Our sweet little kitty passed away on Sunday morning and the place feels terribly quiet without her. I took her in as a stray a year and a half ago. We didn’t know anything about her – where she came from, who her previous owners were, or whether she even had previous owners, though she […]
In the last blog post, I described the receiver part of my build of the ZL2BMI DSB transceiver and noted that I’d been having problems with the TX transmitting a constant carrier, even with no modulation. Everything seemed to be OK up to and including when I built the driver stage. On adding the BD139-16 […]
A few weeks ago, Jason NT7S mentioned the ZL2BMI DSB transceiver as a rig I might be interested in building. He was right – I had seen it in SPRAT but for some reason hadn’t seriously considered making it into a project. The mention from him somehow got me to take another look at it […]
I think I might be closing in on the ideal variable capacitor for a VFO. This arrived in the mail yesterday from an eBay seller: The capacitance swing is 9-50pF with wide gaps between the vanes. Rotation is fairly smooth, though the bearings could use a re-lube. Brass is a good metal for the vanes, […]
I did make some progress on the DSB80 a couple of weeks ago and then put the project aside. I became a bit sidetracked by other things, some of them non-radio, so want to provide an update in case the DSB80 project gets shelved for a while. I received a wonderful e-mail from Frank Ogden […]
Several people have commented to me that they enjoy the pictures I take for this blog, and Mike VK1oo recently asked if I could write a post detailing how I take them. I don’t want to turn this into a photography tutorial and acknowledge that there are other (and perhaps better) ways to take pictures […]
I was 19 years old in March 1983 when the UK magazine Ham Radio Today published the article “A Low Cost DSB/CW Transceiver for 80M”. Being short of cash and wanting to get on the air, I sent away for the kit and soon after, was surfing the phone portion of the UK 80M band […]
etherkit’s OpenBeacon is the first kit to be offered by proprietor Jason NT7S and I think it’s a good one for him to open up with. Sure, it’s not the first QRSS transmitter kit on the market but unless I’m missing something (and I don’t believe that I am) it is the most versatile one […]
It’s been almost 10 months since I published the post on my build of N1BYT’s WBR Receiver – a regen with an unusual design that minimizes re-radiation of the local oscillator signal without the need for an RF pre-amp. It’s fairly sensitive, stable, and only draws about 12-13mA. I’m sitting here right now with this great little regen listening to Bill […]
4SQRP recently announced another addition to their line of kits for the QRP’er and home-brewer. This one particularly caught my eye, for reasons that I’ll explain in the next paragraph. Designed by David Cripe NM0S, the Hi-Per-Mite provides a -3dB bandwidth of 200Hz with no ringing. The center frequency as supplied is 700Hz, but this […]
Dave Richards AA7EE 