Left Coast Political Scene

About 3 AM this morning, my brain said: Hey Pete, how about doing this. The suggestion was to take the 40M Hybrid Wireless and make that into the 20M version. The brain also suggested "Plug In" networks so that I could operate on either 40 or 20 Meters without resorting to a band switch.  Plan View of the 40M Wireless The above photo is the 40M Wireless sans any Final Output stage. Yes, a real mess that would have to be totally recreated for a new singular 20M version. For starters, this version works, and we have a good sense of the physical space required and a layout that could fit in our 12X12 space. But could this work on 20M is the question. It was an easy test to ascertain the feasibility of such a project change and the short path was to program one of the spare ESP32 boards for 20M and dig into the junk box for a 20M Band Pass Filter Board. Boom... it worked as I copied stations on 20M and so that is a good idea worth pursuing. This approach gets me a finished radio ...

Every Friday I go to the cemetery for my weekly visit with the XYL. While the Santa Clara Catholic Cemetery in Oxnard does a pretty good job of mowing the lawn, that is it. So, I always have to do some grass trimming around the headstone and the ground mounted flower holders. In some ways the additional time it takes to trim the grass and tidy up lets me spend more time on the visit. Up until about three weeks ago I was using a newly acquired pair of hand operated shears. Then I realized my constantly sore right hand was a result of carpal tunnel shearing. That led me to Amazon and this jewel. Fully rechargeable (even from a laptop) it is good for about 20 to 30 minutes of cutting. Fitted with two attachments it can trim the grass as well as trim bush branches up to about 1/4 inch in diameter. Charging takes about 1/2 hour. It is well made and worth the $40. There is always joy in seeing the two young Hispanic sisters who sell flowers at the cemetery entrance as they are still here. An...

The culprit was a flag that had to be set to 1 in software and not to 0. With a heap of thanks to KK4DAS, Dean, who alerted me to the issue which resulted in the code being operational. So now I will go back and fix the 40M Hybrid Wireless so it can do FT-8 on USB. (Done!) But my fumbling was an excellent learning experience, as I saw the opportunity for other improvements which I made. The bonus is the learning of a skill much akin to field stripping my .45 Automatic blindfolded when I was in the Seabees (or Mary Jo in the backseat of the 57 VW Beetle). When you get it, you get it! So, I now can move forward with laying out the 12X12 inch mounting plate. to include the eight tubes in the lower-level stages, the solid-state stages (Audio Amp and RF Driver) and the final RF Amp, the 12GE5.  The Finalized Digital LO/BFO The above module took almost a month to build and troubleshoot. But there was real significant learning in how to work with the JF3HZB code. One shortcoming (sideband...

I am not a coder nor sports enthusiast, but I do like to cook and certainly do appreciate good looking and fit older women. Thus, writing sketches beyond the Mr. Miyagi LED ON and LED OFF exercise can be a challenge. Getting the sideband select feature on the Hybrid 20M Wireless falls into that category. The original JF3HZB code did not have sideband selection and thus my current challenge. I was not even sure flipping a switch was doing anything in the sketch with the code I wrote. (It wasn't.) So, I asked "copilot" for the Miyagi sequence for the ESP32. A sequence was provided by copilot which I actually got to work with just that sketch. I then fitted that On Off code sequence into the JF3HZB code.  AI generated script. The switch flipping now does do two things, with one of those lighting a LED and the second is to load a value for the BFO frequency. BUT it is still not correct! The LED lights and the code will load the 2nd BFO value, but you have to restart the ESP32...

Is that really true? Well my answer is that indeed its true. Example we have some of the slickest technology in our rigs, but they still have problems. You know... that newly constructed 100 watt RF amplifier works great on 20M but is an attenuator on 10M or the code for the ESP32 MCU simply does not work despite being generated by AI. That newly built one tube regen retro circuit simply does not regen.  We fuss, fret, ponder drinking, fever dream removing all the components yet a non-functional lump remains. Nothing we do seems to change the outcome thus every thing changes but nothing changes. I had a great opportunity to spend some quality time with son #3 during our Colorado sojourn and he was sharing with me some of his current workplace experiences. I was totally shocked and amazed... different industry, advanced technology, and a 40 year time warp BUT the very same issues and problems I saw some 40 years ago when I was his age working in aerospace. Surprisingly the only comm...

Time for some Homebrew Magic and Tribal Knowledge Tips. Several Blog posts ago I showed a notional schematic of a tube based Balanced Modulator. You can check it out. A key piece is the Balanced Modulator RF transformer. The primary side of this transformer is in the plate circuit of the receiver mixer (6BE6) and is capacitively coupled to the crystal filter which in this case is a Heathkit Crystal Filter with a Center Frequency of 3.395 MHz.  [Note the 6BE6 is used versus a 12BE6 as this tube's filaments are in series with the 6JH8 as all other tubes are 12 VDC filaments. DC is used versus AC because we saw AC hum pickup by the 6JH8 in the 40M Wireless.] The secondary is an interesting arrangement in that each end of the windings connects to the plates of the 6JH8 and plate voltage is shunt fed to these same plates via 47K resistors. Each Plate has a Capacitor connected from the Plate to Ground. This is the tricky part as this arrangement has the effect of summing the balanced out...