the K1EL keyer, but you can also make a keyer just using some very simple ICs.
Monthly Archives: October 2008
Assembled a 40m QRP transmitter…
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.
Slow Scan Television via AO-51
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.
Haven’t I seen this in a movie before?
Still, it’s kind of cool.
Latest WSPR reception map…
This week I picked up a spot from 9V1LF in Singapore, as well as a few other more mundane state side locations. I’ve had reception reports from 95 separate stations, from something like 38 states, so I thought it was about time to try to make a new map.
Addendum: Redid the map, which is bigger, and includes a plot of contours of distance from my home location to points on the map. It also includes an arc to Hawaii, just because it looked left out sitting by itself out there in the middle of the Pacific.
WB5FKC on 40m
30m was crapping out after about 2:00AM UTC, and I had heard that Christian, WB5FKC was going to be sending QRSS Morse on 40m, just above 7.0008Mhz, so I tuned down and tried recording some. And, miracle of miracles, I got him:
If you read across (and know morse) you can see that it says (with a bit of interpolation) WB5FKC WB5F.. and then cuts out. He reports using a transmit power of only 50mw, and is almost exactly 1000 miles from my location. The recording covers the time from 10:08 to 10:44 or so PDT.
Addendum: I tweaked around with my FFT settings a bit, did a bit of noise reduction and the like, and managed to get this. If you click on it, you can see that there is a bit of chirp as each dot and dash ramp up in frequency over the four and twelve seconds that each takes, respectively.
