LadyAda Named Entrepreneur of 2012

Watch this video and you will see that Limor Fried has The Knack!
She and her company have brought homebrew electronics back to lower Manhattan.
Some kind listener sent me a gift certificate for Ada Fruit.  We will put it to good use, probably
with Raspberry Pi and Arduino gear.
Three cheers for Lady Ada!

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmoke Our Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

Murphy's Whiskers: SHAVED (with Belden 1671A!)

Brad, AA1IP, has come to the rescue and is offering Belden 1671A at prices SIGNIFICANTLY below cocaine levels. Thanks Brad!

Hello--
In response to Bill's plea on SolderSmoke #142 for an inexpensive source of Belden 1671A semi-rigid coaxial cable, I can offer it for sale at $.30 per foot in lengths up to 10 feet to 20 feet; handling longer lengths is problematical, as I don't have a good wire-respooling method at present. Postage and packaging for up to 10 feet of 1671A cable is extra and costs $3.25 for shipping via first-class mail to U.S. addresses (I honor PayPal and certain other payment methods). Note that coaxial connectors for 1671A are available (but not from me, alas). Also, the outer jacket of 1671A is best cut with a fine-toothed coping saw or a miniature tubing cutter such as... http://www.amazon.com/Pit-Bull-Mini-Tubing-Cutter/dp/B0027BBHW0

Questions welcomed as always. 73-- Brad AA1IP

P.S.: the "Murphy's Whiskers" Bill refers to are small pieces of copper braid wire that break off from RG-174/U (or other) coax braid and cause intermittent short-circuits in whatever they fall into.

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics"http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

The Father of the CK722 (and RadioShack!)

Steve Smith of SolderSmoke's West Coast bureau sent us the link to this article about a very interesting guy who made enormous contributions to the radio art. Three cheers for Norman Krim!
http://tinyurl.com/7qsdq22

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics"http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

Walford Electronics' "QRP In the Country"

A stiff wind and occasional drizzle did not put off the large attendance of QRP and home building enthusiasts who attended QRP in the Country on July 17^th. Hundreds of people from all over England and Holland found their way to Upton Bridge Farm, Somerset where the farm barns provided cover. About 25 stalls and displays showed off or sold everything from components to large construction projects. Apart from a few traders selling components, most displays were from Clubs publicising their activities or of ancient domestic and wartime radios, with a few individuals selling items to make space for new projects! There were also practical construction projects to be seen as ‘students’ built their Cary RXs with occasional help from the Bath Buildathon team led by Steve G0FUW. The catering team led by Tony G0GFL cooked a prodigious amount of special local burgers and sausages from the host Tim G3PCJ’s farm served in rolls baked locally that very morning, and washed down by village beer and cider, under the careful eye of Robert PA9RZ!

A raffle raised £200 for those suffering in East Africa; the main prize being a year’s subscription to PW kindly donated by Rob G3XFD which was won by Graham G4DPH. George G3RJV was asked to select a couple of displays that ‘appealed’ to him for two other prizes. The GQRP Club had kindly donated a special edition of Drew VK3XU’s latest project book which was also won by G4DPH for his PW Sprat project; a Walford Electronics Radlet CW TCVR kit went to Colin G3YHU for his valved superhet. A years subscription to BYLARA was won by SWL Mike Jones who is about to take his Foundation licence course.

After the event Tim G3PCJ said he was said delighted with the increased attendance and wished to thank everybody whose hard work had made the event so successful. He urged all Clubs within reasonable distance to plan their displays for next year! Watch the press for announcements of the date!

Any questions to:-
Tim Walford G3PCJ walfor@globalnet.co.uk
WALFORD ELECTRONICS www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~walfor

Designers & suppliers of kits for radio enthusiasts

Proprietor Tim Walford BSc MIEE CEng G3PCJ

-----------------

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics"http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

Please Help Get SolderSmoke into RadioShack Stores

Several listeners sent me the link to a new campaign by the RadioShack stores. They apparently want to get back into supplying parts for the electronics DIY community. Great! I always liked the oft-maligned stores. I missed them when overseas, and was always saddened to see them drifting away from the world of our kind of radio shack. But it appears that the 'shack might be coming back! RadioShack has asked customers to leave comments on their blog page listing the three items that they would like to see added to the RadioShack inventory.

I would really appreciate it if you guys would go to that page and tell them that you think it would be a good idea for them to sell the book "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" in their stores. You can point them to the link http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm

Some things you might mention in your comments on the RadioShack blog:

-- One of the reasons I wrote the book was because I wanted to try to help perpetuate the old, friendly, cooperative ham radio spirit: The culture of the Elmer and all that. The shared junk box. The willingness to help someone with a project or a technical problem. This book might help foster the kind of sense of community that would help everyone (including RadioShack!)

-- The book was in part inspired by the RadioShack publications of the great Forrest Mims. Like Mim's books, SolderSmoke has lots of hand-drawn diagrams.

-- The book actually contains (already!) a very favorable comment about the important role played in DIY by the RadioShack stores.

-- While it is mostly about ham radio, it was written to appeal to the broader electronics DIY community, and contains wide variety of projects including astronomy, kite aerial photography and rocketry.

-- The author -- Bill Meara -- would be willing to work something out with them (!)

So, gentlemen: Please get typing! Don't tell them I sent you ;-) Let's make this seem like a spontaneous outpouring of popular support.

Here is the blog location for RadioShack: http://blog.radioshack.com/post/2011/05/19/RadioShack-And-The-DIY-Community-You-Talked-Were-Listening.aspx

or http://blog.radioshack.com/post.aspx?id=f7239c83-8fd3-47e4-9fb9-395f57b56bb7

If you are so inclined you could also tweet them your input @Radio Shack

And you could put your comments on their Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/RadioShack

Thanks a lot!

Struggling Brother

OM Jason, NT7S, has been experiencing the kinds of workbench trials and tribulations faced by anyone who tries to create something new. But I think the radio gods are looking favorably on his efforts -- a recent QSO with W7ZOI is a very good omen:

http://www.nt7s.com/blog/

Hang in there Jason! I'm sure the QRP community is looking forward to the availability of the rigs you are developing.

New HamStack Project Boards from Sierra Radio Systems

From Sierra Radio Systems (our sponsor):

We just got a batch of new boards that are a very handy companion to the HamStack CPU board. We call it a "Project Board". If you are embedding a CPU board into your own project, that works fine. However, if you want to build a stand-alone application, like a keyer, sequencer, DTMF decoder, reset timer, tone generator, whatever, you will need a power supply, connectors and some sub-circuits. That is what the project board includes. You plug the CPU board on top of the project board and you can program it to do all kinds of things.

The board includes the following sub-circuits...
Features
- 2 digital inputs with 10 pullup resistors to +5v DC
- 4 analog inputs with a selectable voltage range of 0-5 or 0-22 volts DC
- 3 high speed, quiet, SPST reed relays capable of switching up to 500 ma.
- 1 opto isolated digital output
- 1 RS-232 serial port
- 1 analog signal output that can generate a sine wave 0-5kHz at 0-5v DC
- 8870 DTMF decoder chip
- 1 Temperature probe input
- 3 additional general purpose CPU IO connections
- 5v DC power supply (supply rail for logic and analog chips)
- 2.5v DC power supply (bias supply for op amps)
- 3.3v DC power supply (supply rail for 3.3v parts)
- 5 pole low pass filter to condition the analog signal generators output

Ideas...
For repeater builders, you can use the DTMF decoder and relays to make a master site reset controller that sits outside the repeater controller.
You can use the tone generation function to make a portable or bench top test tone generator.
You can use the reed relays to do timer based computer resetting.
Make a CW IDer or beacon transmitter controller.
Battery voltage monitor. Read the voltage, when low, one of the reed relays keys the repeater transmitter and the tone generator send a beep or CW message.
Plus...
We are writing a really cool keyer app that will do iambic mode A/B, record and send programmable macros, with an LCD to show the speed and use a digital rotary encoder to set the speed.
The keyer will be open source and you can hack it to your hearts content.

Anyway, its the perfect platform to build a HamStack based ham radio project. The HamStack (and project board) supports programming in C or Basic.

Check it out on the web site www.hamstack.com

George
KJ6VU

CFL Light Bulb Schematics

Lots of good parts in those new fancy bulbs! This site provides schematics for the major brands. Very useful. Try not to eat the mercury in the tubes.
http://www.pavouk.org/hw/lamp/en_index.html#bigluz20w

SolderSmoke at Winterfest

I'll be at the Vienna Wireless Society's Winterfest hamfest tomorrow morning. I've gathered up all the unnecessary junk in the shack, and hope to replace it all with new and better junk tomorrow. I'll also have a few copies of "SolderSmoke -- The Book" for sale. I'll be at table D4 inside the facility. Hope to see many of you there!

T-Shirts! Bumper Stickers! Mugs! Save 15%!

Visit the SolderSmoke Store and save 15% through January 20.
COUPON CODE: JANXV
http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmoke

"Wired" looks at Radio Shack

Art, KG6ZWD, sent this link to me. Looks like Wired magazine has an interesting article about Radio Shack.

http://blakegonzales.com/2010/06/30/growing-up-with-radioshack/

I always liked these stores. They were never perfectly aligned with our needs, and they seem to be drifting even further away, but over the years I picked up lots of good gear and needed parts at these stores. Ideas too! I have those "Mini Notebooks" by Forrest Mims. Great stuff!

SolderSmoke is Moving the Markets!

Hi Bill,

I was at the East Suffolk Wireless Revival yesterday (Sunday) morning – hardly FDIM, but still a nice little flea market / boot sale, maybe 20 / 25 people selling odds and ends from SMD components to rigs and other bits of kit. Finished up in a bit of a good natured scrum fighting over variable capacitors made all the more desirable for having proper shafts and being made of something other than plastic.

Your name came up as being the inspiration for a resurgence in home building and the subsequent rise in prices of desirable bits as they became scarce as more people wised up to the fun of building and the ease of just melting solder straight on to the PCB rather than trying to etch something. Rather suspect that your podcasts and that book are actually being more influential than you realise. Read my copy lying on the beach in Antigua, but still keep going back to it, and as you have said in the past, the rest of the library – it’s making a very pleasant change from the Masters that I’m buried in at the moment.

Bought the UK equivalent of a Harbor Freight punch over a few days back, so can now make my own little round pads out of old PCB – magical !!

Good luck with the move – I was brought up on a prison farm in Tanzania amongst other places, so recall all too well that strange sense of loss when you leave a country for pastures anew. Lovely to hear Maria sounding so Italian – picking up another language at that age is a wonderful thing to have done and will no doubt stand both her and Billy in good stead over the years. I still manage a little Swahili after 50 years, including teaching my last 2 dogs a few commands which is always funny.

Looking forward to the next podcast – they have become an important little interlude in my life and keep my interest in amateur radio invigorated

All the best

Nick

QRSSing again, AA1TJ's new page

As I mentioned earlier, computer problems have delayed the SolderSmoke podcast (don't worry, parts are on the way).  They have also knocked me off the WSPR system.  So I switched over to QRSS mode and am now pumping out about 20 milliwatts of upside down sloooooooooow FSK on about 10140050 Hz.  (Don't you like how in QRSS you find yourself giving the frequency not in kilos or megas, but in just plain Hertz?   If I get into a retro mode I may start giving them in cycles.) During daylight hours in Europe you should be able to watch my little signal arriving at ON5EX's station in Belgium.  Just look down on the right on this page for a live view of Johan's receive screen.


VA3STL has some good QRSS stuff on his blog:  http://va3stl.wordpress.com/



I noticed this morning that Mike, AA1TJ has moved and updated his very fine site.  Check it out: 
http://www.aa1tj.com/radio.html
Be sure to click on the link that lead to info about Mike mountain-top work site.  Like I said, truly the kind of job that Knack victims dream about.

Rumor has it that Dan's Small Parts is back in operation after a winter break.

Nice Video on 40 Meter Receiver Project

Tom, AK2B, put up a nice video about a 40 meter receiver that he made from the small circuit boards that Diz sells at PartsAndKits.com. Also, you will see KD1JV's digital dial and the New England QRP club's NEScaf. Nice work guys!

The Xtal Set Society

The Xtal Set Society wins our "Good Guys of the Month" award. In an effort to improve the performance of my Vatican City Crystal Radio, and my hellish regen, I ordered a Hi-Z crystal earphone from the Society. It arrived very quickly, along with a free copy of their newsletter, their amazing catalog, and a free piece of candy!

There is great stuff in the catalog, and the newsletter seems like gold mine of technical info.

Check it out: http://www.midnightscience.com/index.html

Halted Specialties -- Our kind of store!

The New York Times recently ran a story about Halted Specialties, the Silicon Valley electronics store. Wow, almost makes you want to move to the area,
Here's the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/technology/personaltech/05basics.html?_r=1

No need to move. They do mail order:
http://www.halted.com/

Looks like they are having a Vintage Radio event on Feb 21, 2009

Kits and Parts dot com

For some nice offers on parts of interest to QRPers and Knack victims in general, check out the website of Diz, W8DIZ.

http://kitsandparts.com/

Dan's Small Parts Back in Operation

http://www.danssmallpartsandkits.net/

Dan is a great source of parts for Knack victims. Check out his catalog -- take a look at his special deals.

N3ZI's $9.99 Counter Kits

Doug, N3ZI, was one of the intrepid participants in the ARRL Homebrew Challenge competition. FB! He is now making available some very inexpensive digital frequency readout kits. Jerry, NR5A, sent me one. (Thanks Jerry!) Obviously this is a kit useful to Knack victims.

Here is the web site for the kits: http://www.pongrance.com/

Dan's Small Parts Temporarily Closed

Dan's web site reports that there was a bad accident, and that his business is temporarily closed, but that "Dan will be back." Let's all wish Dan the best of luck. Many of us depend on him to keep our junk boxes well-stocked. I was just getting ready to send him an order.