Imabug's journey into electronics and amateur radio as AB4UG and VA6BUG
Helped out yesterday with comm support for the Charleston Marathon again with my fellow amateur radio ops. Like last year, it was a pretty cool start to the event, but the weather warmed up nicely by the end of the race. This year I was assigned to two positions on the marathon course at Mile 2 and Mile 18.
Had a good time helping out with comm support, and fortunately there were no incidents along the course. Had a good time and I’m glad I was able to help out with the event.
I’ve been asked to give a presentation at the Charleston Library‘s DIY Festival that’s happening on Feb 28.
Sounds like it’s going to be a neat thing. My plan is to give a modified version of the amateur radio talk I’ve given at the last few BarcampCHS, and augment with a demonstration build of a crystal radio using some magnet wire and the 1N34A diodes I acquired recently.
Time to start messing around with building…
Jason/NT7S launched the crowdfunding campaign for his version of an Si5351 breakout board last night, and already this morning it’s at over 150%. The stretch goal at $1 500 involves spending some more time on the software library to make the board easier to use.
It’s a neat little oscillator chip that seems to provide a lot of capabilities for not a lot of money. He’s been documenting his investigations on the chip at his blog for the past year now, including building a couple of receivers and transceivers around the Si5351.
The Si5351A is quite a capable IC at a very modest price. It is a PLL clock generator with three independent outputs which can each generate a separate signal from 8 kHz to 160 MHz. A 25 or 27 MHz reference oscillator is used for the two internal PLLs (the Etherkit breakout board uses a 25 MHz reference oscillator), which allows the user to choose the amount of frequency stability and accuracy required.
Go check out the Si5351 breakout board campaign on Indiegogo, and pick one up if it’s something you’ll find useful in an upcoming project.
With the radio all set up now in the new shack and connected to the antenna with a slightly shorter length of coax than before, and after being up in the air for two years now, I figured it was a good time to check the SWR performance across the bands to see how/if it changed.
Compared with two years ago, there haven’t been too many changes. SWR has gone up a little bit in general for all the bands, but not a whole lot. The biggest change seems to have happened on 80m, with the SWR around 3.8 MHz dipping down to a range that I think the radio’s tuner might be able to handle. The SWR on 15m has also gone above the range the radio’s tuner will handle, so that’s one band I seem to have lost.
Things still seem to be looking pretty good for the antenna so far. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a few more up this year.
Well, I didn’t get a whole lot of my 2014 goals crossed off the list, but I did manage to get a few crossed off.
For 2015, I’ll carry over most of the 2014 goals.
I’ll add more to the list as I (hopefully) cross these off the list.