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

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

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!

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