Pay More and Get Less. Flash the Cash!

The Ham Radio technology of today takes us way beyond just making contacts or endlessly yelling into the Microphone "CQ POTA". It has become evaluative! We lust to know how our signal sounds at the other end of the circuit and those on the other end lust to tell us something is not right! A young BB ~ Now > 80 (I'll do anything to get you to read the Blog.) I smile when I hear signal reports: "well, you are only about a 5X7 and I can hear every word, but you are not strong!" The report somehow leaves you with an expectation that unless you are 20dB/S9 then it is not a good contact.  Last night I had the new 40M Hybrid Wireless Set on and just listening to various station, most of which were about 500 to 1000 miles away. I ran across that group that uses USB on 40M, and I switched over to USB and suddenly realized I never tried the new rig on USB.  The net control then asked would anyone like to check in. The control station was in Colorado Springs, and this w...

You haven't heard much about my Hybrid Wireless rig lately as I have been busy "flattening the warts" and we now have a better product. [ I find that blog readers usually only get this far and then head off to other parts looking for items on new radios or new technology. You should at least scroll to the end and watch the short video as the radio now "barks up a storm" and signals seem to pop out of nowhere . ] Some of the issues were RF Feedback and noise issues along with a change in the bias circuitry. The $30 Amazon power supply I found later on had a noise issue. It was noticeable at low volume levels. I replaced that with a full wave bridge rectifier and now the screen voltage (and plate voltage on the receiver tubes) is 240VDC. The noise is gone. I had to add some shielding around the steered 2N2222A, that is the Rx RF Amp and Tx Pre-Driver and 2N3053 Driver stage. I also swamped the input of the IRF510 with a 50 Ohm resistor. Now no more RF Feedback. Th...

  The 2026 Caterpillar Pickup Truck With but two months left in 2025, it has been quite a year. Recapping, you disowned your two slug kids, finally you rid yourself of the nagging, dumpy looking XYL. As a bonus you now have two girlfriends, and you own two premium SDRs, one from Apache Anon and the other from FLEX. The 200-foot tower complete with the 16 element Log Periodic antenna is finally working and now you are looking for something exciting to do with $100K sitting in your checking account.  Did I also mention that after listening to a presentation from Jason Huang you invested heavily into Nvidia. His idea is to take cloud computing that is tethered to servers sitting in large brick and mortar facilities and to link it to mobile radio networks without the servers. This spells a new ham radio option using Huang's idea. So back to the chunk of change sitting in your personal checking account. To kill some time, you watched one of your favorite movies, The Fighting Seabee...

Since 99% of hams literally no longer scratch build anything anymore this causes the: Gee does someone make a kit for such and such application. Kit building gives you the feel of being a real ham and not just an appliance operator. Kit building while also is a Flash the Cash is less of the unboxing a completed unit from "Chine" and more of a pseudo feel of I built this. Antenna tuners are a good example and there are a couple of companies that sell fully automatic high power antenna tuners, and many have a hefty Flash the Cash price tag. But what if you wanted a kit as this suggests having the capability but at a lesser price. So, we consulted the House of Bozos (BoJack + Bezos) and found a plethora of low-cost 100-watt automatic and a bevy of kits (mostly QRP) but some rated at 100-watts where the Flash The Cash < $100.  A $35, 100-Watt Kit from Bozos. Now if you are in the 1% who wants to homebrew a 3KW automatic unit then you could do it with stepper motors and Ardui...

Here is the problem. You are passing by a garage sale and spot a box full of parts and the price tag says $0.50. In the box is a pretty healthy power transformer rated at 250AC CT at 0.130 amps, two 100Ufd filter caps rated at 600 VDC and a 10 Henry choke rated at 150 milliamps. You could get quite an array of voltage outputs from these components depending on what configuration you use for the rectifiers. Three possible configurations include: 1. Full wave rectifier (2 Diodes) 2. Full wave bridge rectifier (4 Diodes) choke input 3. Full wave bridge rectifier (4 Diodes) cap input Drum roll... Full wave rectifier ~ 175VDC Full wave bridge rectifier choke input ~ 225VDC Full wave bridge rectifier cap input ~ 350VDC That is quite a spread but while the voltage values would seem to draw our attention there are other factors which would actually directly influence your selection. Invariably many would invoke the best looking with the biggest boobs criteria (350 VDC) but fail to look at volt...

Our hobby started 1st with Spark Gap transmitters and Coherer Detectors using CW. Fast forward through tubes, transistors, AM, SSB, FM and now Satellite, Digital and of course FT-8. Something hiding in the bushes is Digital Voice and a new mode FreeDV 2.0 which is digital processing of a SSB signal. Take your standard SSB gear and add the free software FreeDV 2.0 and you are in the mode of pulling your hair out. A snippet from their website... I saw that there was a demo of this mode as far back as 2018 at a RSGB convention, so this mode has been around for 7 or 8 years. I heard about it yesterday. This Digital Voice Mode is yet another omen of contests and operating overtaking homebrewing anything. Some will read this as an assault on purely hardware defined radios as computers are involved and it is just that.  My crystal ball suggests this mode will soon be fitted with functionality and software so that your Smart Phone is now a  FreeDV transceiver. All the pieces (or most...