Pay More and Get Less. Flash the Cash!

So, what is an RFH? That my friend is a Radical Fundamentalist Homebrewer or a person who totally homebrews a rig with discrete parts, no SMD, no chips or Arduinos here. The trouble is that the supply system is doing you in! A blog reader suggested I go to Digi-Key and search on BF998 which used to be a staple Dual Gate MOSFET, and one often used by W7ZOI. I did that and found out they are not available being obsolete. Aha --click on the link for substitutes and I did that. Surprise! There is Zero stock, and the subs are also obsolete. At play here are four factors that will affect our RFH. The first is a demand issue and the basic question who is buying the BF998 DGM for use in production or projects? The answer is a few RFH's or someone who stumbled upon an article in QRP Quarterly by N6QW who designed a two band Direct Conversion Receiver using the BF998. Another user may be looking for a replacement part in an obsolete radio but that is peanuts. No new designs are in process th...

Low Power Consumption Homebrew Rig for Use During PSPS. Prompted by the 4 recent preemptive "turning out the lights events" we are looking for the better mousetrap.   The Starting Place    One of the two G4GXO stages. The 4X6 Board is a complete Receiver less the BPF, LO and BFO Two of the G4GXO bidirectional modules (Jan 26th posting) are used in this rig. No RF Amp Stage is used to conserve power. What you see and hear is the antenna into the BPF and then on to the Mixer and IF Module.  From there onto the Product Detector / Balanced Modulator and audio stages. The Rx/Tx Mixer is a TUF-1, and the PD/BM is an ADE-1. The LO/BFO is a Seed Xiao RP2040 driving a Si5351. The transmit chain will be a 2N2222A, 2N2219A. With 8 Volts PTP output from the 2N2219A that gives about 150 Milliwatts to the antenna on 40M SSB. If we could get 10V PTP then that is a quarter of a watt. A small relay applies a set level of bias for IF gain on the 1st stage for Receive. On Transmit this...

Failure to know something is one thing but being at the other end of a Help Line and knowing nothing about the subject is pure incompetence. The recent power shutoffs and local fire danger prompted me to remove the "land line" bundled with Frontier and move that to T-Mobile. My Frontier service was out but the T-Mobile worked. I was able to tether my laptop to the T-Mobile phone, so I was good for comms. Then the trouble started! To unbundle the "land line" phone resulted in Frontier cancelling my service. That was a blessing in disguise. Frontier has essentially screwed me over for a long time. I found out yesterday that instead of paying $134 for the bundle package and by dropping the phone that the bundled cost could be $39. That is robbery! If you have Frontier, I suggest you look carefully at your billing as you too are getting screwed. So, the alternative is T-Mobile Home Internet. I found that with some recent changes to their cell towers I get a rock-solid s...

  Fumbling the ball. That is what Hallicrafters did in the early 1970's when they introduced the FPM-300 Safari. This radio was an all band SSB CW transceiver with built in power supplies for 12VDC and 120VAC, thus the connection to a Safari. A Hybrid rig, it has two tubes and the rest solid state.  The fumbling part involves a cranky drifty VFO and a rubber band operated band switch where the rubber band would fail, and the band switch got out of sync.   I bought one 10 years ago and could never fix all of the problems, so I kept the main board and S Meter and sold the rest as parts. From these two pieces I designed a solid state QRP radio. The receiver is actually pretty good once you rid yourself of the albatross Hallicrafters circuits associated with the VFO and band switch. My efforts involved taking the mainboard which had a 44 Pin Edge Connector and discerning how to interface those 44 pins to make a working Transceiver. My mechanical band switch has 2 poles and 5 ...

Bi-Directional IF Amplifier Stage from G4GXO So, you just popped for 100 Pieces of the SMD version of the J310 for about $20 and that is when you discovered that China didn't pay the 10% tariff -- you did. About $2 extra to buy 100 pieces. Stupid decisions have consequences! A Tip of the Cap to you MAGA-O-Lytes. Now what do you do with those 100 Pieces? With due recognition to Ron Taylor, G4GXO who designed this circuit which appeared in SPRAT #128 you build it. Yes, it is a bilateral circuit and signal reversal is done with Voltage switching. If you are a serious homebrewer, then you need to join the G-QRP club and purchase the SPRAT on a Stick!   In case you bought the SMD version of the J310 it has a max voltage of 10 Volts and this circuit should work at 10 VDC -- it might need some resistor tweaking but don't fret it will work OK.   This circuit simulates a Dual Gate MOSFET and does have an advantage of being able to adjust the gain by what is applied to Gate #2. In sever...

Meet the ELAD, a QRP SDR from Italy Having nothing in my refrigerator because of the PSPS I had to get some basic food stuffs like some milk and eggs.  It was sticker shock, like $7 for a dozen of eggs. The eggs I really like are close to $10 a dozen.  This new administration is so focused on revenge, immigrant deportation and taking away our rights, it seems like fixing the food inflation would be job one. But then that is not as much fun as rounding up "those immigrants".  Shades of the Chinese Exclusion Act. A funny story about that era. When I lived in Port Townsend (WA) , there is a bit of history with that act. Many Chinese were employed building the railroad to Seattle. Job done the Chinese remained in the local area and even migrated to places like Port Townsend where they set up businesses like Prostitution and Laundries. The enactment of the Exclusion Act put a real kink in the local late-night entertainment and the outsourcing of clean clothes. BTW the Chinese ...

Ten hours without power and just a bit of spoiled food. The Laguna Fire was contained to about 94 acres and mostly open fields -- although threatening hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of produce growing in the Oxnard Plain. This time I moved all of the stuff, which was pre-positioned, into the car and thought this might be the time. But God was with us.  Also threatened was CSU Channel Islands which has an urban legend connection to the Eagles. This California State University was formerly a state mental hospital which was converted to the University. The connection is the song from the Eagles called "Hotel California". Legend has it the mental hospital was Hotel California. Quick take a look at the SSB radio or Homebrew Rig sitting in front of you and give a tip of the cap to O.G. "Mike" Villard Jr. In 1947 Dr. Villard was a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford and also W6OYT. It was in 1947 that he built and put on the air a homebrew SSB trans...

Breaking news. Power outage and the Laguna Fire is 6 miles west of my house. Car is packed with only 1 Radio. If my home gets smoked then it's the end of my boat anchor collection. An inconvenience but not the end of the world . There was a popular song many moons ago by Johnny Cash called Ring of Fire. Well, there is a Ring of Fire around the Los Angeles Area. The latest is the Hughes Fire near Lake Castaic about 40 Miles NE from me. As usual a raft of PSPS texts, emails and even phone calls to expect my power to go down for the 4th time in two months.  Hughes Fire ~ About 9000 Acres This fire situation is great political fodder for what's his name, but the reality is that I keep nothing in the refrigerator, and I have my go stuff at the front door. But the Hughes Fire is different -- I can smell it, whereas the other fires in the ring were not smelly at this QTH. At 9000 acres burnt that comes to about 14 Square Miles. [9000*43560 / (5280^2) = 14.1 sq miles] My battery is cha...