MKARS80 - via the West Indies

I ordered a MKARS80 transceiver kit a month ago and when it didn´t sbow up here I started wondering. But given that there has been and still is a ash cloud over Europe I understand that it could be delays. Today it came. Take a close look at the package above to see where it went!

Small steps...

...to the goal to be active on the HF bands are what I´m taking. But I´m in no hurry.

Last week I found someone that sold "a lot of radio equipment". It seemed to be mostly CB equipment but I went there and took a look and see if I would find anything interesting. I stayed there for 2 hours! I had to stop myself from dragging home too much, "maybe good to have" things.

The best thing I bought was a manual tuner from MFJ, 941E. I also got a HT for 70 cm by Kenwood and a scanner AOR AR-1000XLT (seems dead....) and an amp of unknown kind (probably CB) and two SWR meters. I do not have any antenna for 70 cm with BNC connector, so I might try to homebrew something like some of these:

http://blog.g4ilo.com/2010/05/satellite-antenna.html

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/05/collapsible_fabric_yagi_antenna.html 


I also received an order from kitsandparts.com . I´m very impressed with their range of stuff, both parts and kits.. ;-) He got building blocks called RF Toolkit so you can add them together to form a transceiver or receiver of different kinds. Really cool.  I will definitely be a returning customer! This is what I got:

The T130-2 toroids I will use together with longwire antennas. The ferrites are for a receiver and good to have in the future. The 30 m LPF I will use with the Genesis Q5 probably in QRSS mode but have to get a 10.140 MHz crystal first. Probably will be from Genesis if I don´t get any other option? The SWR bridge will go together with two ampere panel meters that probably is on it´s way from China right now.Also got 5 NE602 mixers to use with the receiver (more on that later).

During last week I tried to build a dipole, with Slinkys! I really didn´t have any time to evalutate performance (and it was also hanging maybe too low to be a good antenna) but I kept it on receive on the WSPR system.

Make: Electronics

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I got a nice gift from my wife, Make: Electronics. A well illustrated book on basic electronics. I think I know a bit about the subject, but I thought that it would be good to go through all the experiments to make sure I really understand the basic theory. It also includes some chapter on digital logic which I have not played with at all. I might document some of the experiments in future blog posts.

Here is a blog that documents all the experiments:

Hands On - Make: Electronics