Yesterday's blog suggested there may be less than 10,000 US hams that homebrew their station rigs. That figure is a pure guess on my part but may be close to the true number.
But just what does homebrewing a rig mean? Does building a kit with all the design aspects pre-packaged including a circuit board and all the parts qualify? Or is homebrew a narrower definition such as envisioning a project, making a block diagram, developing the circuits, using LT Spice simulations verify the design, building/evaluating prototype modules and finally building/testing all of the final block modules which results in a totally homebrew radio. That type of homebrew radio approach is definitely less than 1%.
Long ago hams took pride in home constructing their rigs. The rig here is homebrew was said with great pride when sharing station details in a QSO. But to do that takes an investment of time in learning the how to do it and having knowledge about circuits. You also need those skills when something goes awry.
Fixing the Stinker Radio
Those factors do not sit well with newer licensed hams who had to do very little to get a ticket. We must blame the ARRL and the Nerds from Newington whose misguided view set up this easy peasy approach to licensing which has denigrated the technical skill set that was the very foundation of the earlier licensing approach.
It now appears to have come back and bit the ARRL big time with a decline in membership. I guess their next ploy is to give a free one-year subscription to any newly licensed ham.
In an amazing display of you never saw that coming, several blog postings ago I posted a video of the Stinker radio. It was a video of a couple of junk box modules that I slapped together and decried this radio sucks and is awful. Well, that video is inching toward 1000 views something I don't often see with an elegant looking and sounding projects. It was filler guys and is way beyond the normal 300 or so views that is typical of my project videos!
Based on the video comments I feel compelled to fix that hunk of junk.
There are some obvious 1st steps such as getting the rig nailed down (shades of Mary Jo) and cleaning up the wiring. That should add to the stability.
Quite obvious is the need to have a band pass filter in line as you can hear a lot of bleeding through of out of band signals. The BFO frequency needs tweaking as this has a 4.9152MHz four pole filter and the Arduino/Si5351 was liberated from another 4.9152MHz rig whose filter center frequency is close but NOT the same.
One thing found and fixed was too much gain in the IF Module which caused it to oscillate. The output stage of this steered module was changed from a tuned output to a simple RF choke. That broke the oscillating feedback loop and that settled things down. W7ZOI in SSDRA would call this a band aid fix.
So, are you a kit builder or homebrewer and do you qualify for the 1%?
If I get the Stinker fixed you will know.
73's
Pete N6QW
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