BITX 5 Watter Makes the Trip to Tokyo

The solar flux index was only 151 this morning, but grey line conditions to Japan were very good.  Yoshi, JA1OJJ, was booming in on 17 meters.   We had a nice chat.  He said I was 55.  His 5 element quad helped a lot!   

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F6FEO's BITX 20 (and DSB Rig)

This morning I was looking at F6FEO's wonderful web site (Frank, KM4AXA is building the 28 Mhz DSB rig from Michel's site) .  The drawings have a nice JF1OZL feel to them.

Check out Michel's site.  Just hit the translate button if you have trouble with the French language:
http://f6feo.homebuilder.free.fr/index.html

Merci Michel! 



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MOXON Antenna Project -- Need Rotator Advice

 

 

I've been put together a fishing pole MOXON antenna for 17 meters.  It will be used with my 5 Watt BITX rig.  I need something to spin it around.   I know that many of the cheap TV rotators don't hold up very well.  I had one die quickly out in the Azores.  There seems to be several brands out there, but the rotators and the control boxes look suspiciously similar. 

 

Is there any brand out there that is more robust and reliable than rest? 

I came up with a pretty cool way of affixing the corners of the antenna elements to the fishing poles.  That coil-like thing is the wire part of a bungee cord.  It fits nicely into the end of the fiberglass pole. You have to be sure to get the pole length and the element dimensions properly proportioned, with a sufficient amount of bend in the poles.

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Fireballs Emitting RF at HF!

Yea, and that damn gamma ray bust static has been totally messing up the 12 meter band! Someone should complain to the FCC!

https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/1382596c320d

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

Some DX That You Can Never Work. Never.

There is some amazing info in this site. It is worth reading.

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-disappearing-universe-d7447467c63a

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Pete Juliano's Enclosures

 

I'm sure many of you are, like me, impressed with the enclosures that Pete Juliano has been using with his rigs.   Here's an e-mail that he sent yesterday to Bert. 

Hi Bert,

 

You have a ready source of material right there in Seattle and they will cut it to size. Check out On-Line Metals. The transceiver project has a 4 x 8 inch base plate I bought from them and the front and back are pieces of single sided copper PC Board. The support material is 1/2 inch aluminum angle stock (Home Depot). Interesting use of round aluminum pillars. The front and back are stabilized using 1/4 inch threaded aluminum spacers that were fitted inside of small diameter hollow aluminum tube I bought in a hobby shop. A dab of Gorilla Glue holds the spacers inside the tubing and it forms a rigid support structure.

 

The subject of mechanical construction is a good one and perhaps Bill would like to cover that in a future podcast. That said I do have a bench top 3 axis manual milling machine and a 3 axis CNC milling machine (that one cost me about $250K). The cost was not in the machine but the cost of sending my youngest son to WSU where he got an ME degree. He designed and built the machine for me.

 

Boeing Surplus (now gone) in Kent used to sell aluminum plate by the pound and a lot of my stock (now all gone) came from there. As a retired Boeing employee I used to get a discount.

 

73’s

Pete

And here is a slide show illustrating Pete's technique:

https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=4f1e8c71e0d4f1dc&id=4F1E8C71E0D4F1DC%212607&Bsrc=Photomail&Bpub=SDX.Photos&sff=1&authkey=!ADzJ4SgPn5OzRqk


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Video of Pete Juliano's 20-40 Bilateral Rig

Wow, what a beautiful rig.  Nice work Pete.  Kind of eerie how we both chose the 20/40 combination after building 17 meter rigs. We'll have to talk more about this in SolderSmoke 162.  Soon!

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A Post Card from Paris

This arrived from Paris, from our friend Rogier, PA1ZZ KJ6ETL. "Men are like computers: one never knows what's going on inside."  But it looks to me like the OM in the picture knows EXACTLY what's going on inside that rig.  So I guess this is commentary on the perils of black boxes, and the benefits of an analog, discrete component, Hardware Defined Radio approach.    I'm with you Rogier!  Merci!


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Thought Provoking Comments from Bert, WF7I

 
Hey Bill. 

 I enjoyed the interview with Pete N6QW very much.  So many main points were covered and I kept nodding in agreement, especially some of the stuff about the ease of doing homebrew that we have these days.  Like you, or similar to you I'm guessing, I have memories as a kid staring at the pages of an ARRL handbook, saying "huh?"  These days almost any question can be answered with a Google (and if not, an appropriate book overnighted via Amazon).  You guys both nailed it too with the comments about the free design software that is plentiful and the cheap crystals (I still need to order some "bags" of these!).  When I started out it seemed crystals were a big expense.  I guess not so much now.  It's really a great time to be a homebrewer.

I was trying to think of more questions for him for the second half of your interview but most of what I could come up with was too pedestrian probably or already covered.  I am curious about amplifiers but I believe he's going to talk about that next anyway.  Nothing was said about using varactor diodes in VFOs (unless I missed it) and I'm a little curious about his experiences with them.  And whether he still uses air variables or not (and if he has an opinion on these more compact "polyvaricons", one of which is in the Hendricks version of the Bitx-20 I'm building).   It sounds like most homebrewers these days are pairing up their VFOs with digital architecture of one type or another for stability and the display.  I guess you can't argue with the price of some of the needed parts.  But like you I feel like I'm not wanting to jump into the complex digital too far, the simplicity and ease of understanding of the simple circuits is really refreshing and fun for me.  The moment you have to rely on software for something I feel that the project is lessened a bit, not as robust in a way, kind of like having to rely on cholesterol-lowering meds so that we can keep eating cheeseburgers (had to slip in a food reference somewhere).

Something else dawned on me a few weeks ago, soon after I'd built my 40m direct conversion rig ("mrad-40") -- does anyone consider the audience on the band they're designing for???  I'm only partly joking!  There are some rude and coarse dudes on 40m.  It takes a little bit of luster off the whole "first light" experience of a new homebuilt radio when you turn it on and hear some drunks arguing politics or making fun of a YL ham on another frequency!  Probably not a suitable question for Pete!

I also really enjoyed the FDIM edition.  As always, it's one of the best of your podcast series.  My favorite was the interview with the ham near the end, I think he was 2nd to last.  He seemed to really sum up the entire homebrew motivation and experience.  I don't remember his name offhand.  But his description of sitting there with store-bought radios and the sort of transactional nature of appliance operating ("telephoning strangers") perfectly describes how I felt about a dozen years ago.  I'd migrated towards DX chasing and 6m grid collecting but that too can get pretty stale after awhile.  I'm getting closer to having a station that is all home-built, but I'm not sure I'll ever sell my commercial rigs as he did (although it would free up money for more test equipment!).

Maybe one final comment for Pete or just in general.  Since I've been a ham I feel like there's always been this pressure to build/design something that is in some way "cutting edge" or new.  In today's landscape that would be along the lines of the FDIM guy turning an Android phone into a ham rig.  I'm wondering if others feel some sort of peer pressure to "push the envelope" in some way with what they're doing, to establish bragging rights of some kind or to somehow feel that what they're doing is important or relevant.  I've never been clever enough to succumb to this pressure and invent something ingenious!  And I find doing lots of software coding incredibly boring and I know I'm not very skilled at it. 

So...I guess the question or point is, should we all in some way as "responsible" hams feel obligated to break ground in some new technical aspect of the hobby somehow, especially as builders and homebrewers (and hams)?  In other words, should I be riddled with guilt if I decide to devote the rest of my life to building regens and not SDRs?  Do you know what I mean here?  There seems to be a mindset among some hams that the hobby was founded on experimentalists pushing the boundaries of what was known, and in some way we all carry that torch.  For me, I've always pretty much seen it as a hobby, and if it felt like work I didn't do it!  Any thoughts on that?

Bert WF7I

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El Peregrino (The Pilgrim) from Spain

Eduardo, EA3GHS, sent this to me.  It looks like a wonderful bilateral SSB rig for 17 meters.
They said they wanted a "daylight" rig (for a daytime band) because in Spain the religious pilgrims walk all day and are tired at night.  Hence 17 for Los Peregrinos!

http://ea3ghs.qrp.cat/peregrino.html



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Alan Wolke's GREAT Video on Transmission Line Termination

An outSTANDING Wave video from Alan!  Check out the comments from new hams on the YouTube page:  Alan has a real knack (!) for explaining technical material, and for imparting real understanding. 

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Harv's Minima

Good Evening Bill & fellow Solder-smoke friends,

 

Well, I’m following the pack. I began gathering items for the Minima Transceiver back in March 14. There had been a good bit of strong back-N-forth discussions on the Minima Blog about what works and what doesn’t work. Some circuit refinements had been agreed upon while other were left to individual preferences. So, I decided to just be silent an learn from the experts. As a result, I did several months of observing before I took the plunge. While my efforts are not nearly as aggressive as others, I decided to forge a much slower path to success.

In my own quirky way of doing things, I kitted each module, measured all the parts statically, laid out the components, and finally built & tested each assembly before going to the next.

As a result, the learning’s were great and the performance of each section equal or better than my expectations.

 

I went the Manhattan Style this time but,  I have purchased several sets of Minima PCBs to use in the future. As I see it, there is a lot more solder melting ahead.

 

Bill, building radios is NOT DEAD yet. That desire to get back to the golden days of home-brewing still lives on.

 

At the end of the Memorial Weekend, this is my current Minima progress…

 

·         Construction of all 3 Audio Stages now complete (see photos)

·         The Microphone Pre-Amp is now awaiting voice testing

·         Audio Amplifier and Final Amplifier have been tested together

·         The results of audio testing has been superb for all stages thus far

·         3 complete sets of Micro Relays have been order and I’m now awaiting their arrival

·         24 – various ferrite and powered iron cores arrived several weeks ago, these are the heart of the front-end RX/TX stages

·         100 - 20 Mhz. crystals have arrived and await characterization

·         25 - 8” Male to Male SMA Cables have arrived this weekend, will need to order 15 – 4” Male to Male SMA Cable Assemblies next

·         5 – 12” X 15” Copper Clad Boards have arrived this weekend

·         25 –J310 N-channel J RF Power FETs were ordered and arrived this weekend, these are used in the Mixer Stage

 

 

Final Audio Stage

 

 

Audio Amplifier Stage

 

 

Microphone Pre-Amplifier Stage (see microphone connector mounted at rear)

 

I’m ready to begin kitting the Side Tone Oscillator and RX/TX Relay Stages.

The largest and most intense modules are yet to be tackled.

The Bi-Directional Amplifier has 34 parts alone.  So far I have installed over 40 parts in the three modules I’ve completed…

I realize it is just a start but, I’m motivated to see this one project through to completion.

 

73’s & Happy Soldering

 

Harv -=WA3EIB=-

Albuquerque, NM.

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