Summer

Summer of 2010 has been one of the better ones. Very pleasant weather and  I have been home with my son for a couple of months. It has not been that much time for radio. I have done some listening and few times  been working on some test equipment, but that will be covered in a post within a few weeks. I have also had my HF band debut, but I give a report on that within in some day or so.

Here are some other points from the last months:

I have mentioned earlier some interference problem when using the QS1R SDR receiver. One easy solution that I tried and seemed to work was to solder a connector to the 5 V connection in the PC power supply. A lot cleaner than the switching power supply I used earlier. Old PC power supplies can be had for free so maybe I should take use of them more. I also plan to make a 12V->5V regulator to try to run the QS1R from batteries together with the laptop.

A 9:1 un:un for random longwires has been made. See image below. No transmitting with it yet.

Texas Instruments has released a micro controller development board called Launch Pad . It was available for $4, so I ordered one. Maybe they want to compete with Arduino ? The package came and below is a photo of the content. I have not played with it much yet.

I do some shopping on Ebay and mostly from far east. My understanding has been that when I order cheap stuff with low or no shipping cost I take the risk if it gets lost. I ordered some parts from Thai Shop Etc and when I hadn´t received it within a month I started to think I was "scammed". But when I contacted them they said they either will refund me or send the stuff again. I choose the latter and within a week I had it in my hands. Very good service! So I would say that I recommend them.

and last:


The Medium Wave DX season 2010-11 has started when I received some common stations from North American on the 21 August. 1130 WBBR, New York as always the strongest.

Shack update and OS choices

A shack is what someone interested in radio usually calls where they have their radios permanently installed and used. I´ve never had a shack like that as I live in an apartment and all radio use from here has been temporary and the serious DX chasing has been done at the DX listening club.

Now I start to have something that could be called a shack in my wifes parents summer house where I recently installed a 15,5 M longwire antenna. The receivers you see on the picture here is a borrowed Icom R-70 and the QS1R. I struggle with some interferances but I think I will be able to solve them very soon (more about that in later blog post).

I also got a computer on the bench. It´s actually one of my older main PC:s from a couple of years back. It´s an AMD Duron 1300 MHz with 768 MB RAM and 120 GB disk. It runs Windows XP and soon will have Kubuntu on it too. I actually have been a Linux user since the early days of Slackware, and then Debian (used when I and a friend set up the first email system at our school) via OpenSuse  (chosen because we use Novell Suse Enterprise at work for database servers) and now I think I will try Ubuntu (or actually Kubuntu to give it an european touch). I see Ubuntu being mentioned on the ham radio groups and mailing lists so it might be the best choice now.

I gave up with Linux and changed to Mac when I got the opportunity to be a Campus representative for Apple at my university a few years ago. I liked MacOS very much as it gave me both Unix and some fancy software like iLife. Something I learned during this period was that I will not work with sales in future careers!

I moved to Windows again and it was actually because of radio. My first SDR was the SDR-IQ from RfSpace and the software, SpectraVue, could only run on Windows. But I would like to go back to Linux and if recording capabilities in the new QS1R software arrives I might be able to do that.

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