Eugene

Radio updates

What have I been doing in the amateur radio world lately?

Well, not a heck of a lot actually. I’ve even skipped a few of the big contests happening this fall.

Lately most of my spare time has been spent reading up on and learning about electronics and Arduino related things. I’ve spent a little bit of time playing at the workbench. Nothing terribly complex. Just soldering together simple circuits and practicing ugly construction techniques.

My reading list for the past few months:

EMRFD
Ham Radio for Arduino and PICAXE
Arduino for Ham Radio
Solid Sate Design for the Radio Amateur
W1FB’s QRP Notebook
ARRL’s Hands-On Radio Experiments

I’m no expert yet, but I think I know a little more than I did a while ago.

In the next couple of weeks, the plan is to turn the guest bedroom into a ham shack/guest bedroom. First we’ll empty out the room, paint the walls and then move everything back in. I’ll have to get back into the crawl space to pull the coax out, but the antenna feed point will be closer to the radio which means a shorter coax run that won’t have to go under the house.

The guest room also stays a lot cooler than the office so playing radio during the summer will be a lot more comfortable.

VA6BUG wallpaper

My dad forwarded my Canadian amateur radio certificate to me, and it arrived in the mail today. Looks pretty spiffy. Now I need to get a frame for it.

Canadian amateur radio certificate VA6BUG

I’m quite pleased and proud of this accomplishment.

Canadian Ham

I was able to take both the Canadian Amateur Radio Basic and Advanced certification tests this morning, and much to my surprise, managed to pass both of them.

I was pretty sure I’d pass the Basic test with at least Honours (80%+). The Advanced test I was a little less optimistic about since I didn’t have as much time to prepare for it as I had wanted. Fortunately I managed to score high enough to pass both tests, so now I have my Basic with Honours and Advanced qualifications!

Less than 30 minutes after the examiner left, I was already able to apply for my call sign through the Industry Canada website (wasn’t expecting to be able to do that for another day or two based on what the examiner told me). Hopefully that will go through by the weekend and then I’ll be official!

Update: My new Canadian call sign is active! VA6BUG

Charleston Hamfest preparations

Preparations are under way for the 2015 Charleston Hamfest. As usual, it’s scheduled for the first Saturday in February and will be at the same location as last year in North Charleston. Door prizes, forums, VE exams, and all the normal fun things you expect at a hamfest. It’s not a large hamfest, but I’ve enjoyed going to the last few and being able to meet other hams. I’ve also managed to score a few decent deals too. Looking forward to this next one.

Ugly construction attempt

My first attempt at building a circuit using the ugly construction technique. It’s supposed to be a simple oscillator circuit using a J310 transistor.

One of the advantages of ugly construction is that if you’re working from a schematic or circuit drawing, building is pretty easy. I found that soldering components to the copper clad required a bit of patience, because it’s essentially a very large heat sink. Put the soldering iron on the copper clad, add solder until you get a good sized pool, leave the soldering iron in place and place the component.

For this particular circuit, V_cc is applied to the big resistor with the free lead and output is off the capacitor with the free lead. I soldered on a piece of wire to make the ground connection easier. Haven’t applied power to test it out yet. Will see if it works later on.