When I first heard the term Ugly Weekender, I thought of the young ham guy who went out partying Friday night and through an unfortunate incident of beer goggling* awakes the next morning to see a YL like this next to him. That had the makings of a true Ugly Weekender.
We are not covering that kind of weekender but one that highlights that seminal W7ZOI project involving a CW transceiver. The Ugly Weekender was mentioned in yesterday's blog and the link has a you tube video.
There is an elegance to the W7ZOI design in that it is a Direct Conversion Receiver with a tunable analog LO and that LO serves as the frequency source for the Transmitter.
For those ashamed of being an Amateur Extra and don't own a soldering iron or have never built anything, this is a project for you.
The reason I suggest that is that you can build the receiver first and listen to how good a DCR can sound and then you can add the transmit side.
Now there are many DCR receiver projects including mine or the N2CQR/KK4DAS effort and certainly both will serve you well. BUT building the W7ZOI version inextricably connects you to the great W7ZOI.
The Ugly Weekender (UW) involves no beer goggling and is a sparse design meaning you can do it cheaply. The UW also affords an opportunity to eventually rip out the Analog VFO (get it working with what is designed first) and then add a Nano and Si5351.
Thus, the UW is a steppingstone project that builds ones CV (Curriculum Vitae) by bridging the Analog world with the Digital world.
It is a project like this from the father son team (Wes and Roger) that embodies the true ham radio hobby. Keep in mind before you can contest or operate... somebody had to design, build and test a radio.
A cute definition I heard regarding the term "cognitive decline" which is where an older person pisses his pants, doesn't care, blames others and covers over the spot with make-up. There are some clever people out there working overtime.
Them that know, now don't care if you know.
73's
Pete N6QW