We recently complained that no SolderSmoke Direct Conversion receivers have been built in Japan. So far, no Japanese SS DC Receivers have been built, but Hidehiko JA9MAT has gone a long way in addressing this complaint. In the video above you will see a 40 meter receiver using a PTO and a LONG tuning shaft. There is a wooden base. I see at least three 3D printed coil forms. Hidehiko explains that this receiver has "SA612(DET) + 2N3904 x 2 (Franklin VFO) based with Long Shaft PTO." FB Hidehiko! More from him in the days ahead.
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
Thursday, July 23, 2026
Tuesday, July 7, 2026
Shuji Nakamura -- Inventor of Blue LEDs -- Takes on Fusion Energy at Age 72
This blog covered Shuji Nakamura at least twice before -- we reported on on how he had invented the blue LED: https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/search?q=Nakamura
Now we report on a more recent effort by Nakamura, this one is focused on nuclear fusion.
I think the inspirational thing about the Nakamura stories has to do with his persistence, his refusal to give up, and -- in this most recent story -- his willingness to take on big challenges at age 72.
Three cheers for Shuji Nakamura!
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From a CNN story: https://www.cnn.com/science/shuji-nakamura-lit-up-the-world-and-now-wants-to-power-it-spc
Shuji Nakamura already transformed the world once. His invention of blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) changed everything about our daily lives.
Computers, phones, big screens, traffic lights and electronic billboards light up because of his invention.
Nakamura earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014, along with two other Japanese scientists, Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, for their contributions to his LED breakthrough.
Some experts have hailed his invention as important as Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb.
And so, it’s big news when one of the world’s greatest inventors says his next invention will far surpass the importance of his previous one.
His goal: To create a power plant that uses a new kind of high-pulse laser for nuclear fusion, producing an “endless” supply of efficient, clean energy. With nuclear fusion, there is no uranium involved and no chance for a meltdown.
If he cracks the code, its potential is limitless, said Nakamura, a professor of materials and of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barara (UCSB).
At an age when many look to retire, Nakamura, 72, bursts with energy.
“Retirement is very boring,” he told CNN.
‘I became so desperate’
Long before Nakamura earned Nobel recognition, before he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, he was maligned and ridiculed — an engineer best known for explosions in his lab and for his lack of productivity.
Nakamura worked at a then-little known Japanese chemical company called Nichia Corporation, in 1979, heading its research and development team, comprised of just two people.
But after about 10 years in, he’d developed only three products — and none sold well. At company soccer and softball games, his colleagues harangued him saying, “Why haven’t you produced anything? You need to quit!”
Afterward, on Friday nights, Nakamura often returned to the office and roamed the halls taking on extra duty as an overnight security guard.
“Yeah,” Nakamura said with a laugh, “I had to check the whole company walking around.”
Feeling isolated, Nakamura developed a mentality of what he calls “invention by anger,” an extreme drive to prove others wrong. All his managers told him the same thing: You must quit.
“I became so desperate,” he said.
A last-ditch effort to save his job
Nakamura grew up in a small Japanese fishing village where he learned to love nature and the color blue because of the ocean.
His experience tinkering, toiling and blowing up stuff in his lab had given him the idea to chase his dream of cracking the code to blue LEDs.Major corporations like IBM, General Electric, Bell Labs, Sony and Toshiba invested millions over the decades trying to solve the mystery. Red and green LEDs were easily mastered, yet the solution to making blue LEDs remained elusive because blue light has a shorter wavelength and requires significantly more energy to emit.
At stake was the potential for a multibillion-dollar industry.
In a last-ditch effort to save his job, Nakamura approached Nichia’s founder and chairman Nobuo Ogawa.
“Can I develop blue LEDs?” Nakamura asked.
He couldn’t believe what came next.
“OK, no problem,” Ogawa said.
Nakamura was given a budget of $3 million, an unheard-of amount in 1988 that represented 2% of the company’s annual sales. Two-thirds of the money was for equipment; the rest was to be spent on studying and learning techniques that could lead to a breakthrough.
‘I feel resentful when people look down on me’
Nakamura then spent a year in a lab at the University of Florida learning about metal-organic chemical vapor deposition, or MOCVD.
At 34, he’d never stepped foot on a plane. He also never had a scientific paper published — a fact that earned scorn in Florida. To those with PhDs in the lab, Nakamura was a nobody with zero academic chops. They treated him like a lowly technician, he said, constantly asking him to fix this and fix that.
He quietly raged. “I feel resentful when people look down on me,” he once said. “At that time, I developed more fighting spirit. I would not allow myself to be beaten by such people.”
When he returned to Japan in 1989, more hurdles were thrown his way. His biggest fan, the founder of Nichia, stepped aside as president.
And in his pursuit of a breakthrough, Nakamura chose to go all-in on studying the material gallium nitride as the key to unlocking blue LEDs. Almost every other researcher in the world worked with a different material, zinc selenide.
This became a huge problem, he said, when a renowned researcher held a seminar at Nichia with an emphatic message: gallium nitride was a dead end. Among those in the audience was Nakamura’s new boss.
By day’s end, a hand-written note arrived on his desk, ordering Nakamura to halt all work.
He rejected the order. “I threw it away in the garbage,” he told CNN, smiling.
More notes arrived every few weeks with the same order. He tossed them in the trash, too.
In Japanese culture, he said, it is nearly unheard of to ignore a superior’s orders. In fact, Nakamura stopped attending weekly R&D briefings so that he wouldn’t have to tell colleagues what he was doing.
“I became so angry,” he said, “so that I make the decision” to keep going and keep chasing his dream.
Within months, Nakamura was vindicated. He experienced “the greatest moment of my life,” when he made a simple LED that illuminated with a soft violet-blue light. He wasn’t sure how long the light might last.
He left for the night, and, in the morning, the light still glowed. “It was still very dim, but it’s surviving,” he said. “That moment is very ‘Oh my gosh!’”
On November 29, 1993, Nichia held a news conference that shocked the electronics world. The blue LED had been conquered.
It turned out Nakamura was right: Gallium nitride proved to be the key.
“The tamer of nature and successor to Edison,” Forbes magazine once wrote, “turned out to be an unknown researcher at a Japanese company few had heard of.”
Endless energy as his final chapter
Nichia and Nakamura eventually had a public falling out with back-and-forth lawsuits. The two sides settled their landmark dispute in 2005 — with Nichia agreeing to pay him $8.1 million, far less than the nearly $180 million a Japanese court had ruled Nakamura deserved for his invention.
Almost all of the money, he said, went to “attorney fees and also taxes.”
He prefers not to dwell on that part of his past. He’s proud of what he invented. Plus, he said, “Winning the Nobel Prize was greater.”
“I’m very happy,” he said.
Nichia didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment.
A recent report by the International Atomic Energy found that if old light bulbs were still used around the world, global electricity needs would be nearly unsustainable — “around 70% higher electricity consumption for indoor lighting in buildings.” The electricity saved on home lighting from LEDs, the report found, roughly equals the power used by the entire country of South Korea.
Nakamura is focused on the future and what he feels will have an even greater environmental impact by producing limitless energy with zero emissions.
To meet this goal, he has formed Blue Laser Fusion, a company that uses his blue LED technology to create laser power that could transform energy generation around the world.
About 99.5% of nuclear fusion research over the decades, he estimated, has focused on using powerful magnetic fields to create endless power. Nakamura believes the answer lies in the 0.5%.
“The story is very similar to the blue LED development,” Nakamura said.
In December 2022, researchers at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California, a core part of the US Department of Energy (DOE), achieved the first-ever “fusion gain,” a major scientific breakthrough, when a laser-induced reaction produced more energy than it takes to trigger it.
Nakamura was not involved in that experiment. However, he had already begun developing a new high-power laser concept for inertial fusion, drawing upon his pioneering work in LEDs and laser diodes.
He co-founded Blue Laser Fusion in November 2022. The DOE fusion breakthrough further energized him. Nakamura is determined to take what was proven as scientifically possible in the lab and turn it into a functioning power plant.
He said Blue Laser Fusion has seen breakthrough after breakthrough in the years since.
To contain the continuous fusion reaction without burning everything up, Nakamura and his team have created what is called the optical enhancement cavity, which stores the high-pulse laser energy in its optical chamber, then amplifies the laser power by up to 100,000 times, which drives and contains the burn.
“In layman’s terms,” UCSB said in a 2025 news release, “the laser is the hammer breaking into a tiny pellet of hydrogen isotopes (atoms). The chamber is the anvil, keeping everything contained. The result? Genuinely clean, secure fusion energy.”
At this point, it’s far from Nakamura’s goal of limitless energy with far-reaching benefits.
More work is needed. The company is scaling up to meet its goal to construct a 1-gigawatt pilot fusion power plant — big enough to power 750,000 to 1 million homes — by 2032 near Santa Barbara, California.
Will this be his greatest achievement and gift to the world?
“Yeah, yeah,” Nakamura said simply.
Asked how he might react if a young scientist in his lab defies his orders and continues doing whatever he or she wants to do, Nakamura laughed.
His message to young scientists everywhere, he said, is this: “Taking a risk is most important.”
Doing so might just change the world.
Sunday, July 5, 2026
An Interesting Receiver from North Macedonia
https://hackaday.com/2026/07/02/diy-si5351-radio-tunes-in-sw-mw-and-more/
There are some really cool features in this receiver: There is an ESP microcontroller and an Si5351. There is the rotary digital dial that we had been working with. There is an NE602 mixer and a receiver that is sometimes (SDR mode) direct conversion and other times (Radio mode) a simple superhet with an 455 kHz IF. Wow.
There are really two receivers in this box, and AI kind of confused them. When I asked what the IF was, Gemini told me that there was no IF - it was, they said, a direct conversion reveiver. But no! In the quickly displayed schematics in the video, we see an IF amplifier and what appears to be two IF transformers and a BFO at 455 kHz. So at least in the "RADIO" switch position we see a superhet. The VFO freuency fed into the NE602 is 455 kHz above or below the signal frequency. If they had a BFO on they could listen to CW and SSB in the "Radio" position (it would not be single signal -- there is no sharp filter in there). But even wthout a BFO, in the RADIO mode you could also listen to AM signals using the envelope detector in the IF strip.
Things change when you throw the switch to the SDR mode. Much of the IF/Demodulator board is turned off. The Si5351 now feeds the signal frequency to the VFO port of the NE 602, turning it into a direct conversion receiver. You could feed this signal into your SDR but you would not get image rejection. For this you would need I and Q signals to go to the computer. This receiver provides I and Q output from the Si5351, and it is this that you need to turn that computer into a true single signal, image-rejecting receiver.
Thanks to Hack-A-Day for alerting us to this, thanks to Mirko Pavleski for building this receiver and showing it to us, and special thanks to Hans Summers G0UPL for cracking the code that let the Si5351 produce the stable I and Q signals needed in SDR receivers like this. More on this tomorrow.
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
Coil-Making in Japan -- Manual and Automatic
I found this video sort of soothing. I liked the manual process, but the automatic process is amazing too.
Thanks to Rogier PA1ZZ for sending this.
Friday, November 22, 2024
Tezukuri and Chappy Happy -- Amazing Videos on Homebrew Radio (from Japan?) - Another 40 Meter Direct Conversion Receiver
So around the time we were building 40 meter direct conversion receivers, someone else was doing something similar. His product (above) is a lot nicer than ours. He has an S-meter and a digital frequency readout. But like ours, his is built on a wooden board. FB OM.
If you want to see what a direct conversion receiver can do, watch his video (above).
I was really amazed to see him use a modified VFO from a Kenwood TS-820. Not long ago Pete N6QW spotted one of these on e-bay and recommended that I buy it. As with the Yaesu FT-101 VFOs, we bought it for the gears and reduction drives but ended up with the entire VFO circuit. I now have one on my shelf, ready to go. TRGHS.
We are not sure who Chappy Happy is, but "Tezukuri" means "hand-made" in Japanese. The writing in the video descriptions are in Japanese, then Chinese.
Here is the YouTube channel. Amazing stuff here: https://www.youtube.com/@chappyhappy3675 He is clearly a ham. He even works on an old S-38. Who is this guy?
Saturday, September 7, 2024
Sony and the Transistor
I found the comment about Sony's belief that NPN transistors are superior to PNP very interesting.
Tuesday, June 18, 2024
Amazing Homebrew from Japan -- 7L4WVU's All Homebrew Station
Thanks to Roy WN3F for alerting me to this. Tadashi-san has really built some beautiful stuff. Especially impressive to me is his use of the spectrum analyser and two-tone audio tests to look at IMD of the entire transceiver. See video above. FB OM.
Be sure to check out 7L4WVU's YouTube channel:
And his QRZ page heralding his all-homebrew station covering 1.8 to 430 MHz: https://www.qrz.com/db/7L4WVU
Friday, February 16, 2024
Shuji Nakamora and his (Juliano) Blue Gallium Nitride LED
Lots of great stuff in this video:
-- They get the charge carrier thing right: contrary to many presentations, holes don't really move in a semiconductor. Electrons move to fill holes, making it appear that the holes are moving.
-- Interesting that Nakamura was so willing to defy company orders for so long.
-- The description of the discipline that powered his inventiveness is inspiring.
-- The way he was treated (badly) in Florida because he lacked a PhD is sadly illuminating.
-- The discussion of corporate infighting is interesting.
We wrote about Nakamura before: https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2021/02/shuji-nakamura-inventor-of-juliano-blue.html
Monday, January 15, 2024
Clock Chimes from Japan - Contact with JA0LBE
This contact with Masa was a lot of fun. 2300Z January 14, 2024. 15 meters was obviously in great shape. Suddenly I started hearing clock chimes. The sound seemed to be coming from my rig. Then I looked at my watch and realized we were at the top of the hour. Masa-san's clock chimes were being picked up by his microphone. The microphone was in his I-pad, which he was using to connect to his ham radio station. Very cool.
This email came in from Masa:
| Sun, Jan 14, 7:54 AM (20 hours ago) |  | ||
| ||||
Hello Bill
Thank you very very much for your Email attached the video of our QSO.
Your homemade transceiver is working excellent! I was very surprised to watch the video. I checked transmitting of your equipment is very good this morning. And this evening I understood receiving was also very very good. Congratulations on your homemade equipment.
I have tried remote operation for several months. But I’m afraid my transmitting is not good.
Thanks for your video, I could tell following things. Thank you so much l appreciate it.
My remote signal has almost no blinking up,I felt.
There are about 2 seconds latency on my transmitting.
Most important thing I realize is English conversation over the phone is very difficult for me. I need to learn intonation and pronunciation of English much more.
Again thank you very much for your Email,I appreciate it.
Have a nice day. And good night from Japan.
73!
73!
JA0LBE, Masa in NAGANO
Friday, December 29, 2023
7J6CBQ on Okinawa -- And a Translation of a Science Fiction Novel about Ham Radio in China
The article about Sergeant Malik Pugh USMC on Okinawa brought back memories from the 1990s. David Cowhig was 73 Magazine's Hambassador on Okinawa -- I had the same "position" in the Dominican Republic. David and I were both in the Foreign Service; we joked that 73 had afforded us our only chances to be ambassadors of any kind. David's Okinawa QSL and the opening from his initial report to 73 magazine appear above. You can see more here:
- https://archive.org/details/
73-magazine-1993-04/page/82/ mode/2up - https://archive.org/details/
73-magazine-1993-04/page/84/ mode/2up - https://archive.org/details/
73-magazine-1993-04/page/86/ mode/2up
A couple of my own "dispatches" as Hambassdor to the Dominican Republic appear here:
Back in the 90's David sent me an old QST Magazine. I wrote about this on the SolderSmoke blog:
Later, I learned about another "Hambassador" who was still active as a radio amateur: Ron Gang 4X1MK:
Finally (and this is really cool): David Cowhig has been putting his language skills to good use, translating Chinese written material. He sent me his translation of the opening chapters of a Chinese science fiction novel about ham radio. Readers of the SolderSmoke Daily News will like this:
We Live in Nanjing 《我们生活在南京》
Thanks David!
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
A Marine's Home Workshop on Okinawa
Sergeant Malik Pugh recently won the Navy-Marine Corps Achievement Medal for stepping forward and 3D printing a part that was needed to put a satellite terminal back in operation. That's was great, but even more interesting for us is the fact that Sergeant Pugh has a home electronics workshop in his place on family quarters on Okinawa. See picture above.
The workshop seems to be focused on RC cars, robots and drones, but there is clearly ham radio potential there. This may be the first time since David Cowhig WA1LBP's tour on the island in the early 1990s that we see a workshop like this one. David was 7J6CBQ and, in addition to his duties at the American Consulate at Naha, Okinawa, served as 73 Magazine's "Hambassdor" (I was the Hambassador to the Dominican Republic at the same time).
Read about Sergeant Pugh here:
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