SM7UCZ QRP projects

Dom M1KTA's blog mentioned a simple 160m AM transmitter on SM7UCZ's website. Looking at SM7UCZ's website I see there are lots of ideas there. Be sure to use Google to translate into English.

Useful Simple Signal Generator

Dom Baines has a useful blogsite and today I noticed this NorCal circuit on his page for a multi-band S9/S1 signal generator. It uses a switched crystal oscillator with 2 well-defined output levels at 50uV and 1uV, so is ideal to test receivers.

A new station to appear on 500kHz - M1KTA

Dom M1KTA has just received his NoV for 500kHz and hopes to be active on CW (and WSPR I hope) very soon. Dom is not too far away from me (18kms), so a CW QSO should be a OK. It will be useful having another station quite close when experimenting.

6m AM and noise

Two local tests with stations on 6m AM have shown just how noisy the band can be when using this mode. M1KTA was 18kms away and M1MAJ around 15kms yet both were not strong on the vertical V2000 antenna on 6m AM even when they were using FT817 rigs at 2W AM. We were going to try the SixBox but signals would have been too weak. Switching to USB made a lot of difference (better) unsurprisingly, as the noise level reduces with the bandwidth.

This goes to show how AM signals do need to be strong to overcome the band noise: when signals are a decent level AM is a fine mode, but it can be hard work when they are very marginal with lots of noise in the background.