brainwagon

Well, this morning I decided I wanted to get the K1EL keyer that I put together mounted in a proper aluminum case. The sad thing was, I didn’t really pay enough attention to internal clearances, with the net result that I did a pretty crappy job. I’ll probably try again sometime soon, but in the […]

Yesterday’s linked article about negative resistance oscillators got me thinking about the possibility of creating a radio where literally every component was made by hand. Okay, I’m not quite ready to make my own wire, but the zinc oxide oscillator that Nyle Steiner seemed like it was only one step away from reaching a reasonable […]

The Spark, Bang, Buzz website has a lot of really interesting low cost electronics experiments involving homebrewing electronics components. Like making your own vacuum tubes, cathode ray tubes, and negative resistance devices. The last is very cool: using a heat treated piece of zinc, you can make a simple oscillator which was documented in the […]

Courtesy of Bill Meara over at SolderSmoke, check out this link to the HF Beacon for MIT Atlantic Balloon Program. It’s a pretty simple 1.5w transmitter for 30m that could be built for about $25. It’s heart is a 74HC540 octal inverter chip, and uses two 2n7000 transistors. Very neat!

When you get an amateur radio license, you are issued a callsign. Mine was KF6KYI. This was a “2×3” call, which means it had two digits, followed by a single region digit, followed by three letters. These are issued sequentially, which means they aren’t particularly aesthetic or short. If you want to spend a grand […]

Today I had a few minutes to finally put together this pair of small Morse paddles that I got from American Morse. They have a very nice “milled aluminum” aesthetic that I like a lot. By themselves, they are a little light, and tend to float around a bit, but they include a tapped hole […]

I needed something to read on a plane trip this last weekend, and a quick stop at Ham Radio Outlet had me leaving with a copy of Hands-On Radio Experiments by Ward Silver, N0AX. Ward writes the “Hands-On” column each month in QST, and this book is nothing more than five years of his columns […]

Two of my current interests…

The 15 meter band continues to be pretty strong today. I was getting mostly South America, but tuning around, I heard E51JD calling from Cook Islands tonight. I turned on the recorder and got this: E51JD from the Cook Islands

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while: toss together a cheap Yagi antenna suitable for listening to AO-51 on 70cm. If you just google for “cheap yagi”, you’ll find the link to the design. An hour, some 12 gauge aluminum (not optimal, but what I had on hand), a poplar stick, some coax […]

Well, this weekend is the CQ World Wide DX Contest, one of the larger contest weekends. I tuned up to 15m, around 21.259, and found HC8A booming in. Months ago, my 40m direct conversion receiver was initiated with reception of an RTTY signal from HC8N. Both are stations located on the Galapagos Islands. Nifty. Here’s […]

Today, on wsprnet.org, W1BW announced that Wednesdays would be “Special Activity Days”, and that today’s special activity would be to operate on 20m instead of the more common 30m. Overall, I didn’t get as many spots as I typically get during the day on 30m, but I did manage to get a spot from GW4VBE, […]

My Ramsey 40m QRP rig needs a keyer, so I ordered this nifty one from K1EL. I should be able to install it in a Altoids tin or something similar, and have a nice, fully functional keyer. Then, all I’ll need is a key. Probably can make a key out of an old hacksaw blade […]

Just got back from Pacificon. Had a nice time, and managed to pass the upgrade exam. I’m now an Extra class ham. Bow down and worship me! (Just kidding.) The test was a lot closer than I thought it should have been: I seemed to get a lot of questions that were unfamiliar to me, […]

It’s not too exciting, but it’s a start. During a 30 degree pass, I managed to get MacRobot SSTV to decode this partial image. It’s not the greatest SSTV decoder: it seems to miss the VIS preamble almost all the time, and loses sync fairly often when noise interrupts, which when you think of it, […]