Imabug's journey into electronics and amateur radio as AB4UG and VA6BUG
Just noticed the results for the 2015 North Carolina QSO Party are up. I submitted my log in the Single Op Out of State Phone category and ended up 16 out of 66 submissions in that category with 4070 points. Not anywhere near close to the big guys with scores in the 5 digits, but I’m pleased with it.
It’s a fun QSO party to play in and looking forward to the next one.
It’s taken me a few years to get to, but I finally started working on the Softrock Ensemble RXTX kit I picked up a few years ago.
This is a much larger board than the Softrock Lite II I put together a while ago. A larger board, and a lot more parts (especially toroids).
Started off with the power sections yesterday, which was pretty easy to do. All through hole stuff. The bank of filtering capacitors was a little bit of a challenge, mostly because the holes are pretty close together and it’s not hard to accidentally bridge the contacts.
Haven’t powered it up to test yet because the power jack is a 2.5mm center pin, which none of my wall warts will fit. I’m planning on wiring up the included plug with powerpole connectors on the end. That will let me use the Astron power supply on the bench.
Here’s the current progress. USB power section is next.
CARS has set up an operating day at the club station, WA4USN, on board the USS Yorktown for this year’s ARRL Rookie Roundup (SSB). For Rookie Roundup purposes, a Rookie is someone who was licensed in the current year, or within the past 2 years (2013, 2014, or 2015). If you’re a rookie or new ham and want to experience the HF side of amateur radio or just want to operate from the club station (it’s a pretty neat place to play radio from), this is your chance!
The club room will be open starting at 1PM, April 19. Rookie Roundup starts at 2PM EDT and goes to 759PM EDT (1800 – 2359 UTC). If you’re interested, drop me a note and I’ll put you in touch with the proper people.
Spent some time playing in the Georgia QSO party this weekend. Band conditions were pretty terrible this weekend and I only worked a handful of stations on Saturday. I couldn’t even hear WWV on any of its frequencies, which is really unusual. Normally I can always hear the 10MHz WWV signal, but this weekend it wasn’t anywhere to be heard. Later in the evening the 15MHz WWV signal popped up, but that was it.
Spent most of Sunday at the radio tuning around 40m looking for more GA stations. Did a little better and ended up the weekend with 42 QSOs and 34 counties.
Highlights included:
Had a good time tuning around the bands, even though propagation was down in the dumps.
Band QSOs Pts Mul
7 42 42 34
Total 42 42 34
Score: 1,428
1 Mult = 1.2 Q's
The Si5351 breakout boards all work, at least according to the frequency counter, so I thought I’d put the oscilloscope on one to see what was coming out. I just connected the output of the Si5351 board straight to the oscilloscope using an SMA/BNC pigtail. I’m sure it’s a totally incorrect way of doing it, but all I wanted to see was if I got a waveform and if it changed when I changed the Si5351 frequency.
I’ve been told that the Si5351 output is a square wave, and at kHz frequencies, that’s what I get. This is the 10 kHz waveform. Nice looking square waves.
Going up a few orders of magnitude to 1MHz, the shape of the waveform loses its squareness, most likely due to the way I’ve connected things (impedance mismatch, improper loading and all that). But, as the time base shows, it’s a much higher frequency signal.
At 10 MHz, there’s even more distortion of the waveform, but definitely higher frequency.
Up at 20MHz, things are looking pretty triangular.
So, TIL: