Chugging along -- or is it QRMing?

Boy am I rusty on the keyer. I am using the Norcal keyer chip as my keyer now and it is much better than what I was using. However, I still seem to struggle. I can remember a few (many few!) when my Bencher paddles seemed to do all the work for me. Now I stumble over my own QTH! I need to consider this the next time I move. Perhaps a city with a five letter name would be nice.

I did work a station in Columbia (the country, not the SC capital!) and a few more local ones. I am quite impressed with the palm-tree vertical.  I still would like to add 40 and 10 meters.

Finally got the rest of the parts for my Bitx-20 (my own SMD design.) so I can resume work on that. I also am about to get my Rock-mite  finished, although I still need a portable antenna to use it (or my HW-8 for that matter.)

All seems in slow motion, I know, but progress is progress. As my kids get older, I should have more time. I still am looking at how I can operate during my compute, but the drive may be a bit too intense to focus on ham radio.

Well, 73' s for now. Hope to see you on 20 meters.

Back on the air!

If I had known how much better the "Palm Vertical" would work, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. I worked Texas Sat. night and received a 599 with 10 watts. I know that Texas is not far, but I also heard a station on the Galapagos (and a massive pileup) on 20M. The key is that the antenna is far from all the crap on the house wiring. I am wondering about the quality of the service ground. Still thinking about a roof mounted loop for 10M and 15M. With the sunspots on the rise, I certainly want to have some capability on those bands.

I finally broke down and bought the replacement Norcal keyer chip to replace the one I lost (along with the board!) So I laid out a new board and built the thing. Now all I need is a case. I hope it will improve my CW.

I am down to the power meter and the DDS signal generator and I will be caught up and ready to get back to my SMD bitx. . . I ordered some Toko IF transformers for the band-pass filters today. Hopefully I can move that project along and start talking on it. I have an exciter and VFO and can produce a few mw of RF, but still need the filters and PA to make a completed unit.

A simple wire over the palm

The crappie pole was interesting. Still, there may be an easier way. This past Saturday I improved my radial system around the palm tree. I buried 6 14 foot radials just under the sod. I then took an eighteen foot long piece of wire with a fishing weight on the end and threw it over the palm tree.

Ok, not the fanciest. But, by gosh, I was 59 in to Michigan. Completed my first CW QSO in a long, long time. Boy was I rusty on the 'ole Benchers. My Keyer is a design from "Fundamentals of Amateur Radio, circa 1970s. It is made up of two 741 op-amps. It is far from perfect and has a few quirks which can make it tricky to use. I think I sent di-di-di-di-di-di-di-dit (error) more times than I would like to count! Still I survived.

With the antenna 40 feet from the house I can hear! The thing does tune up on 30, 15 and 10. But I doubt the efficiency is high. Still need a good way to get on 40. I am thinking of a loading coil and another wire tossed over the palm. It's a shame the palm is only about 18 feet high (to the top of the leaves, the trunk is a bit lower still.)

Someday I still wnat to try a lop lying on the roof. . . we shall see. For now I am QRV!

A Crappie pole may be the answer after all

I actually had some time Saturday to play with the antennas. Moving my random wire to the chimney did not help the noise problem enough to make it worth while. So I took the 100 feet of Beldon 9918 I have had laying around for . . . many years, I think about 17!, ran it along one of the fence stringers to the farthest corner of the Baby/Dog enclosure (about 50 feet form the house.) I used a 12' crappie pole with 24' of wire and a 12' radial, I tossed the "extra" wire over a nearby palm tree. AMAZING! I can actually hear stations on 40M (S5-S6 noise levels.) I can also hear on 20, 15 and 10! I think I am on to something. Another beautiful thing is that it is invisible from the street. In addition, during long terms of not using it, I can lay it on the top fence stringer so it is really invisible. This may be better than a flagpole.

I am ordering a 20' rod from amazon and the new plan is to use 3 parallel wires for a 40,20,15 and 10 meter vertical, sort of leaning up against the palm tree (which also places it outside the baby enclosure.) I may be on the air yet! (almost 2 years from the start!) Maybe play with 30M too.

I'll post some pictures when I get it set up for real.

Boy has it been a while!

You ever see and interesting blog, that never comes to fruition? That would be this one. I have been soooo busy, this is the last thing I have had time for. Plus, I have had no time for Ham radio since last July! I am still working on the antenna problem. My mag loop (my daughter calls it: my contraption) needs a better mounting and a little more capacitor for 40M. The adapted electric screwdriver works well. I will have to confirm that it is difficult to get more than an octave (2:1 freq. ratio) because of the Min/Max Cap ratio. So, I will probably build two loops. Another possibility is build a small receive only loop and put it outside, well away from the EMI of my home and use it so I can hear stations (my main problem right now with the Attic/Siding random wire.) Even before all that, when I get an hour or two, I am going to move my wire to up along the chimney and out to a vent pipe and see how that works.
My Bitx is still in the container I use for projects under construction, as are all my other projects.

Busy days of Summer

Its been a while (how many blogs do you see that on?) Let's see . . . I built a fence to keep the little one out of the pond. It my work out as a great camouflage for a better antenna. I am thinking of a sloper from a corner of the fence to the chimney or vent pipe on the roof. A few radials and viola -- I'm on 40 again! I also built a Rockmite 40 for travel. I would like to also finish an amplifier and a tuner, also a portable set of paddles. I am looking forward to being able to operate when I have some down time (on vacation or such.)
Oh yeah, the smt Bitx is still waiting for me fo finsh the rx filter and PA. Just seems hard to get to it all right now.

Some of us Take a bit longer . . .

Ok, So I am building an oscillator for my SMD BitXxx(20.) A long time ago my dad taught me how to read the codes on capacitors – 1st significant digit, 2nd significant 3rd is the multiplier.
So … why is it so hard to get the #$#$@ thing down to 4 Mhz? When I started I had a 19Mhz VFO (vice 4!) Let's think about this -- a cap marked 104 is 1 and 4 zeros pico-farads (10,000 pF or .01 uF) a 103 is .001 or 1000 pf. Now what is 330? I thought my dad had taught that (my fault, not his) it should be 330pf (cause zero makes no sense as a power of ten!) At the age I learned it, I thought that 10 to the 0 was absurd. It was not until later that I learned that it was equal to 1. So if the caps I was using were 330 pF they would have been marked “331.” It was when I was trying to figure out what a 681 cap would be if 680 were 680 pico-farads . . . that the light finally came on and I realized the error of my thinking. Wow, it only took 40 years to straighten that one out! Think how fast it could have happened if I had had a capacitance meter!

So now it makes sense that my Oscillator is going at 18 Mhz instead of 1.8

My shack building continues on. I finally created a hole in my exterior wall so I could feed cables out in another way besides through the open window (not popular around here and it does look a bit tacky.) So I finally got to tear into Vinyl siding and put in an external outlet box (J-Box.) It came out pretty nice. I will have to put some photos up.

I also figured out that my screening is Al . . . not fiberglass. I was trying to figure out why my mag-loop was so badly de-tuned when sitting on the screen porch near the edge. I still have yet to make a contact on that antenna as my stupid microphone quit working on the Yaesu (another long story!) and my confidence in my CW skills are still pretty low.

Someday, I will actually be able to talk on Ham radio!