Here us Bob's interview with Farhan:
http://soldersmoke.com/VU2ESE23.mp3
Serving the worldwide community of radio-electronic homebrewers. Providing blog support to the SolderSmoke podcast: http://soldersmoke.com
Solar X-rays: Geomagnetic Field: |
Here us Bob's interview with Farhan:
http://soldersmoke.com/VU2ESE23.mp3
Here is the interview:
http://soldersmoke.com/KK7B23.mp3
And here is a paper Rick did on VHF. It is a bit old, but it is good.
http://www.pnwvhfs.org/conference/2009/Introduction-to-VHF-Experiments.pdf
Thanks Rick! Thanks Bob!
Here is Eric's page on this interview, with useful show notes:
https://www.qsotoday.com/podcasts/n5bf
I like to listen to Eric's shows on YouTube -- here is the YouTube recording of the N5BF interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbr4jE11vfg
Here is N5BF's ham radio web site:
http://cbduncan.duncanheights.com/HamRadio/HamRadio.html
Here is the club page of the San Bernardino Microwave Society:
http://www.ham-radio.com/sbms/
Thanks to Eric and Courtney!
-- Farhan talks about his practice of taking the pictures of new rigs with the new rig sitting atop the book that was most important in its design and construction. FB.
-- I was really blown away by Farhan's presentation of how the uBITX advertisement was inspired by and in many ways based on the Heathkit ad for an HW-101. Amazing.
-- I learned a lot from Farhan's discussion of SDR theory. I pledge to spend more time with this. I really like Farhan's hybrid HDR/SDR approach.
-- But I have a question: Farhan seems to say that we'd need a big expensive GOOGL computer to do the direct sampling HF SDR. But doesn't the little RTL-SDR do just that? Without a GOOGL?
-- Great to see Wes's AFTIA being used in the sBITX.
-- Really cool that Farhan has his mind on VHF transverters when designing the sBITX. I liked use of the TCXO module to free up one of the Si5351 clock outputs. FB. And great to include an idea from Hans in this rig.
Thanks very much to Farhan (who stayed up until 3 am to do this!) and to the RSGB for hosting.
EI7GL reports some very interesting IARU activity that could possibly result in the 5 Meter band coming back to amateur radio use:
"The 60 MHz or 5 metre band has the potential to be a future allocation for the Amateur Radio service. The International Amateur Radio Union (IARU) are currently encouraging member societies to try and obtain small allocations at 40 MHz and 60 MHz."
https://ei7gl.blogspot.com/p/60-mhz.html
Regaining 5 meters was, of course, the objective of Frank Jones and the Five Meter Liberation Army. Wouldn't it be great of Michael Hopkins' fictional tale actually ended up coming true!
I read these stories when they were first coming out and I really liked them. Here are all the FMLA episodes. Don't try to read them all in one sitting. Spread them out. Savor them. Think about the message that Frank was sending us.
All of the FMLA episodes: https://tomfhome.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/frank_and_the_fmla.pdf
--------------------------------------
Related articles, books and links:
Frank's obit: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/frank-jones/
Frank's book "5 Meter Telephony": https://w5jgv.com/downloads/5-Meter%20Radiotelephony%20by%20Frank%20Jones.pdf
Frank's 1937 Antenna Handbook: http://rfcec.com/RFCEC/Section-3%20-%20Fundamentals%20of%20RF%20Communication-Electronics/23%20-%20RADIO%20ENGINEERING%20DATA/1937%20-%20Jones%20Antenna%20Handbook%20(By%20Frank%20C.%20Jones).pdf
About the author, Michael Hopkins AB5L: https://www.rantechnology.com/index.cfm?key=view_resource&TransKey=615604E8-9DAA-40A3-9E48-4160806D893D&CategoryID=8E884CE4-9CED-4957-872B-5EBDB058D540&Small=1
SolderSmoke Podcast #230 is available for download
http://soldersmoke.com/soldersmoke230.mp3
Over on Hack-A-Day Jenny List (G7CKF) has a really nice article about ham radio and homebrewing. She truly has The Knack: She got her start in radio electronics at age 9 when her parents gave her George Dobbs's Ladybird book.
https://hackaday.com/2021/01/21/a-few-of-my-favorite-things-amateur-radio/
One of her paragraphs really seemed to capture the SDR-HDR conflict that we so often joke about:
The age of the homebrew RF tinkerer may be at a close, at least in the manner in which I started it. Nobody at the cutting edge of radio is likely to be messing around with discrete transistor circuits in the 2020s, unless perhaps they are working with extremely exotic devices up in the millimetre wavelengths. It’s all software-defined radios, opaque black plastic boxes that deliver a useful radio experience on a computer but that’s it. No more homebrew, no more tinkering.
Whew, good thing I'm not on the cutting edge. It sounds kind of sad. Oh well, that leaves more discrete transistors for us to tinker with.
Jenny's Profile on Hack-A-Day:
[Jenny List]: Contributing Editor and European Correspondent
Jenny List trained as an electronic engineer but spent twenty years in the publishing industry working on everything from computer games to
dictionaries before breaking out and returning to her roots.
She grew up around her parents’ small farm and blacksmith business in rural England, so making (and breaking) things is in her blood. Countless projects have crossed her bench over the years, though these days you’ll find her working with electronics and in particular radio, textiles for clothing and costume, decrepit classic cars, and real cider from first principles.
When she’s not writing for Hackaday she works on language corpus analysis software, designs and sells amateur radio kits, sits on the board of Oxford Hackspace, and is a freelance electronic design engineer and programmer.
Not long ago we took the DISH satellite antenna off our roof. For a while I resisted pleas to put the big thing on the curb for pickup. I fantasized about using it for radio astronomy. In the end, I threw it away. I do have VHF/UHF aspirations, but being able to use that dish just seemed to be something in my distant future (if ever!).
But check out what David N2QG is doing with his dishes: He is listening to very distant spacecraft normally picked up only by NASA's Deep space network. Very cool. Truly inspirational.
Here are the links:
http://www.prutchi.com/2020/10/15/recap-of-x-band-dsn-activities-and-plans-for-the-future/
http://www.prutchi.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/DSN_Lessons-_Learned_N2QG.pdf
Well, I'm working on it again. First I converted it from 220 to 110 power. I had a transformer in the junk box that fit nicely, both electrically and mechanically. In the course of doing this, I learned something about this counter that I did not know: As long as it is plugged in, even if you turn it off, the time-base oscillator keeps running. And get this Color Burst Liberation Army members: The oscillator runs at 3.579545 MHz. TRGHS.
With sunspots scarce and with Pete pessimistic about the solar cycle, VHF and UHF now seem more interesting. I need to have more test gear for the higher frequencies. This counter works up to 650 MHz. Yea!
When I first fixed this thing, I was quite pleased to get it going with "Input A -- 5 Hz to 100 MHz." But now I want to get "Input B -- 40 MHz to 650 MHz" working also. I used a 50 MHz signal from my newly repaired HP-8640B to trouble shoot Input B. I think one of the divider chips is bad. It is a Plessey SP 8630B. Does anyone have one of these chips in their junk box?