N6QW -- Left Coast Radio

Once again, the Amazon Phantom has struck! In yesterday's mail was a package from Amazon containing a pumice scraping stone to clean the toilet bowl.  To my benefactor I thank you, and I truly appreciate your generosity. Anyone else feeling the urge to send a pumice stone -- I am good. A gallon of 12% Hydrogen Peroxide ... OOOPS Here I am soliciting and that is not my intent. Please do not send any H202. Now a giant plug for the G-QRP Club and the SPRAT publication. I am lucky to own a SPRAT on a STICK, which essentially is a compendium of all of the SPRAT articles going back to #1 and carried forward to the most recent all on a USB Stick. Be aware that the compendium is only as recent to when the stick was burned.  But I did find Issue #61 on my stick which covers the Stockton Bridge in an article entitled A Bi-Directional Inline Wattmeter pp 12-16. (David Stockton, G4ZNQ). No "Digital Stuff" here just two meters. G4ZNQ's description of the circuit and its function i

[Late Breaking News! Dean, KK4DAS now has resolved the MCU problem -- it was a library issue. Check out this link on his build and the resolution. https://kk4das.blogspot.com/2024/07/homebrew-sbitx-power-and-swr-meter.html ] In one week, we will be looking to change the Calendar to August. Time to start thinking about a winter project. Do we channel the thinking toward something we need like a new rig for the shack or to an item of test equipment.  If the wheel of fortune lands on test gear, then one of the most useful pieces is a SWR Bridge. In the most recent SolderSmoke Podcast (#252) Dean, KK4DAS shared some tales of woe regarding a SWR Power Meter that would be built into his homebrew SDR Bitx (SBitx) transceiver. Essentially, Raspberry Pi 4 software poles a sensor (Stockton Bridge) and the voltage values, Forward and Reverse, are read and then massaged in software to derive an output for display on the screen. He has been wrestling this gorilla for several weeks. The issue is til

I have been vexed with a ring around my toilet bowl. It has given me nightmares and the supposed super toilet bowl cleaners on Amazon are a huge joke. Bezos' stuff is expensive and does nothing to remove the ring! In desperation I turned the problem over to the micro-shaft AI Co-pilot. I spoke the question asking for recommended toilet bowl cleaners. This is no BS, as the co-pilot AI came back with a listing of recommended bowling ball cleaners. The Co-pilot AI must have been trained in China where English is not a 1st Language.     So, then I typed in the question and the #1 response was the 9th Grade Science Project answer. Start by pouring a box of Arm and Hammer Baking Soda into the bowl and let stand an hour and then dump in a bottle of Vinegar -- watch the foam devour the ring. The next steps suggest you will still have to scrub like hell with a pumice stone to lift the ring. In an earlier foray into AI using Chat GPT, the answer was to find toilet bowl cleansers that contai

  The all-important power supply is a lot like an antenna. Use anything and it will work! Well, that belief and statement have a good chance of starting you off on a wrong foot for both antennas and power supplies. These two elements typically are given no consideration, and the result is often poor performance of the radio. A typical advert from a supplier who resells manufacturer overstock starts with 12VDC at 30 Amps open switcher all for $9.95 shipped. The price is certainly less than a Big Mac Meal at Mickey D's but should also give rise to an acid stomach. Too Good To Be True has a prophetic ring to it! Power supplies commonly used with solid state equipment broadly fall into two categories: 1) Linear Supplies and 2) Switchers. The Linear supplies are the old transformer rectifier kind and are often heavy. I have a Astron 35 Amp Linear supply you never want to drop on your toe. A Switcher uses that old back EMF principle to take the decay of a pulsed inductor field to create

You have this insatiable urge to homebrew a SSB/CW transceiver and I mean totally homebrew! This rig will have no IC's.  (Gulp) an Analog VFO, a homebrew microphone and even a home constructed case. The 12 pole QER Crystal Filter, of course homebrewed, is suddenly a decision point. No, the decision is not about 12 poles but what frequency? Did I mention this will be your first ever homebrew project. Of all of these pieces indeed the IF Filter Frequency is perhaps the 1st item on the critical path. The McCoy Silver Sentinel or Golden Guardian Filters were some of the 1st commercial 9 MHz Crystal Filters. The 9 MHz filter was popular in the single conversion 80/20 rigs because a 5MHz VFO yields two bands, although you would need two BFO crystals.  Had you used a 5 MHz Filter and 9 MHz VFO then because of sideband inversion only one BFO crystal is needed to give USB on 20M and LSB on 80M. The 9 MHz filter is seen a lot in homebrew and commercial radios (Ten Tec). This all worked prett

In yesterday's post I was babbling about a matchbox sized SSB Transceiver. I must have been suffering from the heat we have been experiencing in SoCal. Small is not always a good thing. Today's post will look at what shrinking the size down of a homebrew rig really means. I can remember being issued a Motorla cell phone (1990's) as a part of my job. It was fat and in no way easily slipped into your pocket. Today's cell phones easily fit into any pocket in your tight designer jeans. Portability is the key operative word and so it would be with a ham rig, thus the shrink down syndrome.  Since we are focusing on a homebrew radio, the builder has total control over the size and final configuration.  My foray into creating a shirt pocket SSB transceiver started back in 2007. https://www.jessystems.com/morexcvrs.html That project didn't end up being shirt pocket size but did provide some important baseline data. Somewhat reincarnated it is in a box 7X7X2 or almost 100 cub