Left Coast Political Scene

Preparing for Field Day ~2020 June 27, 2020 ~ FD is Here! We had an amazing FD with six total contacts including one on FT-8. I know you are snickering; but that is the most contacts I have ever made on any FD in the last 61 years! I spent my whole allotted hour for the operation with 25 minutes wasted on my tripod Vertical antenna. It just wasn't hearing anything so I simply tapped into my 40M Delta Loop and then the spectrum lit up. Thus that is six contacts in about 35 minutes. As I always say -- the antenna is more important than the rig. More proof of that today. But there were some proof of concept pieces to my FD (Fun Day) foray. First and foremost I now have a way to totally power my RADIG from 12 VDC including the RPi3 and the 7" HDMI. Secondly I forced myself to permanently mount the RADIG on a metal plate versus the haphazard bread board. So those were two very positive outcomes resulting from FD. Thirdly if I would really want to operate portable s...

Yes! That is what I said. "A Homebrew DDC SDR Transceiver" June 13th, 2020 ~ I have had a response to my inquiry. Yes indeed there are readers of this blog who are "doing the DDC" thing and I even have some recommendations on different LTC ADC's (perhaps less expensive).  I will share that model number and a spec sheet later today. This could get really interesting. The Model # is the LTC2291 @ about $28 from Digi-Key. Still not under $10. No Op-Amps, Precision Capacitors or Resistors will be involved with this project. 73's Pete N6QW ***** Last evening I had an opportunity via Zoom to share some of my homebrew projects with the Cedar Valley ARC located in Cedar Rapids Iowa. What a great bunch of hams -- many are former and current Collins Radio Employees (now a unit of Raytheon). I was asked quite a few questions: but a couple members pointed a finger at me asking why I was using the front end analog hardware in the t...

When You Know Stuff, You Can Do Stuff! All In A Days Work! June 12th, 2020 ~ WSPR Data for the New 40M Loop Antenna Tabular Data for Transmit at www.n6qw.com Most stations that heard me at 500 milliwatts  are close in; but N6QW was heard in New Zealand. Received stations were from Japan, Australia and many across the USA for about a two hour period. Two days is just that --  two days.  No Op-Amps, Precision Capacitors or Resistors were used for this evaluation. 73's Pete N6QW June 11, 2020 ~ 1:2 Magic Balun Info https://oz1bxm.blogspot.com/2012/11/homemade-12-balun.html With thanks to Lars we now have info on how to build that 1:2 Balun. It is like a head slap moment one you see the pictorial. Initially I had seen just a photo of the completed balun which used the same color wire for both windings -- it was hard to tell the actual number of turns and what connected to where. The color coded wire makes everything lucid! The 1:2 matches ...