Miami SolderSmoke

The family and I are now in Miami. We departed Rome on Thursday, made a quick visit to San Diego (to see my brother and his family) and are now in beautiful Miami, right on Biscayne Bay. We'll be here for a few days. No radio activity to speak of -- the move kept me quite busy. But I picked up a good book at the airport -- "Is God A Mathematician?" by Mario Livio. It provides a lot of useful info on some of the math-in-electronics issues that we talk about on the podcast and in SolderSmoke -- The Book.

It was hard to leave Rome, but we are happy to be back in the USA on the the 4th of July. We'll watch the fireworks tonight.

Homebrew Fusion Reactor in New York City

Not really a QRP project (the goal of course is definitely QRO) but Knack victims will find this article and the associated video interesting. We've covered homebrew fusion before. This fellow is the 38th successful "amateur fusor" in the world. Go Brooklyn!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10385853.stm

New Sci-Fi Show: Pioneer One

Not bad, especially for a $6000 budget! You can watch it free on You Tube. Here is part one.

SolderSmoke is Moving the Markets!

Hi Bill,

I was at the East Suffolk Wireless Revival yesterday (Sunday) morning – hardly FDIM, but still a nice little flea market / boot sale, maybe 20 / 25 people selling odds and ends from SMD components to rigs and other bits of kit. Finished up in a bit of a good natured scrum fighting over variable capacitors made all the more desirable for having proper shafts and being made of something other than plastic.

Your name came up as being the inspiration for a resurgence in home building and the subsequent rise in prices of desirable bits as they became scarce as more people wised up to the fun of building and the ease of just melting solder straight on to the PCB rather than trying to etch something. Rather suspect that your podcasts and that book are actually being more influential than you realise. Read my copy lying on the beach in Antigua, but still keep going back to it, and as you have said in the past, the rest of the library – it’s making a very pleasant change from the Masters that I’m buried in at the moment.

Bought the UK equivalent of a Harbor Freight punch over a few days back, so can now make my own little round pads out of old PCB – magical !!

Good luck with the move – I was brought up on a prison farm in Tanzania amongst other places, so recall all too well that strange sense of loss when you leave a country for pastures anew. Lovely to hear Maria sounding so Italian – picking up another language at that age is a wonderful thing to have done and will no doubt stand both her and Billy in good stead over the years. I still manage a little Swahili after 50 years, including teaching my last 2 dogs a few commands which is always funny.

Looking forward to the next podcast – they have become an important little interlude in my life and keep my interest in amateur radio invigorated

All the best

Nick

Thomas Edison, On the Air

There is an interesting technical story about how this was recorded, and how the recording was recently recovered:

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=942480

"100 Feet Up In A Pine Tree, Soldering Iron Clinched In His Teeth"

Radio Guys at University of Virginia, 1966

Hi Bill.

I emailed you once to the Yahoo! address, but thought I'd send an updated email to your soldersmoke address, in a desperate attempt to be mentioned in the gonging "SolderSmoke Mailbag"!

I learned of the podcast at May's Hamvention. I wish I had known of the Four Days in May event, but this was the first Dayton I've ever been to.

I thought I'd mention that the ham club I'm involved with here in central Virginia, the University of Virginia club, is putting together a rhombic antenna out in the woods. Although more sweat (and hornet stings) than solder smoke is expected to come from this effort, I still thought it would be worthy of note within the realm of homebrew activity. I hope to have some photographs from our slingshot-and-fishing-line event. With a large crop of able-bodied 20-somethings at our disposal, we should be able to get this thing put together in short order (one of our new members even has extensive tree-climbing skills and a battery-powered soldering iron! If I can get a shot of him 100ft up a pine with the iron in his teeth, I will be sure to pass along). It is hoped that our new monster antenna will help us compete with our cross-state rivals, the Hokies of Virginia Tech. I will be sure to sacrifice a few chickens to Papa Legba prior to our outing.

There are definitely still young people interested in homebrew radio and I work everyday alongside many victims of "The Knack". I'm working on spreading the SolderSmoke gospel to as many of them as possible, and letting them know of our library of "Sacred Texts": EMRFD, Solid State Design, and Electronics of Radio, among others. And of course, some of our "Prophets" of the faith: Ashhar Farhan, the Haywards, and the late Doug DeMaw.

I also wanted to say that since I have a lengthy commute to and from the university, I've been listening to ALL of the soldersmoke podcasts, starting from the first one. I'm up to the summer of 2007 now. I found it very sad to hear of Mike KL7R's death in Jan 2007 and I find that I do miss the back and forth banter the two of your shared on the podcasts. However, it is still a lot of fun to listen to and I've kept a small logbook of ideas from the episodes, building up a list of projects I hope to soon embark upon.

Best 73 and thank you for your podcasts.

Bert WF7I

The Last Roman Rig: New WSPR DSB Transceiver

They are coming to pack up my soldering iron next week, so I'm afraid this will be my last Roman creation. You can see the W3PM Colpitts oscillator in the center. The KA7EXM AF amp is in the lower left. The Softrock-based Manhattanized PA is in the upper right. To the right of the oscillator is a classic W1FB two diode balanced modulator. You see three big green relays. The top one switches the antenna and 12 volts during T/R switching. The middle one switches the audio amp input, the bottom one switches the audio amp output. (I use the same AF amp for receive and transmit, just switching around the input and output.)

It works fine and has sent and received WSPR sigs. I think it will also do PSK-31 with the FLDIGI program. I could use a one more stage of RF amplification between the balanced modulator and the PA driver amp. Also, the AF impedance match between the KA7EXM amp and the balanced modulator nees work: Roger's circuit was deisgned to drive high impedance phones. That balanced modulator circuit has about 50 ohms at each port. Ideas?

I was thinking of calling it the Achilles. But I think I will go with "L'Aquilone" (The Kite").