DL1DN's First Homebrew Contacts with a BITX40

FB!

German Thermatron Homebrew

Michael DF2OK has been melting solder in Germany.  Above is a short video of the first sounds made by an AC-1 replica he built.   Michael notes:  "Yeah, I love these old style radios. You can see nearly everything. :-)  BTW: All without Arduino and other black boxes and chips!"
FB Michael.

During the AC-1 build Michael struggled with a bad tube.  His discovery and resolution of the problem is presented in this video (understandable even to those who don't speak German):



Finally, here is a nice video of Michael's 40 meter regen receiver. Anyone who has built or worked with a regen will understand perfectly this video.  Watch Michael tune in stations while adjusting the regeneration.  Note his demonstration of the lack of hand capacitance. FB Michael!  Thanks!  

The Amazing History of the Gibson Girl Rescue Radio

 

A video about the Kon-Tiki expedition got us wondering about how you could generate hydrogen gas for an antenna balloon while on a raft at sea. (That's the kind of question that keeps Knack victims up at night.)  This led us to the Gibson Girl rescue radio.  This morning I found a fascinating web site that gives the long, multi-country history of the curvaceous rescue rig: 

 

http://www.wftw.nl/gibsongirl.html 

Lucien's German Mighty Mite (Video)

Excellent Lucien!  Thanks for sending this.   I know what you mean about a project that doesn't work.  It is rewarding and educational to figure out where you went wrong.  I knew a guy who would ask, at a hamfest, "Does this rig work?"  If the the seller admitted that it didn't, he'd reply, "Good, I pay extra for that!"   He liked the challenge of fixing it.  Of course, there are limits to this, and sometimes these challenges will make you wish you had taken up stamp collecting. 

Hi Bill and Pete,

For me too, it's a happy day - I got the Mighty Mite working! Thank you so much for the inspiration to get into homebrewing...

I'm just licensed for a year now and this was my very first project (except for 2 basic kits that I build) and it really was a great learning experience. The best part: Since it didn't work out "plug'n play", I had to debug the thing and actually start thinking - so I put 2 caps in parallel instead of the wrong one I had used (I found them in a little box some guys at a hamfest gave me for free - never thought I would ever use something from it...). And I had to use the voltmeter to look for a short circuit. Basic stuff, but for me, this was a breakthrough!

Here are some more things I learned during this first project (don't laugh):

• Where the heck do I plug stuff that's supposed to go to "ground" in? Now I know: usually to the negative pole!
• When 2 lines cross in a schematic, that doesn't mean there's a connection!
• How do these ready-made breadboards actually work? Had to try out...
• It's important to think about the actual layout beforehand!
• When debugging, trial and error doesn't help.
• There's yet another crazy foreign unit called "gauge"! (I used smaller magnet wire than recommended, it still seems to work...)
• 9V-blocks get VERY hot when shorted for a minute or so!

Attached is an image of my ugly prototype, now I want to give it a better "home"... And here is a little video, demonstrating that it works, inspired by IZ1KSW:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxXyAb_np8I&feature=youtu.be

BTW, frequency is about 3,5793 Mhz.

Thanks again for all the great inspiration and vy 73 from Germany,

Lucien / DH7LM

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Video of Colin's First Contact with his Homebrew Scratch-built BITX20

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.

Colin, M1BUU

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When Your Local Oscillator Could Sink Your Ship!

Thomas KK6AHT is the intrepid radio amateur from France who moved to California and successfully built a Minima as his first homebrew project.  Yesterday we got additional evidence that Thomas definitely has THE KNACK.  It seems that he has been looking through really old radio magazines (clearly a symptom).  He sent us this add from 1942.  Yikes!  Imagine getting your ship sunk because your Local Oscillator is not quite local enough!  

.....................

Hey!

I thought you would get a kick out of this 1942 ad. Sounds like those guys had a some good reasons to fight QRM ... Who knew the important role played by the FCC during the war?

Now tell me: why were the receivers so noisy at the beginning of the war? What did they change? Happy new year to you both! May the gods of radio (and digital) bring you much fun on the air.

73, Thomas  

..............................

Good to hear from you Thomas.  Long time no hear -- I was beginning to fear that you had grown disillusioned with homebrewing and had switched to stamp collecting or something else less frustrating.

As for the ship radios, two things come to mind.  Some of them may still have been using regens at the start of the war.  If so, that was kind of suicidal -- regens radiate!  The detector moves in and out of oscillation (sometimes staying in oscillation) at the receive freq.  The Germans were quite good at detecting and direction-finding these signals, on land and at sea.   So the regens would have to go.

Superhets are not quite as bad, but they too can radiate.  My Bitx spills out a bit of signal at 23 MHz (VFO) and at 5 MHz (BFO).  Without adequate shielding, these sigs could also be detected and triangulated.   Looks like the radio in the picture had lots of shielding. 

We watched a French movie last night:  The French Minister.  A comedy about life in the French Foreign Ministry.   It was kind of fun.

What are you working on?   I am listening to 17 meters using an OLD superhet in which I have replaced the VFO with an Arduino/DDS generator.   Works great but the display is making lots of noise. 

73  Bill 

..................................

Hi Thomas,

Well Thomas, I will dip my toe into some very deep water and attempt an answer for you which also is an important clue about QRP operations.

1. Today we have many many signals co-existing in the radio spectrum. During the war there was much less radio garbage and the military lit up the ether with transmissions very sparingly. But that is on the transmit side. That said the local oscillators (much like you have with the Si-570 on your Minima) used in receivers also produce RF that unless is minimized in some fashion is passed right through to the antenna and can be detected. Regenerative receivers are especially prone to this. Yes some military equipment used regenerative receivers. In fact the famous Paraset had to be constantly moved so it would not be detected.
2. This receiver generated RF into the antenna was addressed by companies like Scott by shielding everything. That receiver in the photo probably weighed about a 100 pounds or more. Much attention was paid to RF bypassing and grounding. The cheap table top radios were RF generators par excellence.
3. There was another approach developed in WWII to solve that problem and forms the basis of what makes work that little device sitting in your pocket. The odd part it was invented by a famous movie star. Look up Heddy Lamar in wikipedia. She and a co-inventor came up with the concept of frequency hopping and spread spectrum technology. By jumping frequencies it would be hard to pinpoint a transmitting station. That concept forms the backbone of our cellphone system
4. Now the QRP part – if the RF output from a receiver local oscillator (milliwatts) can be detected from afar – then it follows QRP works!

Have fun. 

Pete

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Electro-mechanical Heaven.... with Hell (Hellschreiber)

Bob LeDoux sent us a link to a really amazing site about the Hellschreiber system.  The site is filled with great videos, pictures, and animations like the one above.  Lots of radio history too.  Check it out: 

http://www.nonstopsystems.com/radio/hellschreiber-function-operation.htm 
This is all the work of F. Dorenberg, N4SPP.  Thanks OM! 

Bob writes:   I'm working on a microcontroller based reader for
this mode.  For old fossils, like us, this mode looks perfect.  It can
be sent using simple CW equipment and it appears to be a great
replacement for those who are tiring of Morse code.
Its perfect for Knack victims. We can even build mechanical printers. Thanks Bob!


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German Radio Amateurs Receive Signals from ICE Spacecraft

The wizards at AMSAT-DL have done it again!  Their latest feat of outer space derring-do is the reception of the 5 watt (QRP!) signal from the lost (now found) ICE spacecraft.  Details here:
http://amsat-uk.org/2014/03/09/radio-amateurs-receive-nasa-isee-3ice-spacecraft/

Here is their facility:

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A Nice Workshop in Germany

Wannabe-Choppers from Thorsten Indra on Vimeo.

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Podcast Noise Explained; Mic advice from Germany

Hello Bill,

This might be down the drain for you, but I only listen to your podcast very few months:

The background hiss you mentioned in Soldersmoke 148 definitely was a crosstalk from the switching voltage converters for the CPU in your laptop. The CPUs these days are operated with voltages in the .7 V to  2 V range,with currents from several Amperes up. A high-performance CPU may dissipate150 W which can easily mean supply currents of 100 A an more. The CPU operating voltage, especially in a laptop, might change several 100 times a second. I think you can imagine the rest.

Why is that voltage adaption so important? This is within your domain: The biggest heat source in digital electronics these days is charging and discharging capacitors. Unless you use a resonant circuit (which you cannot do on a chip) you dissipate P = 1/2 C U^2 with every discharge. Yes: Power depends on the square of the supply voltage. And at a clock frequency in the 2 GHz range you charge and discharge all those capacitors quite often. Each of these has a capacity in the fF (.001 pF) range, but you have billions of these...

Over the time you had quite some complaints about your whistling s. In former times this was definitely made worse by some technical problems. But this is a problem long gone. An Soldersmoke 149 I believe the remaining problem simply was the tooth gap you described a few years back.

BTW: You could easily reduce the file sizes of your podcasts by at least 50% with a few simple measures:

- You should record the podcast as you do now, with a 44 or 48 kHz sampling rate, that's fine. I would even record in wave format.

- Afterwards downsample your recording to a sampling rate of 12 or 16 kHz. This provides ample audio bandwidth for this purpose. See e.g.http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=19705

- Then create the MP3 file with a signal rate of 48 or 64 kbit/s.


BTW: Last weekend at a ham flea market I got a variable transformer. Now I can try to revitalize my Drake TR4C that has not seen any electricity for some 30 years. I bought it when I got my shortwave license in 1975. At that time I lived with my parents. Then I could operate it during my military service. But after that I got an electronics engineer and lost all possibilities to erect any kind of SW antenna. Only three years ago I got my own house near Munich. But I'm hardly at home and I nearly exclusively operate from my car. I will not try this with any kind of boatanchor :-)

vy 73
Alexander
DL4NO

------------------------------------
Von: solder smoke [mailto:soldersmoke@yahoo.com]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 19. März 2013 09:49
An: DL4NOAlexander
Betreff: Re: Soldersmoke 148: Background Hiss

Thank you Alexander.  That is very useful information.   I have switched to a new computer and I think the hiss  problem is gone.   The gap in my teeth remains however!    I am thinking about getting a better microphone.  Any advice on this?   I am glad to  hear that you are back into ham radio.  My Elmer (the guy who helped me get started as a novice) was an immigrant from Germany (Hilmar,  WN2NEC).  He was an excellent technician.   I still use some of the things he made for me.   73  Bill ------------------------------------------------ Hello Bill,   about a microphone: Think about a headset, possibly a wireless one. I would search forums about dictation software for advice.   A headset fixes the position of the microphone relative to your mouth. At the same time the microphone is near your mouth so any ambient noise is suppressed. A wireless [Bluetooth] headset would allow you to move around freely. Unless you come near a larger hard or soft surface or leave the room the sound should not change much. You could arrange the materials for your next podcast around the room and move from "chapter" to "chapter". And as the digitizing happens in the headset all weak analog signals are safe away from any voltage converters and digital electronics.   I had never left ham radio, I just reduced and modified my activities. 2m or 70cm FM were always possible. Here in Germany we have more than 1,000 repeaters. Many of these repeaters have Echolink capabilities. For the last 15 years I have more or less exclusively worked from my car while driving. In my car I have a FT-857D. For shortwave I use monoband antennas on a PL mount at on the roof of my car. For pictures see http://www.dl4no.de/thema/amateur1.htm. The schematic in http://www.dl4no.de/thema/mobil-st.htm shows how I ensure that my TRX gets its 22 A peak from the 12V outlet in the trunk of my car: I buffer it with a 1 F capacitor - really 1,000,000 µF! The mean supply current during SSB transmit is less than 5 A.   A quite important role in my ham life play the local chapters of our German ham radio society DARC. There are more than 1,000 of them, each with its own DOK. So wherever my customers are, at least one local ham meeting a month is not far away. I participate in their activities, give a lecture from time to time. This is a big help as I mostly work at my customers and these are scattered all over southern Germany.   Just a short story with some local connection for you: Peter, DL5NC, spent quite a few years in the Washington, DC area. He has a US call, but please don't ask. He was born some 50 km from my home town. Formally this area, Franconia, has been part of Bavaria since 1806. Nevertheless we believe that the Bavarians have no clue how to brew beer.   One Friday morning (your time) he was on his way into Washington, DC. Through Echolink he connected to a Munich repeater while I was in the afternoon rush hour on my way to a beer garden. I told him that this was one of the few places in Munich where you could get a decent beer. And otherwise I had my own beer at home imported from Franconia. He threatened to never again talk to me because of mental cruelty. In the meantime he returned to Germany and got a neighbor. We drank a few Franconican beers together in the meantime :-) vy 73 Alexander DL4NO

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Rich Arland's Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics

Rich Arland's SKN Station

Hi Bill:

I am writing to tell you what a GREAT book "Solder Smoke" is. I really enjoyed it and I am amazed at how similar our paths are regarding electronics, ham radio and our journeys around the world. 

Although I am 16 years older than you I, too, got my start in radio at an early age: about 10, after I got nailed by my dad's console SW/AM radio prior to a Cub Scout meeting one evening. I just had to figure out how I received a shock from that big old receiver, which led me to a life long pursuit of the elusive electron, an interesting 50 year career in ham radio, a 20 year career in the USAF (Tech Controller, AFSC: 307), and ultimately teaching vocational electronics in the State Correctional Institution at Dallas, Pa. 

During my AF career I spent almost 17 years overseas: two tours in Japan (KA2AA--this was prior to recip licensing as we had the Far East Amateur Radio League in the SOFA), a three year tour at Lajes Field, Terceira Island, the Azores (CT2BH--this was prior to the Azores receiving independence from Portugal in 1976), a five and a half year tour at RAF Mildenhall, UK (G5CSU), and a brief stint in W.Germany (DA2NE) while working with 10th SF Group at Bad Tolz and SOTFE in Patch Barracks. Had 18 months in the 3rd Mobil Comm Gp in Tinker AFB, OK, and a twilight tour at Langley AFB, VA. 

The three years in the Azores was from 1970-73....it was extremely difficult to obtain a ham license at that time and there were only 9 of us licensed in the entire archipelago, as I recall. I was attached to the 1936 Comm SQ, and all we had for comms to support theUS Forces Azores mission were three HF ISB shots: one to Andrews AFB, MD, one to Rota, Spain and the other to RAF Croughton, UK. During that three year period I REALLY learned about HF comm and propagation. I was on duty the day, in 1973, when "the ionosphere turned off"! WE had a SID of such magnitude that it blotted out everything, and I DO MEAN EVERYTHING! We were lucky to hear AFRTS on the hill by the MARS station! During that tour we also performed comm support for the US Navy's Sea Lab project on Sao Maria, which was part of the SOSUS system. Ultra cool stuff!!! On more than one occasion during a mid shift, the Comm SQ chief of maintenance, CT2BC, would snag me from tech control, and we'd go intoLajes Airways (right down the hall) and grab a Scope Control Level, point the two HUGE LPAs toward the states and work a little DX on 20M !! Definitely NOT QRP! All this under the guise of "quality control"! It pays to have friends in low places!

During my UK tour, we initially lived off-base at Bury St. Edmunds. I had a Ten-Tec PM-2B and a tuner which I loaded into a chain link fence behind our house. I quickly worked Collin Turner, G3VTT, and soon became a card carrying member of the G-QRP-Club (#622) in 1979. To celebrate my 34th birthday, my wife Pat (KB3MCT) and Jo Dobbs, wife of George Dobbs, G3RJV, put together a surprise party for me after a Saturday at the RSGB convention near Birmingham. George Burt, GM3OXX along with Ronny, GM3JJG, furnished the haggis....and the single malt....needless to say we did have fun; all 25 of us packed into RJV's home! 

Hey, sorry for being long winded. Our backgrounds and travels are uniquely intertwined. Thanks for writing "Solder Smoke". I am procuring a hard copy (I read it on my Kindle) for my wife, as your insight into the "why things work the way they do" are perfect for her to help her with obtaining her Extra. I only wish I had it when I was teaching my electronics classes in prison. It would have made my job easier, that is for sure. 

Stay well, and I hope we can meet one of these days. In the mean time, I have to pull my Meade ETX out of storage and start watching the sky, and finish building about four model rockets for an upcoming launch weekend here in North Georgia. 

Rich Arland, K7SZ
Dacula, GA

Author: "The ARRL's Low Power Communications, the Art and Science of QRP (all four editions)

ReplyReply All

Move...book editors

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Amateurfunk -- Ham Radio in Germany in 1955

Ah, those were the days!  The bands were in good shape and hams built their own gear.  
Don't let the language barrier deter you -- this German language video is really a lot of fun and worth watching.  It provides a nice look at the hobby as it was 60 years ago. Thanks to Stephen and Michael for alerting me to this.    

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Amazing R/C Airplane Video From Germany

Wow, this is real techno-art. Take seven minutes, put it on full screen, crank up the audio and sit back to enjoy a unique aerial view of a beautiful part of Germany. Thanks to Bill, N5AB, for alerting us to this.

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The Parasaki: DL3PB's Amazing All Diode Transceiver

JBOD! FB!

Hi folks,

I'd like to share with you a long-cherished dream, that recently came true, forty years after I came to read about hams using tunnel diodes to make QSOs when I was aged twelve or so:

Finally I managed a first skywave QSO with my PARASAKI-transceiver, an 'all diode' rig: Christophe/F8DZY replied to my very first call on 20m band in REF-contest last weekend. I was running 2mW into a temporary vertical dipole on my balcony. Distance between us is 918km - obviously OM Christophe has excellent ears.

Those interested in the cruel details of my circuit, please find attached a schematic and a photo of the pretty ugly setup. The circuit is designed straight-forward with exception of the parametric VXO, derived from Mike/AA1TJ's famous Paraceiver design. (see http://fhs-consulting.com/aa1tj/paraceiver.html )

The low impedance of the high peak-current tunnel diodes make it very difficult to built a really crystal controlled oscillator rather than an LC-oscillator, synchronized by the crystal more or less, at least on the higher SW-bands. The Parametric VXO provides a crystal-stable, chirp-free signal on expense of an output power of two milliwatts only instead of ten, but with an amazing spectral purity, no need for a low pass filter or such. Of course it sounds pretty cool making a QSO with a 'bunch of diodes' and a parametrically excited crystal, but believe me or not, I'd preferred to bring that full ten milliwatt into the air - on the other hand that approach allowed to tune the rig a bit ( ~ 5kHz/per xtal), which turned out to be much more valuable than a few milliwatts more while being 'rock-bound'.

The receiver in its 'gain-less' version works fine for strong signals - while listening to QRP(p) stations, the moderate gain of the audio amplifier helps a lot. A comfortable frequency shift between receive and transmit is realized by the 5µH inductor at the LO-port of the mixer, with little effect on sensitivity.

Thanks for the bandwidth, OMs, won't bother again you with such mails, unless I make a cross-pond QSO with that rig ( not that likely ) or any skywave QSO with homemade semiconductors ( probably impossible )...

72!

Peter/DL3PB

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Some Amazing German Knack

Michael, DL4MGM, sends us this report from a country in which "the knack" has deep linguistic and cultural roots. Wow, that's my kind of hamfest! Test stations for homebrew gear. And the key-powered transmitter is a great idea. I know there is a lot of energy going into those straight keys -- as a kid, my arm would hurt after an afternoon of unanswered CQs. Thanks Michael!

Hi Bill,
I do not know how big your german listener base is but in any case I want to draw your attention to the "Amateurfunk Tagung München" on 10th and 11th of March 2012. It is a german amateur radio convention which takes place every other year at the University of applied sciences in Munich. There is one speaker track with, mostly german, talks on a wide spectrum of topics related to our hobby. The organisers did a particularly good job in getting Joe Taylor, K1JT, as a speaker to talk on "Recent Advances in Amateur Weak Signal Communication" (10. at 17:00 local time). Needless to say that I'm looking forward to this. Apart from the talks there will be booths and exhibits from various groups and also some well known commercial sources of RF/microwave components, modules and the like.

Another highlight are the lab places, including personnel, where you can have your home brewed stuff tested up into the high double digit GHz range. I always take home new ideas from just strolling around there and looking at the things people bring for testing...

The last thing I want to mention is the current "operating and construction challenge" because it so right up our alley. It is something like an "Energy harvesting transmitter key". The task is to build a 2m, 80m or 10m transmitter which is completely powered by the energy put into the key movement. In order not to stifle inovations, a lot of liberties are granted such as keying by foot. It will be allowed to pre-charge the energy storage component by keying up to to 10 "v"s with the transmitter turned off. As proof of operation, a 160 character random text message will have to be send to an adjoining room. Ranking criteria (in descending order) will be: - Peak transmitter power during transmission of the last character. - Construction and handling - Message errors - Keying speed / total transfer time - Tone quality and frequency stability Sounds like it will be a lot of fun... Here the link to the german site: http://www.darc.de/distrikte/c/amateurfunktagung-muenchen/

That's all for now.
Keep going!
Kind regards from southern Germany de Michael, DL4MGM



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First Flight in Electric Multi-copter

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Euro Zone: SolderSmoke Kindle-book Now Available

SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics is now available on the Amazon.de (German) web site. Payment in Euros.
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B004V9FIVW

A Language Guide for the International Brotherhood of Electronic Wizards

Hello Bill,

I heard mention of your book, Soldersmoke - Global Adventure in Radio Electronics, on the G-QRP reflector and bought it on a whim. Since it arrived I have not been able to put it down. What a great read! Very enjoyable and an inspiration. I say that because my homebrewing had taken a bit of a back seat while other hobbies - flying RC gliders, ballroom dancing etc - came to the fore. But after reading just a few chapters of your book, the old soldersmith in me was stirred and I had to go and make something.

Like most Hams I am the 'caretaker' of a huge stock of components - well let's face it we are really just looking after part of the world's supply of components for the other guy who might need them! - I decided on a simple phase shift oscillator for 600 Hz and soon found a circuit from my old collection of circuit drawings. I had all the parts and quickly soldered it together. Sadly my elderly 'scope confirmed that it was not working and after a bit of head scratching I decided to make it up on a construction board. In the process I realised that my design had included components of the wrong values and if it had oscillated at all, it would have been in the MHz region! The final product worked a treat and I cobbled together some photos (in the attached PDF) to send to my radio pal - Roger DL3RMU - in Berg Bacchaussen in Bavaria. From your podcasts, I suspect you are a bit of a language wizard as well, but just in case - "Jede Schaltung braucht eine Lichtdiode !!" means, 'Every circuit needs an LED!' and "Erfog!" means 'success!' The result was a lovely 600Hz sine wave at nearly 5V p-p. Not exactly wizardry but very satisfying. Now wouldn't it be great if I could get it to oscillate at RF frequencies!?

Roger DL3RMU and I have shared an hour long, weekly, CW QSO since early 2005. Just to make it that bit more interesting we do it in German! Helpfully CW overcomes my pronunciation problems. This all started with my realisation that my urban location and limited antenna space restricted my effective operating range for a number of reasons. I am not a great linguist but I have always been interested in languages and I figured that while I might not have much reach, I could have a lot of fun trying out CW QSOs both QRO and later QRP in the language of the other guy rather than 'rubber stamp English'. To my surprise my rusty schoolboy French and slightly better German were well received. I met Roger a few times on the air and we decided to keep a weekly sched. I decided to give European languages a real go, so I cobbled together a handful of common phrases from dictionaries and online language resources to get by, before embarking on a more ambitious project: a set of translations for every European language.

Originally I wrote to the radio societies of every European country to seek help but this was not an effective approach. So I then contacted every non-English member of WACRAL (to which I belong) and asked them if they would kindly translate roughly 50 common QSO related phrases into their mother tongue. To my delight and surprise the response was great and a number of guys helped put together the translation files. There are now 15 European languages on my fledgling website. I call the website, 'Parlez Vous QSO' and it can be found at: http://web.onetel.com/~stephenseabrook/. I really ought to find out how to get a proper domain name sorted out (any advice welcome!) but it is easiest to find by typing 'Parlez Vous QSO' into your search engine. The site itself somehow caught the attention of a number of enquirers, some of whom simply emailed me the translations in their own language! This is the sort of 'fraternity of amateur radio enthusiasts' that makes our hobby great! There are quite a few 'missing' languages but the pleasure of being able to communicate - even falteringly - in the other guy's language is great and I am delighted with the response I have had from the guys on the other end of the QSO.

My construction was mainly limited to station accessories: PSK interface, RTTY interface, CAT interface and various test equipment before I got into QRP. I built a FoxIII, MFJ Cub for 20m and a couple of Christmas' ago a K1. What a great radio! I never cease to be amazed that if the station Icom 706 or the Kenwood 570D fails to yield a QSO with lots of Watts, a changeover to the K1 often finds a QSO within minutes! How can that be!?

Keep up the good work on Soldersmoke. I thoroughly enjoy the podcasts and look forward to the sequel to the book!

kind regards

Steve Seabrook M0ECS

Sittingbourne

England

Homo Ludens!

Brought to our attention by Jim, AL7RV.
Check it out: http://ludens.cl/index.html