Pay More and Get Less. Decisions always have consequences.

In single lots of 1 you can buy this amazing integrated circuit for $0.35 and if you buy 10, less than a quarter apiece. Yes, they can be bought at Newark Electronics for that pricing.   [Again, Kudos to N2CQR and KK4DAS for their Direct Conversion Receiver Project and recognition by the ARRL. This post presents a slightly different approach to fabricating a DCR. The results are comparable and that is the clean sound of a DCR.] The above schematic says Product Detector, but it is also a Direct Conversion Receiver. Where it says Carrier Input you connect your LO or VFO and the SSB input is where you feed your output of a medium gain RF amp which has a BPF ahead of that amp. The AF output is fed to an audio amplifier module. See https://www.n6qw.com/MC1496.html A second MC1496 can be configured as a Double Sideband Generator. The Motorola Data Sheets for the MC1496 has all of the circuitry information. Two MC1496's will cost you $0.70 and W1REX has circuit boards for the $0.35 SMD ...

Today is Happy Podcast Day and a large Tip of the Cap to N2CQR who has had the SolderSmoke Podcast for over 2o years. Bravo Bill, and you can acclaim being on the leading edge with this media communication forum about our wonderful hobby. It has been a honor to ride along with you for a small portion of those 20 years! This is a Pixie CW Transceiver and certainly can be had at low cost but not at Walmart.com. I was surprised to find out Walmart sells ham gear. Pixie S but not at Walmart.com  Having few parts and a PCB it should appeal to our demographic. It is low cost too!  Basically, it is a kit comprised of two transistors and an IC plus a crystal for operation on 40M. A Crystal Oscillator runs all of the time to supply an LO on receive to a detector as you would have in a Direct Conversion Receiver. Upon keying the circuit, you get a substantial power Output from the second transistor. The downside is no QSY as such and you have but a single frequency radio.  Worldwi...

What a great question! I wasn't asked to do that, but I don't even know where to start.  I know of several designs that used but a single device and friend N2CQR took on that challenge, but I think ended up using two devices. Here is a LINK to a whole lot of CW transceiver projects and one that caught my eye if only from the very clever aspect -- the Toaster CW transceiver. The designer took a defunct toaster case and built a rig inside the former breakfast special enclosure.  Now in my book he would have gotten extra points if he kept the toaster function AND built the rig inside the case. There is nothing like a warm bagel and bagging some DX. We started with a minimum part count premise and some of those projects in the listing are anything but simple. I think the operative word is simple as that connotes minimum part count, less opportunities to screw up, a short time from parts collection to on the air. That short time frame solves the instant gratification prevailing fe...

What can I do next? I have thought of veering off into a discussion of the mess the majority of American voters made last November. But that will certainly reduce to a small number those who would read the blog. No one likes to hear they did wrong! Or given my newly initiated Sunday church activity with the Grief Grope I could talk about the stages of grief; but that will certainly turn off another segment. So, with that tangent it is likely I would be writing by and for myself as a single reader of the blog. Cleverly we have eliminated the supposed two non-subjects to be discussed by hams.  But the technical side is also a minefield. It would be interesting to develop a demographic of today's average ham operator. Certainly not in the 18-34 demographic for that group has a focus on the third subject not discussed on ham radio. Our target ham group is older but not necessarily in the licensed for 50 years group. Many are recently licensed hams following retirement. Interestingly ma...

My recent adventure with Vacuum Tubes suggested the theme of todays' posting. Yes, CW transmitters. Who does CW? Well, not a lot of hams but it is like climbing Mt. Everest... some make the effort. I am appalled at the cost on junk type CW transmitters on eBay and even after spending a King's Ransom for one you are not done.  Many of the parts like capacitors have reached their end of life and likely the tubes are flat. So, more costs. There is a bonus to building a homebrew CW transmitter and that is the low cost, small sized power supply from Amazon. You can buy a supply for less (a few pennies less) than $30. There is enough juice in that supply to deliver more 5 to 10 watts to the antenna. That will net pages full of contacts! The linear hunk of iron supplies cost a fortune but with this Amazon supply... it plain works and NO SWITCHING noise in the receiver. You don't have to hit send as I am sure that was a burning question. In one of my earlier blog posts I covered th...

I have an extensive stock of T-50-6 powdered iron Toroids, but thought I ought to have a few T-50-2's. So, I navigated to Kits and Parts and a bag of 25 is $6, or less than 25 cents apiece. That sounded pretty good! Next, I started to complete the order only to find that the weight was 5 grams and that turned into an additional cost of $11.01. The shipping and handling are almost 2X the product cost. I decided to pass on the 25-piece order and instead scour my junk box to find two T-50-2's. [Found one in about 5 seconds.] Amidon which is about 70 Miles from my QTH wants $14 for the shipping with a similar actual product cost.  It is funny how one event triggers many others. Recently I stole an octal socket from a power supply for the Hybrid rig and then replaced it which prompted my digging out an old CW transmitter to test the repaired supply which caused me to wind a toroid and that all worked. But I only had one crystal on 7030 which prompted me to look for more crystals.  ...