Just go to http://soldersmoke.com. On that archive page, just click on the blue hyperlinks and your audio player should play that episode.
http://soldersmoke.com
I am fairly certain that Pete Juliano will take pride in N2HTT's success on this project, and will attempt to attribute it, in part, to the Italian ancestry that they share. The Tarantella background music will definitely encourage that kind of thinking. In presenting this nice video, we continue with our "rigs not yet in a box" theme. There is something especially nice about the sound of receivers that are not yet boxed up. Mike has some great information on the construction of this receiver (and other projects) on his blog: http://n2htt.net/
I love this video. Colin finished his BITX a week or so ago and has been waiting for an opportunity to test it. Over the weekend he braved the winter of Northern England and, with his son, set up his new rig out in his snow-covered garden. Appropriately for a first contact with scratch-built rig, the circuitry was unencumbered by any kind of case or box. That's the way it should be done! Well done Colin! You are well and truly a member of the International Brotherhood of Electronic Wizards, and the diagnosis of "The Knack" has been confirmed (a severe case, it appears).
Hi Pete and Bill,
It's been a lovely fine day here in West Yorkshire, so I took a table out into the garden and set up my BITX circuit on it. I set up my SOTA dipole on a 9m fishing pole.
I heard a strong German station calling CQ, so I gave him a call and hoped for the best!
How amazing to contact someone in another country using a rig and mic you've made yourself! Do I qualify as a REAL radio ham now? Do I have a confirmed case of the knack? :-)
Although I may appear underwhelmed in the video, (besides the air punches!), I did really get a kick out of the QSO.
73 and huge thanks to both of you for the encouragement and support.
Bill, All the parts finally arrived from China so the MMM lives :) Good to finally join the CBLA!!
It made for a very enjoyable Saturday afternoon while the snow fell! I left some room between the antenna connector and the coil for the low pass filter I'm going to build if the caps ever arrive.
Thanks for the crystal and the inspiration to get busy and build something; it brought back a few childhood memories of building things for the homebrew contest at the local hamfest.
SolderSmoke Podcast #171 is available: http://soldersmoke.com/soldersmoke171.mp3 Bench Report: Pete's Small Screens (in Color!) Si5351s Bill's Graph Paper Frequency Readout Bill's Broadened Barebones Barbados RX. DIGITIZED! Another AD9850 DDS using M0XPD Kanga UK Shield New 13 dollar Color Display (Prettier than Graph paper!) Pete and Ben's Article in QRP Quarterly Available free here: http://www.qrparci.org/qqsample/qqsample.pdf The DEEP SPIRITUAL REWARDS of DC Receivers The Importance of Good Power Supplies SPRAT Article on HW8 Design Error Latest Edition of Hot Iron Elecraft KX3 -- Has one of the best receivers in the world
Even though my pencil and graph paper frequency readout for the BITX rigs has its own undeniable charm, this little device could get me to go digital. I heard about it from Chuck Adams and the folks on the qrp-tech mailing list. 13 dollars. It covers .1 MHz to 2.4 GHz. You just hook up a 9 volt source and the RF input. It also does IF offset. The construction looks great and it would be very easy to put into (or aside) any rig. Here is where I got mine:
I was one of the millions of people who woke up that Christmas morning in 2003 thinking not of Santa Claus but of Colin Pillinger's Mars Lander, the Beagle 2. We were in London by then, and later on I got to meet Colin Pillinger. I still have the books about Beagle 2 that he gave to me. Wow, it looks like they came very close. Too bad Colin did not live to see these pictures. The Planetary Society has a very good article on all this: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/01160800-beagle-2-found.html
Using a very nice M0XPD AD9860 shield from Kanga-UK and software by Richard AD7C I put together another little DDS VFO. This one went together without a lot of hair pulling. I put the LCD, brightness control and rotary controller on one piece of vero board -- this will also serve as the front panel.
In case you missed this. Makes you think, doesn't it? I'm thinking of a QRPp QRSS transmitter that would just keep on going. Battery designed by Giuseppe Zamboni.
I've been getting tired of being in the dark about the frequency on which my BITX17 was operating. So I pulled out some graph paper, my frequency counter, and a pencil. You will see two frequencies at each point -- that's because I use two crystals, switched by the black knob on the left. I realize this paper and pencil approach is hopelessly out of date, but I see it as "appropriate technology" for a discrete component all-analog transceiver. Pete set me straight on how to come up with the numbers: VXO frequency minus ACTUAL carrier oscillator/BFO freq. After doing this I took great delight in going on the air and asking guys with fancy "glowing numerals" rigs to compare their freq readout with my pencil and graph paper readouts: they were painfully close. But I am not slipping completely into stubborn Luddite-ism; this weekend I worked on a DDS-based AD9850/Arduino VFO with I-Q output based on Paul M0XPD's Kanga-UK Arduino Shield. STAY TUNED!
"SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" is now available as an e-book for Amazon's Kindle.
Here's the site:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V9FIVW
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