It's ugly but it gets you there. I finally got the little 30 meter DSB/Direct Conversion transceiver that I built in Rome working on PSK-31 and JT-65. It features a VXO circuit from George Dobbs, an AF amplifier designed by Roger Hayward, and an RF amp chain designed by Peter Parker. It produces about 1 watt of RF. At first I was manually switching the rig from transmit to receive, but this got old real fast, so I built a little VOX circuit -- the AF from the sound card does the switching. Last night I fired it up on PSK-31 and stations were calling me (including one fellow in Cuba). Then I went to JT-65 and had a complete QSO with KT1B. Another this morning with K0ASK. It is kind of fun to combine the simple (this rig) with the complex (the computer and these digi modes). I find that I can work both JT65 and PSK 31 while keeping the VXO at 10.139 MHz.
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
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