Helge SM/LA6NCA Activates Colorburst Liberation Army in Sweden!

FB Helge.   This is really cool.  I didn't realize until I saw the schematic at the end that he was on 3579 kHz -- that is the old color-burst frequency, and now the frequency of the Color-burst Liberation Army. 

It was challenging to do this without sidetone.  But there appears to be a bit of room left in the matchbox -- could he squeeze in a few more components for a rudimentay sidetone?  Maybe just a piezo buzzer across the key? 

VIVA EL CBLA! 

KD0FNR's Amazing San Francisco TouCans Rig -- A Rockmite and a Tuna Topper in a Pineapple Can Mounted on the Dipole in a Shopping Bag

Click on the image for a better look

This post has a definite San Francisco vibe. 

Hamilton KD0FNR appeared on the SolderSmoke blog way back in 2011.  Perhaps he should join forces with N6ASD who lives quite close to him in SF, and seems to share radio interests.  Also in their area is the esteemed Bay Areas blogger and homebrewer Dave AA7EE ; Dave recently sounded the CBLA alarm, alerting us to the presence of an intruder on 3579 kHz.  In the process, Dave mentioned the Pt. Reyes Web SDR, the presence of which came as welcome news to Hamilton. Finally, Dave and Hamilton mention the KPH Web SDR, which brings to mind Dick Dillman W6AWO who has been on the SolderSmoke blog several times.  

Hamilton and his kids have their rig (a Rockmite and a Tuna Topper in a Dole Pineapple can) mounted at the feedpoint of their dipole (in the red shopping bag above).   They link to it via WiFi and Bluetooth. FB.  Thomas Witherspoon has a nice presentation (by KD0FNR) of the TouCans project on his blog: https://qrper.com/2023/12/field-radio-kit-gallery-kd0fnrs-rockmite-20-and-tuna-topper/ 

Hamilton KD0FNR writes: 

At the moment, the kids whose dad I am, better known as the gang—12, 10, and 8 year-old Diaze, Mota, and Tawnse.. all internet aliases—are big into 20 meters QRP CW with Project TouCans, a Rockmite coupled to a Tuna Topper. The radio and the amp that popped us out of QRPp to plain-old QRP are both housed in a Dole Pineapple can with a tuna can as a cover and antenna mount. The whole rig is still very much mounted in our half-wave dipole! 

Project TouCans consists of a Rockmite feeding a 5 Watt Tuna Topper, all of which is housed in our dipole antenna. The Rockmite has a single crystal bandpass filter on it's rx input. That makes it a pretty wide reciever which is fine, but it's particularly sensitive to its tx frequencies, 14075.5 and 14058 kHz AND—for some reason I have yet to understand—10459 kHz. By watching the SDRs that now—thanks Dave—envelope us here at our home QTH in San Francisco, we can see the frequencies of incoming signals. That information keeps me from responding to 14059 kHz signals in vain.

And now, the headphone repeater: TouCans is completely wireless with respect to the ground. That means there's no power line, no feedline, no keyer lines and no headphone line. Keyer controls are handled via wifi to a Raspberry Pi Pico-W on the rig while audio is brought back to my headphones via Bluetooth. Power is provided by a USB-C battery pack that lives in the rig which is mounted above us in the antenna. (Yes, all of this is becuase I thought feedlines matches and baluns were too mystical and hard to understand years ago. Yes, this has probably all been more work than a balun. Yes, I am still totally enamored of my original design decision. :) ) Anyway, the bluetooth range is about 50 feet and the wifi range is shorter than that. The short of it is—pun not intended—that I can't quite use the rig while I'm in my office. But, I can send CQ to the rig every half minute or so via a memory keyer, then turn on the SDR in my office, and then sprint a bit closer to the rig when someone calls back. (It helps that houses in SF are a bit tiny.) So, SDRs are kinda an integral part of our QTH setup and it's awesome to learn about a new—to us—one! Thanks again!

CBLA: A CALL TO ARMS!

Dave AA7EE alerted us to this attack.  Please follow-up by posting reception reports (and triangulations!) in the comments below.  Dave writes:  

Recently, an unlicensed beacon (for which read pirate) has turned up on 3579 KHz. It seems to be located somewhere in the Western US, in the tradition of unlicensed HF beacons dating back to the late 80's that were solar-powered, and located in remote areas of the Southwestern deserts. The very first ones were a cluster of beacons around 4096 KHz (a frequency for which crystals were cheaply and easily available).

Anyway, I am equal parts intrigued and miffed by this latest clandestine operation. Intrigued because of the mystery surrounding all such clandestine operations. Where is it? What does it look like? Who built it, and why? I'm also miffed because, well, dagnabbit - it's on our turf!

It can be heard nightly after dark in the West, on both the KFS and KPH SDR's, in Half Moon Bay and Point Reyes respectively. It sends a series of 22 dits, then the call letters KOK, then more dits.

This is an outrage, a travesty, and a direct assault on the sovereignty of all self-respecting CBLA recruits! I call on all denizens of colorburst land to dust off their Michigan Mighty Mites and other plucky little transmitters, and launch the loud, raucous battle cries of  CQ, CQ, CQ into the ether. We shall fight them on the airwaves, we shall fight them in our radio shacks while drinking hot chocolate, winding toroids, and reading QST. We shall go on to the end. We shall never surrender!

I'm telling you Bill, when the very foundations of our existence are threatened, there is nothing that a colorburst crystal and half a watt from a 2N3053 transistor can't achieve. By golly, we can do this.

Your obedient colorburst servant,

Dave

AA7EE

A Very Cool Video with NanoVNA, FFT, LC circuits, W2AEW, CuriousMarc, Back-to-Back 1N4148s, and String-Powered Gyroscopes

Don't let the scary nuclear chemistry title put you off -- there is a LOT of very familiar homebrew stuff in this video.  You will feel right at home.  Many of the resonances take place in the ham bands.   The CBLA may have to get involved here. 

Thanks to Chuck WB9KZY for sending this. 

And check out Ben's video on is best projects from the last 10 years: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLkVFjRyoDU

Sticker News (from Holland)

Lex PH2LB sends this really interesting Vice story about stickers and sticker culture.  Who knew?  The original article is in Dutch, but just hit the Google Translate button and Bob will be your uncle. 

https://www.vice.com/nl/article/wxnpp5/wie-zijn-de-mensen-die-overal-stickers-plakken

I shared with our Solder-Sticker Community these thoughts: 

Really cool Lex.   This reminds me that we need more stickers.  And maybe a new design.  The IBEW thing confuses Americans -- here it looks like a labor union thing. 

The Color Burst Liberation Army logo (below) is one possible element that we might want to include.  I think our new stickers should exhort people to DO something:  

"BUILD A SHORTWAVE RECEIVER!" 

"LIBERATE 3.579 MHz!"  

"MELT SOLDER!"  

"RESIST FT-8!"

"JUST SAY NO TO SDR!"    

Things like that. 

Thoughts?  Discuss.  

Fixing Up An Old Homebrew Rig -- Barebones Superhet and VXO 6 Watter

 

I'm not exactly sure why I pulled this old rig off the shelf, but I'll write up what I did -- I often use this blog as a kind of notebook.  I can look back and easily see what I did on my last encounter with the rig. 

The receiver is Doug DeMaw's Barebones (aka Barbados) Superhet.  This was my first superhet receiver. I built in in 1997.   The transmitter was my first real homebrew project -- it is the VXO 6 watter from QRP classics.  I built it in the Dominican Republic, probably in 1993 or 1994.  I built the power supply so that I could say that the entire rig is homebrew. 

This rig is getting a bit long in the tooth:   The receiver is built with 40673 Dual-Gate MOSFETs, an some of the transistor cans have gotten rusty.  The frequency readout on the receiver is the top of a coffee can fitted onto the reduction drive behind the tuning knob from a Drake 2-B (not MY 2B!). 

Here are two 2013 videos that I did on this receiver: 

https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2013/03/video-of-my-barebones-superhet.html

-- I put the crystal filter back in CW mode.  I had widened it so that I could listen to 20 meter SSB, but I decided to go back to its original configuration.  When I built the receiver in 1987, I didn't characterize the crystals -- I just used the capacitor values that Doug DeMaw had in his article.  I pretty much did that again this time, just putting caps that are close in value to what Doug had.  DeMaw used color burst crystals at 3.579 MHz.  So I guess this would be a GREAT receiver for the Color Burst Liberation Army!  

-- I used My Antuino (thanks Farhan!) to check the passband.  Here is what it looks like.  I just put the Antuino across the 10k resistors on either side of the input and output transformers.  The coil cores had become very loose -- I just tried put them in the right place.  I may need to put some wax in there to allow them to better stay in place. I think they could have used toroids instead -- that would have been easier. One of the transformer connections was open -- they don't work well that way,  once I fixed that, the passband looks like this: 

-- Each of the horizontal divisions is 500 Hz.  The passband is not pretty, but it is OK, and I  didn't feel like doing too much work on this to get it in better shape. 

-- The filter peak was a bit lower in frequency than expected.  I found that trimmer cap C3 in series with the BFO crystal would not allow me to lower its frequency sufficiently.  So I moved C3 to a position in parallel with the crystal.  With this mod, I could get the BFO frequency to 3578.69.  This produces a 690 Hz tone when the received signal is at the peak of the IF passband.  Opposite sideband rejection is quite good. 

March 2013 Rebuild of the VXO 6 watter

-- I didn't have to do any real work on the transmitter.  The RF amplifier in the transmitter had served for a time as the RF amp in by 17 meter DSB rig (I had added a bias circuit, which I removed when I put the amplifier back in Class C).  Some time ago I rebuilt the oscillator circuit (which had been literally cut off the board when I used the amplifier in the DSB rig). 

-- I did have to reconfigure the muting circuit -- the T/R switch in the transmitter switches the antenna and also -- through a two wire circuit -- cuts off 12 V DC to the transmitter when in receive mode. 

-- For sidetone I just put a small piezo buzzer through a 1k resistor between 12 V DC and the key line. 

It all worked fine -- I talked to three stations on the high end of  the 20 meter CW band. 

500 WYKSYCDS IBEW Stickers Arrive in Europe! Order yours today! Free!

Lex PH2LB in the Netherlands has gone the extra kilometer for the IBEW.  When he saw the stickers that had been placed in New York City, he asked for the design.  I sent him the files that  Jesse N5JHH (designer of the stickers) had sent to me.  Very quickly, Lex had 500 of these stickers printed up and ready to go (see above).  His shack now serves as a veritable beachhead in Europe for the IBEW and the CBLA.  Thank you Les!   

Les has even set up an on-line order form for those who seek to assist in the noble campaign to spread the word about our cause: 

https://ph2lb.nl/webshop/sticker.php

Les is making the stickers available for free -- all you need to do is pay the postage. 

Please be sure to send us pictures of the stickers after they have been placed. 

And let's not forget that the quote on the sticker is from Pete Juliano, N6QW. 

Here is one that recently showed up in Blacksburg, Virginia (zoom in on the green utility box): 

And here is Lex's very interesting site, with his Knack Story:  https://www.ph2lb.nl/blog/index.php?page=history