Skip to main content

March 17, 2024. Happy St. Patrick's Day.

St. Patrick, the Patron Saint of Engineers, I was told invented Green Beer. It seems this was his secret weapon to convert the then pagan Irish to Catholicism by getting them drunk on beer. But that may just be Blarney!

Were St, Patrick alive today would he be a ham? We do know of one Irish Jesuit Priest who was a well-known ham, 9N1MM, Father Marshall Moran in Nepal, the Voice of the Himalaya's.

More tests with the RF Board and indeed the addition of the Band Pass Filter cleaned up the traces. I now get close to 2 VPTP on 40M and less on 20M. I used a BPF (dual 20/40M) built for another rig and noted before that 20M seemed a bit "hinky", so I need to revisit the 20M BPF.

20/40M BPF and SSB Transceiver Board

RF Amp Board (Green ~ In Honor of St. Patrick)


There are many stories about St. Patrick, and it is interesting to note that four US Presidents have Irish Roots: Biden, Obama, Reagan and Kennedy. (Source CNN.) Even more astonishing all four trace their heritage to the Great Potato Famine that caused 1.3 million Irish to emigrate to the US to avoid starvation.

But 99.44% of blog readers likely want to get back to electrons. However, a final note of the connection to St. Patrick and Engineers: Beer consumption during college while studying engineering.

I have a plan to create a steerable amp module using two of these RF amp boards and a couple of relays. 

The SSB Transceiver Board uses two stages (diode steered) of Dual Gate MOSFET's (one on either side of the SSB Filter). The Bias on Gate Two sets the stage gain. I made that Bias variable from an on board 8VDC regulator and a 10K pot. By injecting a 1KHz tone into the Balanced Modulator I could actually see the optimal setting of the bias level before there was distortion at the output side of the RF Board. That also improved things on the receive end.



Strange ritual dealing with Catholicism and Saints days. Normally a date assigned a Saint (birth, death or special act) is recognized with special celebrations and masses. This is absolutely true with one exception and that is if the Saints Day is a Sunday and especially during Lent. Poor St Patrick will have to wait until next year for his Saints Day recognition but that does not prevent you the Blog Readers from hoisting a Beer or Three in his name. 



73's
Pete N6QW (A Mediterranean Irishman)

Popular posts from this blog

January 26, 2024. A simple CW Transceiver/Transmitter

Cruise through the lower part of the ham bands bands and what do you hear? Well, FT-8 and CW. Often you will not hear any SSB stations yet go to the lower part of the bands, and it is a cacophony (I love that word) of bad sounding signals and some high-speed keying. Fast is not so much of the issue as is bad, run together and jerky keying. But none the less our hobby started there.    So, you could crank down your ICOM 7300 and watch the waterfall on CW or you could homebrew a radio. Actually, to do CW right you need more thought up front than you do with a SSB transceiver. Often, I will state that a CW Transceiver is much more difficult to build than a simple SSB rig. I published two articles in QRP Quarterly on CW transceivers and all I got was a yawn so maybe history will repeat itself.  Yawn!   30M CW Transceiver with RIT!   Of interest is that the LO is a Varactor tuned LC oscillator using a NE602. Look closely at the RIT circuit which is only activated on ...
Read more

March 31, 2024. Happy Easter to those who celebrate this day.

What a great day to Binge on Chocolate and experience the pain of that filling that has been leaking.  I would be in that category with the leaking filling(s) had I not just spent an amount equivalent to one of the fancy new uptown appliance box transceivers on two filling repairs. Well at least I can binge on the Chocolate bunnies without fear of pain. Regrettably everything appears to have jumped in price including the price of parts. Well not so much the parts as the shipping costs.  That notably is seen in the eBay treasures. I spotted a nice heathkit DX-20 for about $50 and the shipping was $65. Likely it is a twofer with part being a way to in effect charge a higher price by inflating the shipping and in part by increased shipping costs. Shipping with insurance across the US was about $150 for this jewel and that was three years ago. 6AM on the Left Coast ~ 20M Easter Sunday! My only hope is the cost of Chocolate Bunnies remains steady although a pound of See's Candies f...
Read more

August 30, 2024. A PNP 20M SSB Transceiver

Shown below is the Block Diagram for the 20M PNP SSB Transceiver steered in the  Transmit Mode . The components shown in the dotted block are relay steered so that the block module is single pass and amplifies in a single direction. The Block diagram show steered in Transmit.  Essentially the steering process works so that the IF Module input follows the Balanced Modulator on Transmit and then the input side follows the Receive Mixer on Receive. All done with some relays and a bit of RG174U coax. For those who count things in detail, this block diagram is not unlike what was used for the PSSST Transceiver which can be found on my website . Yes, a warmed over P3ST only using PNP devices. TYGNYBNT. 73's Pete N6QW
Read more