Happy Birthday Arecibo! A Tour of the Radio Telescope

Yesterday I was listening (as I do each morning at 0635) to Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac." (I use a beautiful old FM broadcast receiver that Rogier out in California sent me for my birthday.) Garrison announced that it was the birthday of the Arecibo radio telescope (it opened on November 1, 1963). I wanted to post something about this on the blog, but was running a bit late and didn't get to it. This morning I was greeted by an e-mail from Ken, KG6PO, alerting me to a really magnificent video tour of the Arecibo facility. Wow. This is truly amazing. You guys are going to love this one. Three cheers for Bob Zimmerman! As I watched, I got the distinct feeling that we were visiting Bob's shack, and that the dish was his antenna!

Please spread the word about this video -- it is a real shame that it has only received 757 views. Three cheers for the guys who filmed this. Beautiful work.

Links:

http://youtu.be/kQJawfbjpxw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQJawfbjpxw

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Pumpkin Pi and JBOT Gremlins

Maria wanted to go with a mathematical theme for this year's Jack-0-Lantern. Pumpkin Pi!

I have been chasing some gremlins and banshees around my old Azores 17 meter DSB rig. The JBOT Amp worked fine into a dummy load, but of course things got a bit more complicated when I put it into the rig and connected it to an antenna. It would take off (like a banshee!) if the load was at all reactive. I think this is the result of inadequate shielding and inputs a bit too close to outputs. But it all settles down nicely when I put a transmatch in the antenna line and tune out the reactance. I may just leave it this way.

Output is a bit low -- only about 1 Watt. I realize that at 18 MHz output should be dropping a bit, but I think I should be getting more. I THINK I'm giving it the recommended 1 milliwatt input. At some point I think Farhan mentioned the possible need to experiment with the number of turns on the secondary of the output transformer....

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Snow Static

Related to our post about my new (old!) all-boatanchors heating system (see below), yesterday I had some really horrendous static. I think it was caused by the snow. A Google search on "snow static" brought me to this video (which Gregg in Finland found "shocking""). I liked the tuner and the neon bulbs too.

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My New Shack Heating System: Heath, Halli, Hammarlund and Drake

Temperatures dropped over the weekend and I had to fire up my new heating system for the SolderSmoke shack. See above. Heating by Heath, Halli, Hammarlund and Drake (sounds like a law firm doesn't it?). I'm happy to report that those old filaments take the chill off quite nicely while adding a nice aroma to the room, along with some very pleasing lighting effects (I especially like the green glow from the DX-100 tuning dial).

The Azores-17 DSB JBOT project is (I think) complete. And I did include a low pass filter. In keeping with the finest of ham radio traditions, now that it is cold I will go out and work on an antenna.

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Another Treasure Trove: The Royal Society's Archive

I'm a big fan (wanna-be really) of The Royal Society. In SolderSmoke 138 I noted that Isaac Newton (former Society president) seems to have had The Knack. And when I was in London one of the major perks of my job was that I occasionally got to visit the Society's headquarters. Bill Bryson recently edited a book about the Royal Society -- in his intro he noted that they have always been a very international group (just like us!)
Several readers wrote in with the happy news that the Society's 350 year archive has been placed on-line. Here it is:
http://royalsocietypublishing.org/site/authors/free-archive.xhtml

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Homebrew Jet Engine from Junkbox Parts!

Bob, W8SX (our man in Dayton) sent me this nice video. I really liked the friendly and enthusiastic way in which the builder described his project. I only wish he would have fired it up! Thanks Bob!

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Azorean Oscillator Re-build

With my JBOT amp ready for installation, it was time to go back and check out the rest of the circuitry on my old Azorean DSB/Direct Conversion 17 meter "Magic Carpet" transceiver. I was surprised to find that the oscillator, well, wouldn't oscillate. The MPF102 that I had in the main oscillator circuit was blown. I suspect voltage spikes from the T/R relay. I installed the required diode across the relay coil. (I seem to blow up a lot of MPF102s. Is it just me, or are these devices really fragile? They are junction FETs, not MOSFETS, so I thought of them as being more robust. But I seem to go through a lot of them.)

After messing around with the oscillator and buffer circuits, the nice clean Manhattan isolation pads that had been there at the start were all messed up, with big piles of solder with the ends of multiple axial leads stuck in there. I decided to start afresh. Out came the little PCB box that housed that housed the oscillator, buffer and amp stages. Off came the walls of the box. (When I built this thing the first time, I didn't realize that I would need an amp to get to the 7 dbm needed to drive the diode ring. I ran out of room on the main board and ended up building the needed amplifier on the back wall of the box!)

So I got to build this little circuit again, ten years and three countries after the original build. It was fun. I like building oscillators. There is that satisfying sense of closure and completion when, at the end of the effort, you turn on your receiver and hear the tone from your creation.

There was also a fun little bit of troubleshooting. After rebuilding the oscillator circuit I noticed that applying power to the "on the wall" amplifier caused the oscillator to shut down. At the buffer, I was seeing RF in and RF out, but the whole thing would shut down when I powered up the next stage. Obviously there wasn't a lot of BUFFERING going on! Sure enough, the MPF102 was bad. I replaced it from my dwindling supply, and all was right with the universe.

Now the amp goes in. But first I will build the low pass filter. I promise.

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Steve Jobs (age 12) calls Bill Hewlett (of HP)

"When he was in eighth grade, Steve Jobs decided to build a frequency counter for a school project and needed parts. Someone suggested that he call Bill Hewlett. Finding a William Hewlett in the telephone book, the 12-year-old Jobs called and asked, "Is this the Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard?" "Yes," said Bill. Jobs made his request. Bill spent some time talking to him about his project. Several days later, Jobs went to HP and picked up a bag full of parts that Bill had put together for him."

More HP stories: http://www.hp.com/retiree/history/founders/hewlett/quotes.html

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Halloween Sale on SolderSmoke -- The Book

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Better Link to 1932 Yardley Beers Article

(From the November 2004 issue of QST)

I hear that picture I posted of the 1932 newspaper article was pretty much illegible. Sorry about that. Try this one from the Delaware Valley Radio Association. Scroll down a bit until you see OM Yardley in his front bedroom shack (the one with a window on the world!). On my Firefox browser I was able to click on it and get an easily read-able view.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2790/1877/1600/Yardley%20Beer%20DVRA1.jpg

Thanks DVRA!

BTW: Did you catch the name of the fellow who taught young Yardley the Morse Code? Atherton Noyes. Such good strong names!

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More on Yardley Beers

Just click on the article and use the zoom feature of your browser to visit the teenage shack of Yardley Beers.

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Homebrew Hero: Yardley Beers

How's that for a beautiful homebrew rig! Prompted by our discussion of distinctive ham radio names, Harv, WA3EIB, sent us a very nice report on Yardley Beers, W0JF. The rig pictured is Yardley's "Jason" 20 meter QRP transceiver. Yardley had named the rig for his cousin. Harv met Yardley at a Colorado hamfest in 1993:

"On the table in front of Yardley was an Aluminum Box fashioned into a QRP radio named, “Jason”, 2 broken and worn head phones from the 1920’s, a few 1980’s QST and, several odd radio parts. My bulb of brilliance was not working that day. I said, “I don’t know what I’m looking for!" Somehow Yardley must have studied my eyes. I had locked my vision onto his very elaborate QRP rig. He paused for a few moments and said, “You into QRP?” By this time I felt more relaxed because he was now on my wavelength. I said, “Why yes, I would rather work with a homebrew radio that the ones with features that no one seems to know what they do!”

Harv bought the Jason (and everything else on Yardley's table) and established a lasting friendship with W0JF.

There is a nice article about OM Yardley's life in the November 2004 issue of QST.

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