brainwagon

Or more precisely, is it oscillating, or is it not oscillating? This is my first attempt at actually trying to build a circuit using Manhattan style construction (so please, be kind!) I fetched the oscillator circuit from EMRFD, and tacked it together with some parts from my junkbox. The only substitution that I made was […]

I was looking at the website for fldigi, and noticed that they added a guide which has waterfalls, spectrum, and sounds for each of their supported modes. If you are a beginner, it’s pretty hard to identify some of the lesser known modes, so this can be very helpful. Digital Modes.

Over at KE9V.net, Jeff has had an epiphany. I thought I’d give a couple of comments. Many hams seem to be completely paralyzed that the hobby that they love is dying, or at least changing into something they no longer think is truly amateur radio. I see this on amateur radio forums more than I […]

OH6DC has a great webpage detailing some interesting homebrew QRP rigs which should serve as interesting inspiration for the homebrewer.

A nice little project on packaging the kind of RF probe circuit that I’ve been playing with into the body of an ordinary ballpoint pen. N5ESE’s Ballpoint RF Probe

I ran across Jeremy Chase’s nifty ham radio website when it was mentioned on QRP-L. It’s really quite cool: Jeremy is just beginning to get on the air using kit transceiver (a Wilderness SST), a kit tuner (One of Steve Weber’s cool kits), and a homebrew dummy load that he put together, along with about […]

Okay, after having read WB8ICN’s postings on QRPedia, I decided to try to measure the impedence of both of my meters. I dug a 1.5M ohm resistor out of the pile, and hooked some jumper leads to it. I then did the following: Measure the resistance of the resistor, using the DVM as an ohm […]

Steve Weber has a nice Youtube video on surface mount soldering: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah5HEjDTHUo

Well, I’ve been mucking around with my RF probe circuitry a bit tonight, and encountered something pretty strange. I have two digital multimeters lying around, and my newly rebuilt RF probe/dummy load that I described earlier. I hook one multimeter to it, and I get a reading of 14 volts. I get my other cheapie […]

This duplicates a posting I made on the wsprnet.org website. Aircraft reflection? Or something else? | WSPRnet On Saturday, Jan 10th, I had my transmit-only beacon that I wrote sending both a visual MEPT indicator (the MV that you can see in the attached image) and the WSPR beacon, and tried out a simple program […]

More digging around for information about the RF probe, I found this link to the NJQRP’s presentation at Atlanticon 2000. It’s a cute little QRPP rig built Manhattan style, and includes a discussions of the RF probe setup to measure it’s output. Neat. Atlanticon Kit – It’s a Snap!.

My dummy load experiment still has a few unanswered questions, but I found that the ARRL Handbook has had a circuit which is basically what I built, minus the one series resistor. It looks like this: Okay, they use a germanium diode with considerably lower voltage drop, and include a 4.7M ohm resistor in series […]

G3XBM dug around and found inks to a couple of sites with interesting historic recordings of ham radio transmissions. Here’s one, and here’s another with lots of shortwave recordings. G3XBM’s posting.

Okay, this is pretty basic stuff really, but it’s part of my trip toward additional homebrewing, and it might be of some vague interest, so here we go. If anyone spots anything horribly wrong here, please feel free to help me learn by leaving me a comment here. Before Thanksgiving, I was having quite a […]

Kelly, AB9RF has a nice article, written in response to the question “Why the Hell Would You Want a Ham Radio?” It’s a very good question, and one what we as hams I think don’t do a very good job answering. Her answer is excellent, and well worth reading. Here is my somewhat shorter take […]