Tech Details on SolderSmoke's Theme Music

This will be discussed in the next podcast, so I thought I'd share some tech details on our theme music. From the artist, Maestro Moj:

Geeky details about the music:
In the homebrew spirit, I tried to make all the sounds with instruments which I had soldered together myself. These were a Formant music synthesizer designed by C. Chapman from the Dutch/British "Elektor" magazine, circa 1977, and a FatMan synthesizer kit from PAiA Electronics. I play them through an ancient Kustom 200 guitar amplifier, which I've caused to smoke at least twice. The beginning is my K2 being powered on and tuned across 80 meters. I cheated and used a real gong at the end which a good friend went to the trouble of finding and buying in China, but I fed the sound through a PIC Polywhatsit designed by John Becker and described in Britain's "Everyday Practical Electronics," December 2001.
If anyone wants to sing along, it seems to me that the words are: " - Sol-Der Smo-Oke, - Sol-Der Smoke (repeat over and over) "
Music, like all home-brew, is never truly done. Next time I'll try to get a theremin working again - there's a radio-circuitried musical instrument!
If my grandson has kept the site up, there may be garage band music of his and mine on MySpace under Mikeandtheceiling.

Enjoy!

Mark "moj" Johnson
W8MOJ

Our Kind of Contest: "Eight Pins, One Shot!"

Jeri Ellsworth has come up with a contest that will appeal to SolderSmoke fans: A design competition using 555 timers. Check it out:
http://www.555contest.com/

NASA NANO-Sail Found by Hams!

All is well with the Nano-sail spacecraft, and hams apparently helped find it:

“This is tremendous news and the first time NASA has deployed a solar sail in low-Earth orbit,” said Dean Alhorn, NanoSail-D principal investigator. “To get to this point is an incredible accomplishment for our small team and I can’t thank the amateur ham operator community enough for their help in tracking NanoSail-D. Their assistance was invaluable. In particular, the Marshall Amateur Radio Club was the very first to hear the radio beacon. It was exciting!”

The Marshall Amateur Radio Club confirmed deployment of NanoSail-D late Wednesay EST with reception of the 1200bps AX.25 FM beacon on 437.275MHz +/-10kHz Doppler. News Release: 19 January 2011 Huntsville, AL USA The Marshall Amateur Radio Club (@ MSFC) - WA4NZD late Wednesday afternoon confirmed ejection of the NanoSail-D sub-satellite. This loaf-of-bread sized spacecraft was carried to orbit late last year on an Air Force rocket as part of NASA's FastSat project. This is the first successful deployment of a satellite, launched from a satellite already in orbit .!. The only communication from the NanoSail-D vehicle is via ham radio with 1200 baud FM AX25 beacon packets. The WA4NZD team of N4PMF and WB5RMG, was listening on 437.275 MHz FM with the NanoSail-D Principal Investigator Dean Alhorn at the club station when the beacon was heard and susbequently decoded onto the screen. Please visit http://wa4nzd.wordpress.com/ for pictures and more links to the NanoSail-D project. They are asking for telemetry reception reports from all over the world to help fill in gaps. The battery is expected to last for only three days. Marshall Amateur Radio Club http://wa4nzd.wordpress.com/ NanoSail-D Dashboard http://nanosaild.engr.scu.edu/dashboard.htm NanoSail-D on Twitter http://twitter.com/NanoSailD

Voyager -- Still on the air after 33 years

The Baltimore Sun has a really nice article on the Voyager spacecraft, and on the guys who have been keeping them going for the past 33 years. Here's an excerpt:

You probably have more computing power in your pocket than what NASA's venerable Voyager spacecraft are carrying to the edge of the solar system. They have working memories a million times smaller than your home computer. They record their scientific data on 8-track tape machines. And they communicate with their aging human inventors back home with a 23-watt whisper. Even so, the twin explorers, now 33 years into their mission, continue to explore new territory as far as 11 billion miles from Earth. And they still make global news. Scientists announced last month that Voyager 1 had outrun the solar wind, the first man-made object to reach the doorstep to interstellar space.
Here's the link to the article:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-voyager-20110117,0,278380,full.story

NASA Needs Our Help!

Kim Newton
256-544-0034
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
Kimberly.D.Newton@nasa.gov

01.19.11

 

RELEASE
:
11-009

 

 

NanoSail-D Ejects: NASA Seeks Amateur Radio Operators' Aid to Listen for Beacon Signal

 

 

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- Wednesday, Jan. 19 at 11:30 a.m. EST, engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., confirmed that the NanoSail-D nanosatellite ejected from Fast Affordable Scientific and Technology Satellite, FASTSAT. The ejection event occurred spontaneously and was identified this morning when engineers at the center analyzed onboard FASTSAT telemetry. The ejection of NanoSail-D also has been confirmed by ground-based satellite tracking assets.

Amateur ham operators are asked to listen for the signal to verify NanoSail-D is operating. This information should be sent to the NanoSail-D dashboard at: http://nanosaild.engr.scu.edu/dashboard.htm. The NanoSail-D beacon signal can be found at 437.270 MHz.

The NanoSail-D science team is hopeful the nanosatellite is healthy and can complete its solar sail mission. After ejection, a timer within NanoSail-D begins a three-day countdown as the satellite orbits the Earth. Once the timer reaches zero, four booms will quickly deploy and the NanoSail-D sail will start to unfold to a 100-square-foot polymer sail. Within five seconds the sail fully unfurls.

"This is great news for our team. We’re anxious to hear the beacon which tells us that NanoSail-D is healthy and operating as planned," said Dean Alhorn, NanoSail-D principal investigator and aerospace engineer at the Marshall Center. "The science team is hopeful to see that NanoSail-D is operational and will be able to unfurl its solar sail."

On Dec. 6,, 2010, NASA triggered the planned ejection of NanoSail-D from FASTSAT. At that time, the team confirmed that the door successfully opened and data indicated a successful ejection. Upon further analysis, no evidence of NanoSail-D was identified in low-Earth orbit, leading the team to believe NanoSail-D remained inside FASTSAT.

The FASTSAT mission has continued to operate as planned with the five other scientific experiments operating nominally.

"We knew that the door opened and it was possible that NanoSail-D could eject on its own," said Mark Boudreaux, FASTSAT project manager at the Marshall Center. "What a pleasant surprise this morning when our flight operations team confirmed that NanoSail-D is now a free flyer."

If the deployment is successful, NanoSail-D will stay in low-Earth orbit between 70 and 120 days, depending on atmospheric conditions. NanoSail-D is designed to demonstrate deployment of a compact solar sail boom system that could lead to further development of this alternative solar sail propulsion technology and FASTSAT’s ability to eject a nano-satellite from a micro-satellite -- while avoiding re-contact with the FASTSAT satellite bus.

Follow the NanoSail-D mission operation on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/nanosaild

For additional information on the timeline of the NanoSail-D deployment visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/501204main_NSD2_timeline_sequence.pdf

To learn more about FASTSAT and the NanoSail-D missions visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/smallsats

 

- end -

---

text-only version of this release

 

› Back To Top

 

Rouges Gallery: Three Possible SolderSmoke mics

One of my New Year's resolutions was to finally, seriously pay some attention to the audio quality of the SolderSmoke podcast. With its roots in the scratchy Echolink connections between Juneau and London, audio quality has long been neglected on our show. With some funds donated by kind listeners (thanks guys!) I was this weekend shopping the internet for a suitable SolderMic. I ran into a lot of audio-fool snake oil. Wait a second, I thought, let's do some checks on the many mics I have around me here in the shack. I made comparison tests using three different mics (pictured above): my venerable D-104 chrome lollipop (with a transistor amplifier in the base), the dilapidated computer mic with improvised pop shield that I've been using for the last several years, and a Turner +2 mic that I gutted a while back (the original element was replaced by a cheap Radio Shack electret element, and the on-board amplifier was disconnected). (NOTE: It is a MYTH -- an ugly myth -- that the D-104 is CB gear. We debunked this hideous lie a while back. The D-104 is definitely ham gear! The Turner +2? Well, I don't know about that one. It does look a bit good-buddyish.)

At first, I thought the re-done Turner would win out. Then I thought the computer mic would keep its job. But then -- surprisingly -- the D-104 started to sound REAL good. The D-104 was especially good at keeping AC hum out of the signal -- that was a problem with the other two.

I found that I could get a very nice-sounding audio by running the D-104 audio through some EQ to knock down the little bit of hum that it did pick up, and to put about 30 db of attenuation on my now infamous SSSS whistles. I also used Audacity's noise remover.

So, the next SolderSmoke may come to you via an Astatic D-104. Kind of appropriate, don't you think? What do you guys think? Maybe I should post an audio sample to get some expert opinion before I chrome lollipop #130...

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

What should I do with this thing?

Pretty cool, don't you think? I found this among the stuff that arrived from storage. I must have bought it at a hamfest sometime in the distant past. Note the miniature TUBES. Note the place of manufacture: BEAVERTON, OREGON. The internal construction is beautiful, with good shielding between each stage. It has a nice AC power supply. I have no real need for a 2 meter converter... So, what should I do with this? It seems to have the potential to become a QRP transmitter. Or maybe a DC receiver? Or maybe I should just turn it over to AA1TJ for conversion into something really surprising and marvelous.

Einstein and Lead-Acid Batteries

In "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" we discuss the way in which Einstein's Special Relativity explains how and why transformers and coils work. I thought it was very cool to be able to see the role of Einstein's theory in our little toroidal transformers. Yesterday The New Scientist (perhaps the best science weekly in the world) brought news that we need to consider relativistic effects if we want to understand how and why our car batteries (and, I suppose, our gel-cells) work:

Thank relativity every time your car starts. Lead-acid batteries get about 80 per cent of their voltage from special relativistic effects.

Check it out (the NS story is short and gets right to the point): http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19978-car-batteries-run-on-relativity.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Some Tech Humor

Ron Barrett

Apparently Pluto's demotion from planet status might have been a bit unfair. Researchers say that the rival to Pluto that was discovered six years ago is actually smaller than Pluto.

And I thought this BBC skit on computer problems would yield a few chuckles from the SolderSmoke community. (For U.S. readers: Orange is a big ISP/mobile phone provider in the UK and elsewhere.):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI

Grote Reber, Radio Astronomy, and Tasmania

Wow, the website of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a real treasure trove, with lots of ham radio info. Check out their page about ham radio's contribution to the exploration of the universe: http://www.nrao.edu/whatisra/hist_ham.shtml

The picture above shows antenna that Grote Reber built in his backyard in Wheaton, Illinois in 1937. It is now on display at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia. That's quite an antenna! Imagine the neighbors' reaction.

NRAO has a page devoted to Grote Reber:
http://www.nrao.edu/whatisra/hist_reber.shtml
I had wondered what had drawn him to Tasmania later in life. Here's the answer:

In the 1950s, Reber sought a field that seemed neglected by most other researchers and turned his attention to cosmic radio waves at very low frequencies (1-2 MHz, or wavelength 150-300 meters). Waves of these frequencies cannot penetrate the Earth's ionosphere except in certain parts of the Earth at times of low solar activity. One such place is Tasmania, where Reber lived for many years. He died in Tasmania on December 20, 2002.

ECHOLINK and WINE: Works very well

I've been away from Echolink ever since my eeemachines PC went toes up and wiped out the Windows XP operating system. Echolink had always been a bit difficult to get running, even under Windows, so when I returned the eeemachne to life with Ubuntu, I never really even considered trying to get Echolink running on it. There is no Linux version of Echolink. But then, yesterday, somehow I got inspired. Something told me I should give Echolink a try using the Linux WINE Windows emulator. After all, I'd found that LTSpice worked great under WINE. I went to the Echolink download site, and hit the button. Ubuntu Karmic Koala (the version I am using) automatically fired up WINE and put the new windows program in the appropriate place. Echolink started right up. That night I was able to check into the Sunday evening QRP group for the first time in years. It was great. Now I'm on Echolink in the morning, talking to hams in Western Australia. The cheers for Jonathan Taylor, creator of Echolink! And three cheers for Ubuntu (especially Karmic Koala)!

The Arduino Documentary

Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.

Embedded controllers may seem a bit far afield for SolderSmoke. After all, I kind of gave up on surface mount, and have pretty much resigned myself to "hardware defined radios." (Someone sent me a picture of a T-shirt that kind of captured the sentiment: "I PROGRAM IN SOLDER!") But still, for a number of reasons I find Arduino intriguing. Aside from the amazing things you can do with this device, I like the homebrew, hands-on aspect of it. As you will see in the documentary, there is a real spirit of international collaboration in Arduinoland -- Italians, Spaniards, Colombians, Americans all working together on the project (the documentary itself is also available in Spanish). I also like it because it has its roots in Italy. So, even if you are not into embedded controllers, check out the documentary. I think you will like it.

SolderSmoke Podcast #129

January 8, 2010
SolderSmoke Podcast #129

http://soldersmoke.com/soldersmoke129.mp3

Introducing Cappuccio (pictured above)
"On the Cover of the Hot Iron"
Old tech, new tech:
Hammarlund HQ-100
Lafayette HA-600 (A)
WSPR: VK6 on the grey line, also Wake Island, and Alaska
How I fixed a broken GPU chip using a light bulb!
EMRFD's cool mod of the SBL-1 Diode Ring device (from W6JFR)
MAILBAG

Please send me reports on the audio quality. I made some changes...

Black Boxes No More! Cracking Open CPU Chips!

You guys have to see this. These guys have opened up some old CPU chips and have drawn the circuit diagrams for all the transistors. Then they made models of the circuitry. And they can runs programs on the models! From the site:

Have you ever wondered how the chips inside your computer work? How they process information and run programs? Are you maybe a bit let down by the low resolution of chip photographs on the web or by complex diagrams that reveal very little about how circuits work? Then you've come to the right place!

The first of our projects is aimed at the classic MOS 6502 processor. It's similar to work carried out for the Intel 4004 35th anniversary project, though we've taken a different approach to modeling and studying the chip. In the summer of 2009, working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip's physical components - about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip.

This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games.

http://www.visual6502.org/

I had some technical (operator!) problems with Audacity this morning. Podcast 129 should be out tomorrow morning.

10% Discount Coupon for SolderSmoke -- The Book

http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm

Enter code READ2011 at checkout. (Offer ends January 31, 2011*)

Solar Flux Graph

The projected 2013-2014 peak doesn't look that great, but at least it appears that we are climbing out of the bottom of the cycle.

SolderSmoke Podcast #129 has been recorded and should be out in a day or so.

Propagation Improving

Yesterday spaceweather.com was reporting that a big sunspot was coming around the solar rim. I guess it arrived! Last night my WSPR sig was picked up by VK6XT during what must have been a gray-line situation, but this time with me going into sunset. Then, just about all night I was being picked up by VK2DDI. So, there may be hope for this solar cycle. 2011 seems to be off to a good start!

More WSPR DX

I was pleased to find this report (above) on my screen this weekend. Wake Island.

This morning I saw that yesterday I was picked up by one of the world's most globe-trotting hams: Laurence KL1X (by his remote-controlled station Kl7UK).

GO WSPR!

A Blast from the Past: THE HAMMARLUND HQ-100

I'm sitting here in the shack at 0645 EST on the first Sunday morning in 2011. Coffee is on. And so is my OLD Hammarlund HQ-100. I have it tuned to a friendly AM roundtable on 75 meters. And it sounds GREAT. Nothing like a receiver that is as broad as a barn door to let you appreciate that great AM sound.

This receiver and I have some history. I bought it in the Dominican Republic, probably in 1993, probably from my friend (now SK) Pericles Perdomo. It had suffered the ravages of the Dominican radio environment from both ends: I think I found signs of a lightning surge at the front end, and of a power surge at the AC input. The audio output transformer was bad also. This was one of my first tube-type renovation project. I had a lot of fun with it.

There are no crystal filters in this receiver. If you want to narrow it down, there is a Q-multiplier (so --yikes!-- this receiver is at least in part a regen). In its original configuration the Q multiplier doubled at the BFO, but I guess my anti-regen feelings were at work even then: I took the 100 kc crystal calibrator and put a 453.5 kc crystal in there -- so that calibrator now serves as the BFO. This seems much more civilized.

You can see in the picture that the clock is gone. Mine was in pretty sad shape when I got it. Plus I thought it looked kind of goofy in that otherwise very beautiful front panel. So I took the clock out, patched the hole, and gave the clock to a very grateful Hammarlund collector.

The AM really sounds great. I can see that I'm going to need a 75 meter dipole so I can match this receiver up with my DX-60 VF-1 combo.

If You Could SEE The Night Sky at Radio Frequencies

Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI

SolderSmoke is mainly about radio, but we make frequent detours into astronomy. The picture above nicely combines the two fields. This is what the night sky would look like if our eyes received at radio frequencies! Here's how the National Radio Astronomy Observatory describes their image:

This composite picture shows the radio sky above an optical photograph of the NRAO site in Green Bank, WV. The former 300 Foot Telescope (the large dish standing between the three 85 foot interferometer telescopes and the 140 Foot Telescope) made the 4.85 GHz radio image, which is about 45 degrees wide. Increasing radio brightness is indicated by lighter shades to indicate how the sky would appear to someone with a "radio eye" 300 feet in diameter. The optical and radio skies reveal "parallel universes" containing quite different objects. The extended radio sources concentrated in a band from the lower left to upper right lie in the outer Milky Way. The brightest irregular sources are clouds of hydrogen ionized by luminous stars. Such stars quickly exhaust their nuclear fuel, collapse, and explode as supernovae, whose remnants appear as faint radio rings. Unlike the nearby (less than 1000 light years distant) stars visible to the human eye, almost none of the myriad radio "stars" scattered over the sky are really stars at all. Most are luminous radio galaxies or quasars, and their average distance is over 5,000,000,000 light-years. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, so distant extragalactic sources appear today as they actually were billions of years ago. Radio galaxies and quasars are beacons of information about galaxies and their environs, everywhere in the observable universe, ever since galaxies first formed. Investigator(s): J. J. Condon, J. J. Broderick, and G. A. Seielstad

Higher definition images and lots more info is available here:
http://images.nrao.edu/Miscellaneous/Surveys/321 Three cheers for the NRAO!

So... Think BIG in 2011! Happy New Year and 73 to all!

Storm on Saturn (with radio waves)

There is a big and very unusual storm on Saturn right now. You can see it in the image above. It was taken by amateur astronomer Jim Phillips using an eight inch telescope. I've been out before dawn for the last two mornings trying to see the storm with my 6 inch Dobsonian reflector telescope. I get very nice views of Saturn and Titan, but I can't quite make out the storm. Conditions have not been great, and I'm not sure the storm was in view when I was looking.

The folks at spaceweather.com note that it is generating some static:
Instruments on NASA's Cassini spacecraft are picking up strong bursts of radio static. Apparently, lightning is being generated in multiple cells across the storm front.

Space weather indeed!

Our New SolderGlobe >>>>>>>>>>>>>

I really like this little globe. The red dots record past visits. But the fun part is the flags and city names that pop up showing who is currently looking at the site. Very nice.

You can make the globe spin faster (or backwards) and you can tilt the axis of rotation up and down with your mouse. Give it a spin!

Halogen Lamps and Heat Guns to The Rescue!

Hi Bill,

Your recent success with baking your Sony Vaio gave me the courage to attack my flat screen monitor. The most expensive thing in my entire computer setup is my "LG" brand monitor. It's the only thing that I've purchased new. Everything else came from the curb, or the surplus store. However, it started going on the fritz a few weeks ago.

While browsing around the chat groups on the internet I found out that many monitors from the past few years have had bad capacitors in them. So I opened it up, hoping to find a blob of leaking chemicals near a cap. "It should be a quick fix" I thought. However, everything looked great. No bulging caps, or leaking chemicals. I then turned the circuit board over, and instead of seeing a shining city of perfect solder joints, I saw a cloud of grey. Practically every solder joint was cold.

This is where your laptop baking got me thinking.

I didn't have a halogen lamp handy, but I did have a heat gun. So I put the gun on the high setting, and very slowly passed it over the board. It left a gleaming trail of solder joints.

When I started to connect things back together again, I heard a rattling. It seems that I heated the board up enough to allow some components to completely fall out. Luckily they were through-hole components (nothing surface mount), and were easy to solder back in.

Once everything went back together... success!

One thing to note, at one point I got a nasty zap from one of the caps on the board (I'm assuming for the back light). Even though we're not working with tubes and CRTs anymore, you still have to take heed and discharge high voltage caps before working on anything!

-Keith VE3TZF

Blue Light in Dark Ice

Down in Antarctica, the "Ice Cube" neutrino telescope was completed this month. It is an amazing piece of gear in an awesome location. Essentially, they use a 1 kilometer square piece of pure Antarctic ice as the detector -- when a neutrino hits a water molecule, it makes a bit of blue light and from this light the direction of the neutrino can be determined. But there is a problem: cosmic rays can create the same kind of blue light. So there's noise. They need a filter, right? Yes, and for this purpose they use... THE EARTH. They put the blue light detector at the TOP of the cube and look DOWN, down through the Earth! Only neutrinos get through.

For more details: http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/info/explained.php

SAVE 25% on SolderSmoke -- The Book (and other titles)

R/C Plane with Camera over New York City

This is really amazing. You should watch it in HD. 120 mile range? Maybe from the top of the Empire State building, right?

More info here:

http://singularityhub.com/2010/12/21/breath-taking-aerial-video-footage-from-new-york-city-taken-by-a-rc-plane/

DXers: What is my path to VK6XT?

I've been looking with pride at the WSPR map (below) showing that my little beacon has been received by far-off VK6XT. He picked me up again this morning, again only once. That makes three days in a row, each day only one report. Each time VK6XT is the only station in the Oceania area receiving me. And each day the my signal makes the trip around 1025 UTC. Now, I'm not a skilled DX'er, but it seems obvious to me that we are dealing with grey-line propagation here, right?

The image above shows the view from the sun at 1025 UTC today. Obviously the day/night terminator is along the perimeter of the earth in this image. So, I guess my little sigs could have been travelling either short path over Northern Europe and down over South East Asia OR they could have taken the long trip down over South America, over Antarctica, and on to Perth. My guess is that the short path is more likely. In any case, as cool as it is, the map drawn by the WSPR system is not how the sigs actually travelled.

I hope you DX hounds out there will chime in and tell me if I'm on the wrong path here...

The Payoff from WSPR

Timestamp	Call	MHz	SNR		Grid	Pwr	Reporter	RGrid	km	az
2010-12-22 09:28	N2CQR	10.140215	-28		FM18jv	0.2	VK6XT	OF86td	18576	288
2010-12-21 10:28	N2CQR	10.140221	-28		FM18jv	0.2	VK6XT	OF86td	18576	288

I know some of you guys consider WSPR kind of weird, kind of narcissistic, more like broadcasting than real amateur radio. I hear you. As creator Joe Taylor himself has pointed out, these are not really QSOs. But I have to tell you, it is very satisfying to walk into the shack, and, with coffee cup in hand check the WSPRnet screen to see who has recently received your little QRPp signal. For the last two mornings, I've found VK6XT receiving mine. That's 18,576 kilometers covered by 200 milliwatts to a low dipole. In Western Australia my signal is 28 db below the noise (that means below the noise in a standard SSB passband). I see that I'm making the trip only once each day, at around the same time, and that VK6XT is the only Oz station picking me up. Very cool.

Here is Richard, VK6XT, the fellow at the other end of the path:

I was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in December 1954. Keen on shortwave as a boy, I went to Rangiora High School and met Gary Watson ZL3SV who sparked a lifelong interest in Ham radio. However Life intervened and it wasn't until 1976 in Wollongong, Australia that I first transmitted as VK2NNL.(after a brief fling on The illegal CB band). I upgraded and then returned to NZ to become ZL1OK from Rotorua. I became a DX hound and worked 256 countries for DXCC. The high point of my DX activities was in 1991 when I organised a DX-pedition to the Auckland islands. We operated as ZL9DX / ZL9YL and Kerry operated ZL9TPYon 6 metres. Always keen on home brewing and QRP gear I now work in Perth as a Design and Technology Technician. My ham radio activity is at present operating an Icom IC7400 to a variety of antennas 160m to 2m. . I am keen on the digital modes, especially PSK31, and spend my spare time on my hobby farm near Katanning(300 kM south of Perth).

Ham Radio Time Capsule at University of Virginia

Bert, WF7I has been sending us some great info from the University of Virginia's radio club. Listeners will recall his adventures in putting up and taking down the rhombic antenna. This week Bert sent in excerpts from his research on the history of the UVA club. This bit came from Lee, KD4RE. I know there are a number of "anchor-ologists" out there (fans of the Boatanchors i.e. big, old tube radios). I thought you guys would get a kick out of this. Oh, wouldn't you want to find a room like this one?

Back in 1971 a student named Bill Hughes was Ham and knew I was a ham
and he wanted to get the UVA Ham radio club started up again. There
were a couple of other Hams around, Dave Wolfe who was Chief Engineer
at WTJU before me, has a 2-B receiver in the engineering (transmitter
room) at WTJU when in was in the basement of Humphreys.
(Yeah I have a lot of WTJU Stories..).. Anyway Bill told me he heard
that the last active ham radio club had been located over in one of
the ground rooms behind Varsity Hall (which has since been moved to
make room for Rouse Hall expansion) In those days it was the Air Force ROTC building. Anyway, the ground level had a brick floor and sort of an open portico and across the back were a bunch of rooms (all brick of course). well we came to the old door and saw open wire feeder remnants overhead We opened the door and it was like opening a time capsule - There in the room was mostly 1930s and 1940s vintage gear, I guess it had not been used since the mid 1950s (or early 1950s).

There was a rack with an AM transmitter in it, sort of a copper
colored paint on the front and on it was a piece of cardboard with the call sign W3VA. There were a number of old receivers in the
room I recall a National HRO with its plug-in coils there was and RME
receiver with a tunable preamplifier/selector as a separate box, and
several others. I am not sure but the DX 100 we had for a while may
have come out of there so that would have been late 1950s then...

For more UVA Radio Club history go to:
http://www.student.virginia.edu/~w4uva/file-storage/history/index.html

Save 15% on "SolderSmoke -- The Book" TODAY

Use coupon code: DEC21
http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm

AL7RV's Zenith Transoceanic from Vietnam days

Bill,

Glad the junk box is providing useful. Enjoyed your Blog about the great Ham Radio day you had. I got the same feeling when my Paraset 350v power supply came alive without letting any of the all important 'smoke' out. I did get 'bit', and had a flashback to the days of my youth that involved my Weller Soldering gun and a GE tube manual. I tried to build every circuit in the back of the manual and got 'bit' by most of them. Heck the shocks keep our batteries charged right?

I'm side tracked on a project to construct a 455Kc BFO for a Zenith Trans-Oceanic 3000-1. I purchased the radio at the Tan Son Nhat BX/PX during my first month in country. (~68). The radio spent a year in Vietnam and a little over two more years in Thailand. Used to wrap my fatigues carefully around it and pack tightly in the center of my duffel bag. Held up pretty darn well.

I've dug the radio back out and am having a ball with it. It's helping me a LOT with my Spanish language relearning efforts. But I do lament the lack of English programming on shortwave today.

The Zenith became our main source for news rather then the much edited and heavily censored AFRN. I would patch the audio output of the radio into a spare MUX channel going off to another signal site and they would in turn patch it to other sites in Vietnam. I head stories that in some camps the local AFRN low power FM radio transmitter feed would be pre-empted with the BBC World News that was coming from my Zenith.

Hey, are you enjoying the cold weather! hihihihi...

73 -- Natchez Jim

Computer Successfully COOKED!

I must say, this was one of the strangest repair jobs I've ever had: You may have heard the background: My wife's three year-old Sony Vaios 'puter suddenly came up with really serious graphics problems. A quick Google revealed that lots of computer have this problem (lots of brands... including Apple). We took the computer down to the Sony store and they got all legalistic on us. Yes, it was clearly the video card. Yes, Sony had agreed to fix the video cards. BUT unfortunately Sony had not put our model number on their list of computers that they would fix. So they wanted to charge us $400 to fix the problem. No thanks Sony! Goodbye Sony!

Inspired by the iFixit poster on the wall of my shack, I did some more Googling. Soon I'm reading messages from all around the world recommending that I -- in one way or another -- cook the computer. But why? Is the problem IN the GPU chip? Or is it in the solder connections between the chip and the board.

Gents, you'll be pleased to learn that this is a SOLDERING problem. Looks like NVIDIA used a bad mixture of soldering types. There is apparently little blobs of solder on the baord, and little blobs of solder on the chip. LOTs of little blobs. Surface Mount to the MAX! But they used two different solders and this causes the connections to fail far more quickly than they should have. Here are the details:
http://s0.2mdn.net/2994486/Polycom_inquirer.html?rfp=http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1004378/why-nvidia-chips-defective
Enter the oven solution. The idea is to simply re-heat the chip and make the solder at the connections melt again!

YouTub presents lots of different ways of doing this. I like the idea of using a bright lamp to administer the heat. I used a 120 watt Halogen beam lamp. The kind that you see on lights for the backyard. I tested its heating properties on a chunk of 60/40 rosin core solder. At about 1/2 inch it melted the solder in 30 seconds.

I put the beam on the TOP of the chip and gave it about 30 seconds of burn. Then I administered some heat sink compound, vacuumed out the fan, and put the computer back together.

IT WORKED! That computer is now working just as it had before. This was a very satisfying repair, but there was no real troubleshooting, so it wasn't really up there with my favorite fixes.  You can check out www.computerrepairtraining.org if you want to learn more about fixing computers.

I'll put one of those cheap laptop coolers underneath it. I'm guessing that this thing will go for another few years.

Thanks to all who provided advice. Thanks to ifixit for the inspiration. Thumbs down on Sony. BOOOOO! HISSSSSS!

Should I Put My Sony Computer in the Oven?

In a recent podcast I asked for help with my wife's ailing Sony Vaios computer. The graphics card has gone toes up. Sony acknowledges that they had BIG problems with the NVIDIA graphics cards, but even though our computer has an NVIDIA graphics card and has all the symptoms that come with the NVIDIA graphics card problem, because our particular model is not on their list of affected computers, they won't fix it. (Mental note: Don't buy any more Sony computers!)

Anyway, KB1SNG recommends putting the mother board in the oven:

As crazy as it may sound, you could try putting the motherboard in the oven.
Many people (including myself) have tried this with success.
I did it a while ago, and I can't remember if this ( http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=606658 ) was the guide I used or not, but it should suffice. If I find the other link, I'll post it here.73,Nick LaPointe, KB1SNG

Rogier provides this useful info:

NVIDIA lost a lawsuit with regards to a faulty graphics Chip. Caused by the fact that when they started using lead free solder. This new solder turned out not as heat resistant as thought and tends to break loose causing the chip to fail.
He continues:
Hmm that's a bold move to put the board in the oven.
On the other hand there is little to be lost and you might give it a try.
Thinking of it I rather apply the heat locally. Isolate the Graphics chip from the rest and apply a short blast of heat to the chip.
Perhaps with a hot air paint stripper....

So what do you guys think? Should I pop it in the oven? Or apply some heat? I kind of like the idea of fixing a problem caused by lead-free solder (yuck).

Immediate Gratification: WSPR shows results very fast

So you build or modify a rig and you put up a new antenna and you then spend some time wondering if you're really "getting out," right? Well, wonder no more my friends! WSPR provides almost instant feedback on your work! Here is what the display looked like for my station a short time after I connected my modified transceiver to my new 30 meter dipole. Pond crossings were rare events before.

In my last post I asked if there were others running homebrew gear on WSPR. I am not alone! Paul, M0XPD, has put together a rig far more sophisticated than mine. Paul writes:

You ask if there are any others running h/b in WSPR...

My 50mW multi-mode beacon runs WSPR, DFCW and S/MT Hell on a 10-minute, frequency-hopping cycle.

It is entirely stand-alone - severing the umbilical cord to the PC gave me a really good feeling!

I'm currently working on a set of filters (BP and LP) to allow me to run on other bands (currently I'm on 30m).

Description on my blog: http://m0xpd.blogspot.com

A good radio morning at N2CQR

Today I had one of those really good ham radio mornings in the shack. My objective was to add one more amplifier stage between the balanced modulator and the power amplifier in my Roman WSPR DSB Direct Conversion transceiver. First I had to take the balanced modulator (trifilar transformer and two diodes in a singly balanced configuration) off the board and move back, closer to the AF input jack -- I needed to make space for the new amplifier stage. For that stage I consulted Doug DeMaw's books and Wes Hayward's EMRFD. I went with a feedback amp using a 2N3904 in Class A.

With coffee brewed and with my Drake 2-B tuned to the very congenial DX-60 net (75 meters AM on Sunday mornings), I turned to the junk box. It was like meeting old friends! I pulled out parts that Michael, AA1TJ had sent me. I pulled out others that had been sent by Jim, AL7RV. I got out my box of isolation pads that Jerry Felts, NR5A had sent in. Soon the parts were glued and soldered to a board that already had an AF amplifier designed by Roger Hayward, KA7EXM and a PA that is my "Manhattan-ized" version of Tony Park's SDR rig PA. At the center of the board is little Colpitts oscillator that I took from a WSPR rig designed by Gene, W3PM -- earlier in the week Gene had posted a comment on this blog saying he was pleased to see my call on his WSPR screen. I wonder if Gene realized that he was seeing the signal from an oscillator from his design! The laptop was provided by a listener who prefers to remain anonymous -- thanks OM! Nearby, a copy of "Lid, Kid, Space Cadet" by Jeff K1NSS provided encouragement.

The rig passed the smoke test so I moved it over to the operating position and put it on the air. I got immediate gratification: the WSPRnet map right away showed my signal (now around 200 milliwatts) being received all round North America. You can watch this LIVE by going to http://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map Just plug N2CQR into the "Call" box and hit UPDATE.

I know that WSPR is not everyone's cup of tea, but I like it. It was fun to build this rig. While WSPR is almost exclusively a mode that uses store-bought equipment, I get a kick out of being one of very few ops using a homebrew transceiver in this mode. (Are there any others?)

Next steps: I need to figure out how to set up automatic switching (by the computer) from transmit to receive. And I want to make some PSK-31 contacts with this rig.

Thanks to all who contributed!

73 Bill

Need audio reports for Podcast 128

How did 128 sound? I did drop off the lows, but I used the same filter I used in 127.

10% off on SolderSmoke The Book

Now through December 31. Use coupon code PEARTREE when checking out.

Saturn and Rhea

After a long spell of looking almost exclusively at Jupiter and our Moon, I was very pleased to see that Saturn is now visible. It is up in the south-east just before dawn, to the upper right of VERY bright Venus. The Sky and Telescope screen shot is a good representation of what I saw. I was using a 6 inch reflector telescope. I could see Titan very easily, and I could also see Rhea by using the averted vision trick.
Above is a much better view of Rhea. This one was taken by the Cassini spacecraft last November. Rhea has been in the news recently because scientists have discovered oxygen in its atmosphere:
http://www.astronomy.com/en/News-Observing/News/2010/11/Cassini%20reveals%20oxygen%20atmosphere%20of%20Saturn%20moon%20Rhea.aspx

Lynn Marsh, Boy Telegrapher, 1909

Note the steely-eyed look of determination and confidence. That's the same look that we see in the eyes of the 1925 radio builders (scroll down), and in the eyes of other knack victims.

Free Shipping on SolderSmoke -- The Book

Sorry, but this offer is for is U.S. only.

SolderSmoke 128 is out!

http://soldersmoke.com/soldersmoke128.mp3

3 December 2010
Visit to Wright Brother's Kitty Hawk site
Antenna work on Veterans' Day
W4HBK's Pensacola Snapper
"Knackers of the World Unite" (even in the UK!)
Sky and Telescope Jupiter moons program
Listen to a meteor ping!
DSB DC WSPR transceiver
Other ham books on Lulu
Ubuntu Karmic Koala's Skyrockets
Movie Review: "Social Network"
LTSpice under Wine (in Ubuntu)
Forrest Mims
Broken laptop -- need advice
MAILBAG
New puppy en route

I'll update the rss feed tomorrow.

MOJ goes QRSS

Mark W8MOJ (aka "MOJ") is the artist who created the latest SolderSmoke theme music. MOJ has recently gone QRSS with Slow Feld Hell. Above you can see the results as captured by W4HBK's grabber. Note that MOJ is giving HELL to the N2CQR shark fins!

Some SERIOUS young radio builders

No appliance operators in this bunch! Dave Lucas alerted me to Tom Glover's wonderful site:
http://www.gloveradio.blogspot.com/

Ham Radio on NPR

Mike: KC7IT sent in this very nice quote from National Public Radio:

NPR's On The Media has a sweet little reference to ham radio this week, in their report from a conference about Twitter. Listen to conference organizer Jeff Pulver, starting at 4:15:

BOB GARFIELD: .... sharing thoughts is something people do, fulfilling a primal human need for keeping in touch, even virtual touch, with other humans. Conference organizer, Jeff Pulver:

JEFF PULVER: When I was nine years old I was a very lonely person, and I – maybe I’m always lonely forever. But my - I went to my uncle’s office one day and he had this strange radio and he turned it on, and he says, “CQ, CQ, this is K2QQM calling CQ.”

And all of a sudden these squeaky voices started responding to my uncle. And I thought, this is pretty cool [LAUGHS], that these strangers are now talking to my uncle. And I became obsessed between the time I was nine to about twelve and a half. I taught myself Morse Code, electronic theory, I taught myself the rules and regulations all about amateur radio. In high school, junior high school, I would spend 40, 60 hours a week on the radio. And that was my lifeline. That was where I connected. And all I had to say is I was Jeff from New York, and it didn't matter how old I was, it didn't matter what I did for a living. I had this.

And now all these years later, 6 o'clock in the morning to 7 o'clock in the morning, every day, wherever I am in the world, I'm online. But instead of saying, CQ, CQ, I say, good morning. And a magical thing happens every day.

-------

That was me too, way back in junior high on 2 meter AM with my Heath Twoer. Turns out Jeff's still active too. Nice.

73 de KC7IT

Homo Ludens!

Brought to our attention by Jim, AL7RV.
Check it out: http://ludens.cl/index.html

More QRPoetry from AA1TJ

This is actually prose, not verse, but it has a poetic element to it. It is not for nothing that we have called Michael "the poet laureate of QRP." Must be all that time up on the mountain. Whatever the motivation, we're always happy to get his messages, and we always find inspiration in them:

On the topic of QRP power levels; for me it all stems from the pair of "100mW" walkie-talkies that my brother and I found under the Christmas tree one year. I thought it was magical that we could walk around the neighborhood and still talk to each other. Then one day my friend and I was messing around and I heard some lady's (CBer) voice all of a sudden. It took a moment to figure out that she was talking to me (my first and last CB QSO). We only talked for a few moments but it left me wondering how far it might be possible to communicate with such low power. The electronics magazines I was just starting to read showed massive boat-anchor transmitters; none of which appealed to me. For me the excitement was trying to see how far I could talk with my MPF102 oscillator on 40m; and later, a similar xmtr made from a surplus 2N697 that I happened upon. It was around that time I first heard about tunnel diodes; exotic devices based upon the (still) mystical notion of quantum tunnelling. Of course, I dreamed about building a tunnel diode rig...a dream that would take 35 years to realize...to which I owe a huge debt to Seab, AA1MY...dunno if he knows to this day how big of a deal it was for me; which is why I was especially happy to see his, "with childlike joy and wonder" comment. Ditto for me. Speaking of which, last I showed my wife, N4KGL/p's QTH on the map located on his site "Nov 23rd Lunch Time QRP". http://www.n4kgl.info/ We thought it was fun to progressively zoom out from the parking lot where he was operating yesterday. Right away the Gulf of Mexico appears. Of course, Vermont eventually comes into view. Scientific American that did a similar series of zooms in a book some years ago. It began with a couple lying on a blanket in a park. Some pages later you're staring back at this "pale blue dot" (to steal Carl Sagan's wonderful phrase). Something else comes to mind from Tom Wolfe's, The Right Stuff. Do you recall the passage where Lovell covers the Earth with his thumb? "At one point I sighted the earth with my thumb—and my thumb from that distance fit over the entire planet. I realized how insignificant we all are if everything I'd ever known is behind my thumb. But at that moment I don't think the three of us understood the lasting significance of what we were looking at." Dunno why, but QRPp feels a bit like Lovell's thumb. It gives me the same sense of vertigo displacement; a tiny signal sent from a tiny man located in a vast, oceanic, Universe. I remember saying so to my pal, Jim, W1PID, only last year in connection to my voice-powered CW transmitter. Hearing the dits and dahs return yesterday...looking at my puny transmitter...Wisconsin, Florida, Guadeloupe Island; bouncing these little ripples off the ionosphere...hearing the friendly replies...who would not be overwhelmed by the thought of it all? These little radios are just the launchers; pinkie fingers dabbed in the cosmic pool of Being. The Argentinian writer, Antonio Porchia, said, "Beyond my body my veins are invisible." Jim Lovell's veins radiated from beneath the thumb he so casually dabbed over the Earth. His veins radiated not just back to far away Earth - to everything that he loved - but in all directions; to places he'd never even dreamed of. I'd better sign now. I'm headed up to the mountain-top TV transmitter in a couple of hours... That's how it is here, Steve; QRO pays the bills, QRPp gives the thrills. :o) BTW, Dave, K1SWL, has already given a big thumbs-up to our RockMite contact! 73/72, Mike, AA1TJ