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Showing posts from 2020

Ending the Year of New Technology

A Bright Spot on the New Technology Frontier! December 29, 2020 ~ Just a Few Days Left! How it used to be done! Four Tube (TOOB) SSB transmitter with 10 Watts output, See Editor's and Engineers, Radio Handbook, 18th Edition (W6SAI), and the Transistor Radio Handbook from Les Earnshaw (ZL1AAX)  and Don Stoner (W6TNS) circa 1963. This predates the IC-705 and the FTdx10. (Costs less too!) Happy New Year! 73's Pete N6QW December 26 --- Fun With Homebrew Rigs. Thanks Wes & Terry! Christmas 2020 ~ Pasta Pete at Work. *** Enter the Backpack SDR Project! What a great way to end 2020 and to light off 2021. This SDR project involves the use of the Teensy 4.0 or 4.1 along with COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) hardware to form a SDR Transceiver. It will eventually have a waterfall and spectrum display (ILI9341 or ILI 9488) that are TOUCH SCREEN displays. A new ".io" group has been formed for this project found at  https://groups.io/g/keithsdr A word about the COTS -- the main

New Technology for 2020 ~ The tumultuous year of 2020 is fast closing. Buy an HL2!

  The Why you should Buy! Get an HL2. November 20, 2020 ~ Some Musings.  This is not about radio stuff! Next week we will start the Holiday Season with Thanksgiving and in about a month will be Christmas. Please follow the CDC advice about Holiday gatherings. Simply stated, DON'T travel or have large gatherings. But I want to reflect about a Holiday gathering on December 24th 1945. It was a celebratory day as just a week before I turned four years old and on that day, my Dad and four Uncles had all returned home from the war -- all were alive and looking forward to restarting their lives.  The first question I asked my Dad was if I was going to get a "knife gun" for Christmas which was the next day. He said something to me which I have never forgotten: "He said Petey, (the name I was always called, as his name was Pete too) you never want a knife gun, as it has only one purpose and that is to kill others." Fast forward exactly 20 years and in December 1965 there

New Technology for 2020 ~ The Hermes Lite 2.0 --Some Observations

 The HL2 = The Real Winner for 2020!     November 14th, 2020 ~ The Cool Stuff   The Computer I am using for the HL2 is one I built several years ago and it has a 3 GHZ CPU and 8 GB of Ram. The HDD is 1TB. I had installed Windows 7 Professional on it and thereafter discovered I had a fake copy of Win 7. So as I was thinking about improving the computer situation for the HL2 -- Boom it hit me --- convert this nice computer to Linux Mint 64. That was a huge success.  The MB is a Gigabyte and had two video output ports on the back panel, One was a standard VGA and the other a DVI. Rummaging through a box of computer parts, I discovered that I had a DVi to HDMI adapter. Now I could hook up a HDMI monitor to this jewel. I set about doing that but neglected to remove the VGA cable. Double Boom --like getting hooked up with the hottie cheerleader in high school! Now both monitors worked and I could move the mouse back and forth across the two screens. By some strange quirk I got the QUISK scre

New Technology for 2020 ~ The Hermes Lite 2.0 SDR Transceiver

  The Hermes Lite 2.0 SDR Transceiver. November 7th, 2020 ~ It's Settled! It is done! The stain of the Trump era is soon to be removed! Thanks to all who voted. The Voice of the People has been heard.  Congratulations to President Elect Biden and Vice President Elect Harris. Pete N6QW November 3rd, 2020 -- IT WAS THE MOUSE   We all know this is Dump Trump  Day. Go out and vote! It was the mouse! Back in 1999 I stupidly was one of the very first to purchase a Ten Tec Pegasus. Never buy the first batch of a new model.  Touted as the world's first computer controlled radio , actually I think the Kachina 505 was really the first. But the Pegasus was fraught with problems including a trip back to the Smokey Mountains. I was using an older Windows 95 machine to control the Pegasus and that may be a co-conspirator. Well after many calls to TT -- finally someone who has some smarts told me: Fix your station ground, Make all leads short and Buy stock in a ferrite bead company. I did all