An eventful return home

Today we travelled back from our son's in Kent - and broke down TWICE. The car and battery were fine when we left but the car would not start after refilling with fuel. A jump start got us going again. Then on the M11 near Stansted we broke down again as the battery was hardly functioning and the engine was struggling. We came to a complete stop on the hard shoulder. Thankfully our Direct Line breakdown service towed us home.  A new battery will be bought on Monday and we'll see if that was the only fault.

OK1VEN builds my SAQ converter - see his video

OK1VEN has been building a version of my SAQ converter which up-converts the 17.2kHz signal to HF. He produced a time-lapse video showing him building it, which he put onto YouTube recently. His version looks a lot neater than the G3XBM original!

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-Azk9wmIvg

Merry Christmas everyone

A very happy Christmas to everyone reading this blog. Whatever your circumstances, I hope the day is a peaceful and happy one. No ham operating here today as my wife and I are away from home at our younger son's home in Canterbury. Instead, we've been told to relax and keep out of the kitchen. Suits us!

WSPR reporting - the REAL advantage

This evening, after a brief foray on 40m QRP CW, I returned to 500kHz WSPR whilst getting on with other jobs in the shack. As an example of just how good WSPR can be, see the example shown here in which one brief WSPR transmission results in no less than seven reports. In an instant I could see just where my 1mW ERP signal was getting and how well it was being received. Using modes like CW this sort of thing is just not possible. OK, it is beaconing and not a contact, but to be honest I'm more interested in testing my TX system, checking propagation, seeing how my antenna changes have affected things than having a "rubber stamp" HF QSO in which little information is being exchanged.

40m CW with the Elecraft K1

This evening, for a change, I fired up my little Elecraft K1 4 band QRP CW transceiver that I built a few years ago. Not much doing on 20m or 30m so I went on 40m CW and worked a few stations around Europe. Worst report was 559 and the best 599. It was a change from 500kHz WSPR.

Gnat 1 transceiver - anyone made/used one?

Has anyone here built and used a Gnat-1 single transistor transceiver? This was in SPRAT earlier this year and it was designed by Chris Trask N7ZWY. Although I've seen a few pages with photos of copies, I've not heard how well it works and what anyone has worked with one. The picture on the right is from LY3LP's website and shows his version for 20m.

Designing crystal oscillators

If you want a range "sure fire" crystal oscillator designs to suit fundamental and various overtone modes you should check out the "Oscillators" page on the QuartSLab website. This has details of circuit values and configurations that will really work. Most of these designs are ones I recognise from my days at Pye/Philips PMR, so I know they are reliable and well tried.

SPRAT on CD (GQRP Club)

An ideal, if late, Christmas present is the latest Sprat CD which has all editions of this excellent UK QRP magazine from edition 1 to 140.  Price to members is £4 and to non-members £10 plus postage.

Starting work on the 10m transceiver today

The weather's a bit warmer (0 deg C) so I'm going to start on the local oscillator section of my DSB transceiver today. Will almost certainly use a mixer/VFO or mixer/VXO using a ceramic resonator instead of a crystal. This will allow me to cover a useful part of the band on either CW or sideband and to provide CW offset easily. The DSB modulator will be a matched pair of diodes.

Quote of the decade

"If the climate was a bank they would have saved it", said Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. "But it is not. And they have not"

See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8423822.stm