Archive for category: Amateur Radio

HAMRADIOSAFARI.COM

January 30, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

If you haven’t had a chance yet, try checking out Jack Dunigan’s HAMRADIOSAFARI.COM blog. He’s (from his sidebar) the Senior Management Leader of Aidchild Inc., a project which provides homes for children for orphans living with AIDS in Uganda. While that’s important far in excess of anything having to do with ham radio, he is […]

Crazy Simple 40m Transciever: MOSQUITO Minimalist Transceiver

January 28, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

This 40m transceiver only has around 16 parts, and only a single active device: the ubiquitous IRF510 power transistor which you can even get at Radio Shack. Okay, it’s not exactly a complete receiver: they wired it to a PC sound card, and run an SDR application to get receive audio, but still, impressive! ea3ghs […]

M1KTA’s QRP ham radio blog: PTO VFO

January 28, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

If you go back through lots of amateur radio designs, you’ll find many, many circuits that use the nearly uniquitous 365pf air spaced variale capacitors that were nearly ubiquitous up until about 25 years ago. In the last couple of decades however, they have become like Avatar’s unobtanium, seemingly impossible (or at least expensive) to […]

Book Review: The ARRL Antenna Designer’s Notebook by Brian Cake, KF2YN

January 27, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

The other day I was in HRO and scanning for some reading material for the long weekend. I ran across Brian Cake’s new book, The ARRL Antenna Designer’s Notebook. A brief skim of it showed that it actually covered a couple of interesting antenna types which I had never heard of: the Box Kite Yagi […]

Vicacopter

January 27, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

There has been a lot of work in recent years toward making amateur level UAVs. This one is a tricopter, and is completely open source. They claim that it can fly for “under $100 in parts, not including the airframe”. Sounds like a very cool project. It splits the computational load between an onboard pic […]

Upcoming Balloon Launch: Arizona Near Space Research

January 27, 2010 | Amateur Radio, Amateur Satellite | By: Mark VandeWettering

Another one of those nifty amateur balloon launches is scheduled for next Saturday, February 6: The vehicle will be a 1200g helium-filled latex balloon. The expected burst altitude will be 90,000 feet or higher. The flight is anticipated to last about 2.5 hours from launch to touchdown. Payload: In addition to ANSR flight computer/cross-band repeater […]

40m spots on WSPR

January 26, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’ve got the RFSPACE SDR-IQ hooked up as a receiver again, and using it to feed WSPR. There is a ton of loud RTTY signals swamping the 40m band in the vicinity of the WSPR signals, but I’m still getting some signals. Here is the reports thusfar this evening: Excerpt Addendum: Picked up CX2ABP in […]

Goodbye QRP-L…

January 25, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

I subscribe to quite a few mailing lists relating to ham radio. A few months back, I decided to give the QRP-L a whirl. Unlike many lists like the EMRFD list, QRP-L had a fairly high NSR (noise to signal ratio), but hey, it’s a mailing list. It doesn’t take long to skip over stuff […]

On properly operating a WSPR station…

January 25, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

Anyone who is subscribed to the QRP-L has likely been subjected to a long string of complaints against WSPR in the past week or so. This began with a generic complaint against a “consistent carrier” on 7.040. This rapidly decayed into a long series of rants against WSPR. Since I’m rather more fond of WSPR […]

XBM80-2 An Experimental 80m CW Transceiver G3XBM

January 23, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

Roger, G3XBM has a terrific blog and website, and is always tinkering things together that I find interesting and inspiring. This morning, I see that he’s got a small 2 transistor transceiver for 80m that looks like it could be really fun, and constructed from bits you’d probably find in your junkbox. I like the […]

10 more minutes of “The Cuban Lady” on 5.883 Mhz

January 23, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

I was bored, tuning around when someone on the #hamradio IRC channel mentioned that the “Cuban lady” numbers station was audible around 5.883Mhz. I was bored. I recorded 10 minutes of her. Now you can be bored too. The Cuban Lady, V2A recorded 1/22/2010, around 11:15PM PST

K6HX QRSS Grabber

January 20, 2010 | Amateur Radio, QRSS | By: Mark VandeWettering

For fun, I’ve got my new RFSPACE SDR-IQ running on my laptop using Spectrum Lab and monitoring the 30m QRSS beacon subband. I enabled its HTTP server, and now have set up a little cronscript to copy its display to my webserver once a minute. You can see an example display below (showing KC7VHS, AA5CK […]

Spectrum Lab + 30m + Lightning…

January 19, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

Well, we are beginning to get some lightning in the area, so my radio is disconnected, but before I did so, I managed to hook Spectrum Lab up to my SDR-IQ radio, and got these two DFCW signals: KC7VHS and WA5DJJ.

KnightsQRSS blog

January 17, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

Joachim, PA1GSJ has decided to put up a blog for the KnightsQRSS. I recommend all those interested in QRSS operations to go ahead and subscribe, then we’ll have a common place to talk besides the mailing list. That reminds me, I really do need to get my own site, QRSS.info working again. KnightsQRSS.

A Self Contained QRSS beacon…

January 17, 2010 | Amateur Radio | By: Mark VandeWettering

Paul, M1CNK, has a very nice webpage that details his QRSS beacon, constructed as several different kits assembled as modules. Very cool. qrssbeacon (wiltonpaul).