First some interesting information from my blog statistics. This may be predictive of where the orb of ham radio innovation may be shifting.
Over a short period of time this is the number of views of my blog by country. The bulk is from the USA but #'s 2, 3 and 4 offer a view that there must be homebrewing going on in unexpected places. The #4 entry may be signaling the next country to go big on building ham radio gear ~ Vietnam and its Low Cost of Production!
Who Would Have Thought?
Digi-Key ~ $20
ICE Activities
Any one wonder what is being spent by ICE over the last 13 Months on immigration roundups. Wonder no more as copilot suggests perhaps in the range of $10B
⭐ Combined Estimate: ICE likely spent between $9.5B and $10B on activities that include or directly support immigration roundups over the past 13 months.
Some of those funds as suggested by Copilot were to pay bonuses to contractor personnel. Is that like a bounty on illegal immigrants? Dunno, but somebody knows.
Simple SSB Stuff
Simple SSB Updates
I had to do some repair work and run some tests on other possible bands of use. For starters the seasick Green 16X4 LCD died and I had to install a 16X4 Juliano Blue with white letters, which is cool looking with the yellow panel.
That was a bit of an effort as the overall footprint of both LCD's was exactly the same but their actual display electronics was different (the Blue needed a larger opening in the Y direction but was smaller in the X direction). My solution was to use aluminum spacers and longer bolts so the Blue LCD straddles the opening. That worked!
The next issue was the latest Arduino IDE would not compile the sketch written in IDE 1.8.5. I needed to open the range of the top frequency to test other bands like 20M and 17M. Using a decrepit Old Windows 10 Machine which had 1.8.5 installed, I was able to load the revised sketch.
I retuned just the BPF to 20M and then 17M and I could copy FT-8 signals which is a pretty good test. Actually, the results were better than expected attesting to my good design. Yes, I designed and built this project. It was not a kit and not a replication of another's design. Folks this is real homebrew radio! Link to documentation on the rig.
So, now I must decide whether to leave the sleeping "dawg" lie or make a new BPF for either 20M or 17M.
It is not hard work, but the task was made more difficult because the latest Arduino IDE is not backward compatible for this sketch.
In case you have trouble pronouncing my name, Pete, try this one... Xochitl --- It's "So Chee"!
Them that know, now don't care if you know.
73's
Pete N6QW
