We may have had Fabio Bonucci's rigs on the blog before, but they are so nice I thought it would be OK to feature them again. Bravo Fabio!
Podcast listeners will recall that this year's April 1 edition featured a story about my (supposed) efforts to cure long-standing audio problems by "chemically tailoring" home-made microphone elements. I asked for listener suggestions on which kitchen ingredients I should add to the mix. Very few listeners fell for it. But now -- as often happens -- somebody out there has completed the project that we were using as our annual hoax. Check it out. Very interesting:
Mike is looking for some beta testers for his FT-817 remote control system, and for someone who is proficient on VB6 who can help him clean up the code.
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Bill,
Hello I am a 47 year old ham from Pittsburgh,Pa and my call is WA3O. I felt compelled to write you after my Kindle purchase of your Solder Smoke book. I don't usually read books cover to cover but, this book is different I can not seem to put it down. This is the first time I can personally relate to a book. Like you, I started ham radio at the early age of 13 and have built and struggled with the same projects you have. So I wanted to say thanks!...I am half way through the book and I am dreading finishing it because I probably will never find another book I can relate to so well.
My latest project is some software I wrote for the FT817 and Icom radios. I am not a programmer but, I taught myself VB6 so I could write this remote software. After reading in the book about your Iphone “link”I thought you might like it and I wanted your opinion on it. The software is DTMF control of your radio from any phone. With Skype (and a Skype-in phone number) and my software, you can call your radio from ANY phone (not just a smart cell phone). You dial your number and after a security number the program turns your radio on via the printer port and you have pretty much full control of all the functions of your radio with the voice announcer on the radio (Icom) or the voice out on Microsoft computers it can announce frequency, signal, mode etc. you can even TX. The software even has a time out timer just in case of say a cell phone “drop call”. The software has many features like 50 memory recall, selective scanning, band scanning,direct frequency input. If you have a radio like a IC-7000 or a FT-817 and a auto tuner you have access to all HF,VHF and UHF. I brought the software idea up to some local hams and it sounded like it was a bad idea. I use it every day to listen to 160M while I drive to work in my truck without a BIG 160 antenna on it! I also thought it would be great for guys who just like to see what band conditions are on lunch break. Let's face it we all carry a cell phone. So I would really appreciate your opinion on this.
So best of 73's and keep up the good work
Mike Lamanna WA3O
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George, KB3ODH, found this about 1/2 mile from the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
Thanks for all the suggestions on the bike radio. I googled around a bit and found a schematic that seems very similar to the little receiver I'm working with. I almost certainly would be better off starting anew (perhaps keeping the AF circuitry). But it is interesting to see how a simple AM receiver works. That first transistor is an autodyne circuit -- both a mixer and a oscillator.
As I mentioned on the podcast, I've been riding my bike to work lately. I really enjoy it. We have great bike trails in this area. They use paths of defunct railroad lines -- I ride Washington and Old Dominion Trail.
So I was sitting in the shack yesterday morning, drinking coffee and listening to IGY by Donald Fagen on Pandora, when I heard what I thought was an alarm. I thought it might have been a smoke detector going off (always a real possibility in the N2CQR shack!). It took me a moment to realize that what I was hearing was the device pictured above. I'd left my 2 meter HT tuned to 145.950 MHz, and Arissat-1 was breaking squelch with SSTV tones. Very cool.
Billy alerted me to Pandora. Very cool. You just give it an indication of the kind of music you'd like to listen to. They do the rest. I started out with Creedance Clearwater Revival, and Pandora proceeded to send me a stream of sort-of similar rock. Streaming audio through the web. And it is apparently all legal (you listen to a commercial every once in a while). This is great for background music in the shack. After all, you can only listen to so much SolderSmoke, and 75 meter SSB chatter is not good for you. I'm not sure if it is available outside the USA. I hope it is.
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
In the last podcast I played a recording of some 2 meter signals picked up by my handheld transceiver from the new amateur radio satellite ArisSat-1. Included in the transmission were some tones that were obviously SSTV. Mike, K2MTS, ran the audio through some SSTV software and got this! Pretty good! From space to my HT, across the room to the SolderSmoke mic, out over the internet in podcast form, back to me in an e-mail, and now, on the blog. Thanks Mike!
http://soldersmoke.com/soldersmoke136.mp3
Eddie, KC4LVV, alerted me to the web pages of Nick, KC9KEP. What beautiful craftsmanship! Inspirational stuff! Check out the homebrew capacitors. And the coils! And the coil winder. It's almost too much!
An e-mail exchange on QRP-L this morning about using ceramic resonators in 455 kHz filter circuits (great idea Grayson!) led me to the ham radio corner of the PAR electronics web site. PAR is the company run by Dale Parfitt, W4OP. 
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 17th. 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!
Proprietor Tim Walford BSc MIEE CEng G3PCJ
Our man in Dayton, Bob Crane, W8SX, sent us a really beautiful picture of my favorite antenna (not the one above). Check it out: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110721.html
I was looking through W1FB's Design Notebook the other day and I came across the above schematic for a direct conversion receiver (page 111). Note the Polyakov detector. One strange thing though: Doug was running the oscillator at the operating frequency. I thought the big advantage of the Polyakov design was that you ran the oscillator at half the operating frequency (that's why it is sometimes called a "subharmonic" detector). Any ideas on why Doug did it this way?
Kettering Group, UK"Someone brought out a shortwave radio, and soon a beeping noise filled the room. A Russian scientist, Anatoli Blagonravov, confirmed it was Sputnik. "That is the voice," he said dramatically. "I recognize it." John Townsend Jr., one of the scientists at the party, recalled watching Blagonravov: "I knew him quite well, and I could tell that he was a little surprised and quite proud. My reaction was 'Damn!'"
And so an abstraction now had a voice. It also had a name - Sputnik.
Many of those at the party adjourned to the Soviet Embassy's rooftop, attempting to view Sputnik with the naked eye. Several of the American scientists drifted over to the American IGY headquarters in Washington, where they began speculating on what impact the satellite would have. They feared that the American people would be disappointed.
It also dawned on them that they had better start tracking the satellite's orbit. They got in touch with the American Radio Relay League in West Hartford, Connecticut, asking its 70,000 members-all "ham" radio operators-to lend a hand and help track the Sputnik. In less than twenty-four hours, reports on the satellite were coming back to the National Science Foundation, where a temporary control room had been established. Eventually, these hams and other amateur and professional trackers would consider themselves part of a great international fellowship known as ROOSCH, or the Royal Order of Sputnik Chasers."
That's right guys...ROOSCH...the Royal Order of Sputnik Chasers. And to think that fifty four years later a second great international fellowship would rise from the ashes...ROOSCCH, or the Royal Order of Sputnik Clone Chasers! ;o)
(BTW, October 4, 1957 is an important date in American history for a second reason. On that evening the first episode of Leave it to Beaver made its debut.)
I like the reminder of Sputnik's IGY connection. This is from an article by John Foley. W7ETS, in the October 2007 issue of QST. Be sure to read the translation in the caption. 
Macquarie IslandI caught half of a report on “The 7:30 Report” on Australia’s public broadcaster ABC TV. Not knowing the full Mawson expedition story, I found this interesting. A conservation group is working to conserve the old halfway point radio repeater mast and whatever other bits have survived on Macquarie Island.
The links are to the transcript and the actual report video.
Story Transcript:
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2011/s3268909.htm
Vodcast videos. They are about 26MB in size. Theyr’e both the same video. Just two different formats.
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/730report/video/podcast/r799754_7027600.m4v
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/730report/video/podcast/r799754_7027588.wmv
John Dowdell
Yet to do the test
Sydney Australia
The Early Days of Amateur Radio Slow-Scan TV by Copthorne Macdonald
I got my ham license in 1951 at age 15, and like many hams of that era, the bug hit hard. I worked my way through the University of Kentucky's engineering school, taking 5 years to go through, working nights and weekends out at the transmitter of a local 5 kW AM station. Naturally, I was hamming on the way to and from work in my oil-guzzling 1948 Chrysler. The rig was a 15 watt surplus WWII AM rig that took up most of the leg room under the dash.
One day in 1957 I was in the engineering school's library, thumbing through the Bell System Technical Journal, when I came across an article on some Bell Labs signature transmission experiments using ordinary phone lines. For the first time I realized that picture transmission didn't necessarily mean extremely wide bandwidth. And being the ardent ham I was, I instantly wondered if some sort of practical SSTV system could be worked out for ham radio.
I spent my spare time during the next few months looking into the feasibility of the idea. What sort of display tubes were available? (Ans: P7 phosphor.) How did you get frequency response down to DC if ham rig audio response cut off at 300 Hz? (Ans: Modulate an audio subcarrier.) I kept waiting for the fatal flaw to appear, but I saw none. The idea looked feasible.
I took my paper feasibility study to the head of the EE Department, and asked him if I could design and build such a system as part of an independent problem course. (This would give me a few credits as well as legitimize my use of school facilities for the project.) He agreed, and I ordered surplus CRTs and power transformers and such from surplus houses like Fair Radio Sales in Lima, Ohio. During the next 6 months I designed the unit stage by stage, built a "tank" of a flying-spot scanner in the school's machine shop, and put it all together. I still kept waiting for the fatal flaw to appear, but it never did. The system worked!
What is now the Citizen's Band was at that time the 11 meter ham band. All sorts of strange emissions were allowed on 11 meters then, and the first on-air tests were conducted on that band. Since only one set of SSTV equipment existed, audio tape recordings of the SSTV signal were transmitted on the air by one ham station. At the receiving station we listened to this weird sound coming out of the receiver's loudspeaker as we watched the transmitted pictures being painted in light on the screen of the P7 (long-persistence phosphor, radar-type) cathode ray tube.
I wrote a paper describing the system, and entered it in the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) student paper competition in 1958. It won national first prize that year. The ham community first heard about the system in articles that appeared in the August and September 1958 issues of QST magazine.
Shortly thereafter we hams lost the 11 meter band to CB, and had no long-distance HF frequencies on which to use SSTV. I spent the next 10 years working with hams like Don Miller, W9NTP, and Robert Gervenack, W7FEN in specially authorized on-air tests to convince the FCC that slow-scan would cause no problems to regular ham activities and should be permitted in the 75- to 10-meter voice bands as a regular operating activity. In 1968 the FCC finally authorized SSTV operation on a regular basis in the HF bands. In the 1970s my interests shifted to the USES of ham radio -- to "New Directions Radio" -- ham radio for personal growth and social change. Since 1985, I've been spending most of my time writing -- some of it for rent and food money, some on dear-to-my-heart subjects like the development of wisdom, and strategies for living the most effective life possible.
Our worldwide team of Sputnik enthusiasts continues to seek out the elusive schematic diagram of the spacecraft's 20 MHz transmitter. American, Cuban, Russian and German radio amateurs are involved. Recently Bruce, KK0S, visited the Kansas Cosmosphere in an effort to get a look at the innards of Sputnik's "flight spare." The picture above is his -- it shows the Sputnik antenna connection. (More pictures from Kansas here: http://s747.photobucket.com/albums/xx120/trader_vic/Kansas%20Cosmosphere/)
Let the count begin! Folks have been sending in Drake 2-B serial numbers. They've been coming in via the blog, via e-mail, twitter tweets, Facebook messages, carrier pigeons, etc. I'm afraid I might miss some precious numbers. So let's put them here. If you have some, and I don't have them below, you can post them as a comment to this blog post. When we get enough, we'll turn them over to Scott, K6AUS, for analysis using the same mathematics used to determine the number of German tanks during WWII.
Hi - 
(Photo from NASA, text from New Scientist)A study in contrasts, this photo captures three illuminated moons as a darkened Saturn looms in the shadows. Only the planet's rings are visible but its shape can be traced from the way it partially obscures its rings and one of its moons.
The large foreground moon is Rhea at 1528 kilometres across. Nearly a third of Rhea's size, sunny Enceladus is on the right. Dione, at 1123 kilometres wide, rounds out the trio to the left with a night-cloaked Saturn obstructing part of it.
The photo was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in April. Cassini has been exploring Saturn's 62 known moons since it reached the ringed planet in 2004.
Here's evidence that I am moving ever further along the ham radio hippie trail: This week as I was browsing through the 1970's era columns of Copthorne MacDonald, I came across this gem about our beloved Heathkit HW-8. (The photo is of Cop's rig.) 
In the European dispatches of Mike AA1TJ I saw mention of this new thing called the Reverse Beacon Network. Then SPRAT shows up in my mailbox (HOORAY!) and I see mention of the RBN there. So this morning I figured I'd give it a little test: I called CQ on 40 meters using my Heathkit HW-8. WOW -- it didn't take RBN long to get me! See above. That's after only about 3 minutes of CQing.
