W5USJ's AMAZINGLY BEAUTIFUL Mighty Mite

More beauty and technical details at his site: 

http://www.w5usj.com/mmmassytest.html

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N2HTT's MMM Makes Contacts (the little rubber feet are important)

Hi Bill and Pete,

Some further adventures of the Michigan Mighty Mite - I have added several amenities since first oscillation:

- a low pass filter on the output

- bnc connections for antenna and a rcvr, and a tx/rx switch

- coaxial connector for power

- stereo jack for the key

- LED tx power indicator, and

- little rubber feet

Of all of these, I cannot sufficiently emphasize the importance of little rubber feet. A project just cannot be considered complete without them.

More pictures and details of the low pass filter are on my blog at http://n2htt.net

I've been heard on RBN on 40m several times, but haven't gotten any replies to calling CQ. This weekend was the December SKCC Sprintathon, and I pretty conclusively proved that if there are any other signals on the band the MMM is not likely to be heard.

After the contest ended, I posted on the SKCC sked page, and two stations, KC9W and KT4TN agreed to listen for me. We made successful contacts on 7059 kHz. Both stations are in Tennessee, and coincidentally both ops are named Randy.

As Bruce KK0S observed in his report, the rig seems to operate about 1 kHz above the nominal crystal frequency, as confirmed by both Randys.

I've had a lot of fun with this little rig, it's a keeper.

Keep up the great work with the podcasts, and Happy Holidays

73

Mike N2HTT

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Larry's Mighty Mite

Larry's rig looks like it is almost ready to go for Straight Key Night!   FB.   I was glad to heat that the crystal survived the rough treatment dished out by the US Postal Service these days.  Apparently all envelopes are sent through a steam roller!  Who knew?

Hi Bill and Pete,

As usual life has intervened in my plans, but after a delay for professional and personal reasons I can now report success in yet another additional the the CLA.  I was able to successfully transmit into a dummy load yesterday with my new transmitter.  It is not the prettiest device I have ever built but it is functional.  I tried the home made mepad construction and it works fairly well.  I did discover a few things while building and testing this unit.  First, I need a new soldering iron with a little better temperature control.  Second, before using this transmitter on the air (currently on a dummy load), it needs a low pass filter.  I can see several harmonics imposed on the generated signal.

The first picture show how everything is mounted to piece of scrap wood for stability.  I even screwed down the old key for stability during testing.  The alligator clips are for the dummy load connection (the dummy load is also home built from 20, 1K ohm resistors which is located just on the right edge of the picture).  

Even without an antenna I was able to receive the transmitted signal on my IC-7200 in the shack.  

The signal on the scope is messy but the tome received on the IC-7200 sounds good.

Next steps are the additional of a Low Pass Filter and better matching to the dummy load (currently I'm only at about 49 Ohms).

Thanks again for the encouragement.  I plan to do a little more tweaking on this unit and will keep you updated on any progress.

Have a great holiday and a Happy New Year,

73

Larry

AE7TM

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Mac's Mighty Mite

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W1KF's Connecticut Mighty Mite

Steve W1KF's Connecticut Mighty Mite is the neatest build so far:   it has a front panel and knobs and plugs and everything!  Pete Juliano commented: "Very cool –and elegant. I loved the transistor in a front panel mounted socket with heat sink. Wished I had thought  of that –great idea."  Steve is on the air at grey line times, looking for contacts at 3.579 Mhz.

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CBLA Field Manual

I'm starting to worry about a visit from Homeland Security.   I found this on the blog of W6IEE. He blames K6FWT. 

The CBLA has a Yahoo Group: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/CBLA/info


Up the revolution!  Fight the Powers that Be!

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Another NY Mighty Mite Oscillates -- on 40! N2HTT (Video)

Inspired by all the talk of Mighty Mites, N2HTT put together a nice 40 meter version: 

Details on his blog:  http://n2htt.net/

Click on the video above to see and hear it in action. 

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Ben's Mighty Mite -- IT IS ALIVE!

Ben KD9JNQ is the first of the Colorburst Liberation Army (CLA) recruits to get his Michigan Mighty Mite to oscillate.  So he has been promoted to Colonel. 

Ben writes: 

Bill and Pete, thanks again for the encouragement!

EL CLA UNIDO JAMAS SERA VENCIDO

Ben
KD9JNQ


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Colorburst Explained

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorburst

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Bill's Dominican Mighty Mite (1993)

If you look closely, just in front of my keyboard you can see the Michigan Mighty Mite that I rebuilt this morning (scroll down to see the previous post).  Looks like I was using a polivaricon as the capacitor.  Other than the cap, all the parts used in this 2014 version were from the 1993 effort.  Here is how it is described in "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wirless Electronics": 

    I decided to start off slow, with small projects that seemed likely to succeed.  The secretary in our office in the Embassy, Mady Bullen, had an interest in ham radio that had been sparked by service in far-off places where short-wave was the only way to talk to home.  She would pass me old issues of CQ magazine.  It was in the March 1992 issue that I found the Michigan Mighty Mite.

    It was originated by Ed Knoll, W3FQJ and developed by Tom Jurgens, KY8I. It is about as simple as you can get in a radio transmitter: just one stage, a crystal controlled oscillator.

    An oscillator is basically an amplifier in which some of the output signal is fed back into the input.  If you provide enough feedback in the right way, the amplifier will “take off” and begin generating a signal.  The howl you hear when the microphone of public address system gets too close to the speaker is this kind of signal.  The speaker (the output) is sending energy back to the input (the microphone) and what was an amplifier turns (annoyingly) into an oscillator.  In this case it is an audio frequency oscillator because all the filters and tuned circuits in the PA system are built for the audible frequencies.  But the same thing will happen at radio frequencies.  That’s what the Michigan Mighty Mite is all about. 

    I put the thing together using parts obtained from the Santo Domingo Radio Shack store. The resonant circuit used a coil that was just some wire wound around a discarded plastic 35mm film container.  Homebrew radio projects rarely work the first time you power them up.  I had to fidget with this thing quite a bit—obviously there wasn’t enough feedback.  I had my Drake 2-B on and tuned to the crystal’s frequency.  As I poked around on the little circuit board, I suddenly heard a little chirp from the 2-B.  There it was!  The little device that I had put together was producing radio frequency energy on the 40 meter band.  Hooray!  The joy of oscillation!  Now I felt like I was truly in league with Faraday and Marconi, with Shep, Stan and Bollis, and with Serge! Hilmar would have been proud of me (but he still would have been horrified by my sloppy wiring). 

    I never was able to talk to anyone with that little device—the power output was very low, and my antenna for the 40 meter band was very poor.  But it didn’t really matter.  I had had my first real success at homebrewing a piece of ham radio gear.

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Bill's Re-Born 1993 ColorBurst Michigan Mighty Mite

So far we've sent out 9 of these color burst 3.579 MHz crystals.   It occurred to me that I should make sure these particular rocks work with the Michigan Mighty Mite design we've been advocating.  So today -- still in something of a turkey-induced haze --  I pulled out the surviving remnants of the MMM that I built back in 1993.  That one had been for 40, so I rewound the coil for 80 using the data from this MMM site: http://www.qsl.net/wb5ude/kc6wdk/transmitter.html   

I was hoping that this rig might oscillate even without the variable capacitor, but mine did not.  Once the cap was placed in the circuit, the oscillations began.  It sounds pretty good on my Drake 2B. 

I have not yet wound the secondary (antenna) coil but (as I suspected) the oscillator works fine without it. 

So, no excuses folks.  These cheap junk box crystals work.  Time to build one of these things and join the ranks of hams who have homebrewed a transmitter (and, of course, The ColorBurst Liberation Army).   

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Pete Builds a Michigan Mighty Mite

We have been distributing quite a few 3.579 MHz crystals, but until today we hadn't seen a single new Michigan Mighty Mite.   I commented on this in the last podcast.  Pete came to the rescue and built one: 

Hi Bill,

     The MMM was built – took me a long time (about 30 Minutes so it was kind of slapped together). The most time was consumed drawing squares on the sheet metal. I used a pill bottle cut down for the coil.

     Used a piece of Home Depot sheet metal for the based. I highly recommend a .01 Ufd from the 27 Ohm to ground –key clicks are awful.

     BTW the circuit can be modified so that the tuning cap is soldered to one side of the coil and the other side to ground –essentially the tank tuning cap is in series with the 0.05 bypass cap and is effectively across the coil. Tribal Knowledge

    The CLA lives on!

 Pete

VIVA EL EJERCITO DE LA LIBERACION DEL COLORBURST! VIVA EL CLA! 

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Pete's Michigan Mighty Mite Manhattan MePad Noodle

New recruits have been signing up for the Color Burst Liberation Army.   We have been sending out many more 3.579 MHz crystals. Pete Juliano was doing some noodling and came up with this plan for Manhattan pads or Me(Maine)Pads.   All you need is some copper clad board, a pair of Home Depot tin shears and some super glue. Cut out the pads, glue them down, add components and get the Mighty Mite percolating.  

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Swedish Mighty Mite

A thing of beauty!  Check out the key! 

What a great diagram.  Schematic included! 

http://www.sm7ucz.se/MMM/MMM.htm

Remnants of mine

Steve "Snort Rosin" Smith's 

More on all this: 

http://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/search?q=michigan+mighty+Mite

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AA1TJ Crosses the Pond with 10 milliwatts

From a Facebook Post by Mike, AA1TJ:

Made 7 contacts with this tiny transceiver on 20m CW today with an RF output power of 10milliWatts. Five were stations in Georgia (GA QSO Party). The 6th was a regular QSO with a guy in Mississippi.
I answered a DX station calling CQ at 2230Z. Hearing nothing in response, I sent my call sign a half-dozen times anyway. More silence. As I was reaching for the knob to QSY he suddenly returned my call! ...Carlos, CT1BQH northeast of Lisbon, Portugal (that's him in the second photo). I was only 329 on his end but we kept it going for three minutes!

FYI: the transmitter (top circuit board) begins with a 3.58MHz ceramic resonator VXO (a 2N706 from the early 60's). That drives a push-push frequency doubler built around another 1960's-vintage, 2N2644 (obsolete stock from atop Mt. Mansfield, kindly given to me by Rich at Vermont Public Television). On receive, the 7MHz energy is routed via a DPDT relay (the orange rectangle) to the sub-harmonic (Polyakov) mixer located on the lower board. One stage of AF amplification is provided by a 2N333 that came off the GE assembly line in November of 1958. The DPDT relay is keyed directly. On transmit the 7MHz energy feeds a second push-push frequency doubler to produce 10mW at 14MHz (all spurs -35dBc, or less, with only the output resonator). The relay also switches the antenna between the transmitter and receiver.
Gosh, that was fun!

CT1BQH

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Bert's Pititico (PY2OHH) Rig (Video)

Bravo Bert!  

http://wf7ihomebrew.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/a-listen-on-40m-with-the-1-transistor-pititico/

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DSB Transceiver with Only 3 Transistors

Wow.  Looks like something Peter Parker would really like.  This one was sent to me by Stephen, G7VFY.  It comes from Japan:
http://www.cqpub.co.jp/hanbai/books/15/15061/15061_p.180-181.pdf

From this book:-

http://www.cqpub.co.jp/hanbai/books/15/15061.htm

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PY2OHH's New Super-Minimalist (11 Component!) QRPp Transceiver

Wow!   Check out the latest rig from PY2OHH, the Wizard of Sao Paulo,

http://py2ohh.w2c.com.br/trx/pititico/pititico.html


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Pete Friedrichs' Amazing Books, Projects, and Guests

H.P. "Pete" Friedrichs is the author of two books that belong on our book shelves: "Voice of the Crystal" and "Instruments of Amplification." http://www.hpfriedrichs.com/mybooks/mybooks.htm

This morning I got a nice e-mail from Pete.  He's been listening to the podcast.

His e-mail caused me to revisit his web site.  Lots of minimalist homebrew gold there!

Check out the collection of projects sent to Pete from all around the world by readers of his books: 

http://www.hpfriedrichs.com/guestgallery/guestgallery.htm

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SolderSmoke Podcast #159: Hamfests, Herring Aids, and Tuna Tins

 

SolderSmoke Podcast #159 is available.

 



http://soldersmoke.com/soldersmoke159.mp3

April 1, 2014
Vienna Wireless Hamfest
BITX Talk
W1REX speaks
Tuna Tin 2 Mojo Transfer Ceremony
After 38 years -- finishing my Herring Aid 5 receiver
Feedback, Phasing Dots, Rotational Sense, and Oscillation (or not)
Motorboating (when you don't want to)
Building my Tuna Tin 2 with parts from W1REX
On the air with Tuna Tin and Herring Aid
More Minimalist Meanderings:
An (Almost) All Altoid Crystal Radio!
Tek 465 dies (again) :-(
MAILBAG

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