I’m sure you’re familiar with Jeff Murray K1NSS. He’s the man behind Dashtoons, those ever-so-creative and mirth-inducing ham radio cartoons and funnies that appear on many a happy ham’s QSL card and in print, on websites – in fact, wherever a good clean piece of chuckle-creating ham radio artwork is needed. Jeff is well-known within […]
A couple of weeks ago, I was spending a very pleasant hour or so waiting in the front yard for the mail carrier to deliver some packages of vintage radio parts I had ordered a few days earlier. My neighbor’s cat Stephen was lounging around with me, and it was one of those perfect afternoons […]
I’ve been chatting with John N8RVE via e-mail for a while now. He built a little receiver that I dubbed “The Rugster” – it’s a direct conversion receiver consisting of a standard NE602 front end, with a “poor man’s varactor” (1N4001) to tune the bottom 50KHz of 40M. The AF stages and narrow filtering are […]
EDIT – If you’re thinking of building the Desert Ratt 2, although the pictures in this post are numerous and quite large, I do recommend reading all the text too, as I have included what I thought were relevant details on the construction as part of my narrative. Also make sure to read the comments and […]
I’ve blogged before about air-spaced variable capacitors. I’ve always liked ’em, but I think my understanding of what makes a good one is maturing a little more. I was the winning bidder on a really nice-looking specimen on eBay a few days ago. Ever since placing the winning bid, I had been excitedly looking at […]
About a week and a half ago, I received an e-mail from Rich W9RNK. After a long period of home-brew inactivity (about 20 years) he decided to pick up the soldering iron and start building again. He said that my post on building N1BYT’s WBR Regen Receiver (the most popular post on this blog by far) […]
Today is the last full day of the TX5K team’s operations from Clipperton Island and they have already dismantled site B. Site B was mostly CW which meant I had to abandon my hopes of getting them on 40 and 30 in order to achieve a clean sweep on QRP CW for all bands 80 […]
A few days ago, Bryan Herbert KE6ZGP, posted on Facebook that he’d come first place in his section for Single Op QRP phone in the 2011 ARRL 10-Meter contest and posted a picture of his certificate. I thought it was pretty neat-looking and gave him my congratulations, telling him that I was envious, but happy […]
Shortly after making the last blog-post, my radio operating activities were severely curtailed by QRM that registered well over S9 across all the HF bands. It wasn’t continuous but would come and go seemingly at will throughout the day and night – there was never a time when I could be sure it wasn’t going to obliterate whatever […]
As I’ve explained in earlier posts, my interest in the G4JST/G3WPO DSB80 rig goes back a long way – back to the mid 1980’s in England when I read the description of this little rig in Ham Radio Today and scratched together the money to buy the basic kit. An enclosure was also available but […]
Dave Richards AA7EE 