Eugene

40m OpenBeacon

The 40m Etherkit OpenBeacon I ordered arrived yesterday and made for a nice fun evening at the workbench. It will go along nicely with the other 30m OpenBeacon I received from Matthew/W2MDW. There are a few differences in the production version versus the 30m beta version.

Spent a couple hours at the workbench assembling it and it worked as soon as I connected it to the computer. The only snafu I had was accidentally mixing up two resistors, making me unsolder the first one to switch it out with the correct one. I also got to experiment with using a drill to twist the wires together for the bifilar transformer. Worked amazingly well.

Looking forward to getting this on the air and seeing how far it gets heard. One of these days I’ll have to make up an enclosure and 30m and 40m antennas to put both of the OpenBeacons on the air full time.

Coils!

In addition to the air variable capacitors, three of the parts bins contained a bunch of pre-wound antenna coils, including these that looked unused. One of them even had an instruction sheet.

Calrad CLS Loopstick.

They consist of two coils, one wound on top of the other and what seems to be a ferrite rod inside that can be tuned by turning the screwdriver or even a knob at the other end.

One was also in a box, a Miller A-5495-A with two separate coils and a capacitor. Looks like it has a tuning range of 540 – 1700 Hz, which is the AM broadcast band.

This one was tunable as well by turning the screw at the end.

Now, if I can find some Ge diodes, I wonder if I could use these in a crystal radio…

Adding to the air variable capacitor collection

While exploring the component bins, I came across a couple of air variable capacitors, one of which was still in the box and didn’t look like it had ever been used. A Hammarlund APC-50-B air padding capacitor, complete with knob. Capacitance range is 3.9-50 pF. Looks in really good condition and turns pretty smoothly.

The other air variable capacitor I found is a little more anonymous but also looked like it hadn’t been used before. One of the rotor plates at the very back was slightly bent causing it to make contact with a stator plate. Aside from that it seems in good condition and turns pretty well.

I’ll have to see if I can straighten out that one plate. Would be cool to use it in something.

Component gold mine

I had the fortune of acquiring a veritable gold mine of electrical components tonight. 5 parts bins worth of resistors, capacitors, transistors, switches, ICs and other miscellaneous parts. Most everything is pretty organized so there’s really no sorting that needs to be done. Most of the components were pretty easily identifiable, but there were others that I had never seen before and have no idea what they do.

A lot of items are pretty old, but have never been used. One whole parts bin is just resistors, containing regular carbon film resistors, a few big power resistors and some carbon composition resistors, which you don’t see a whole lot of these days.

The next bin contains transistors and a few other miscellaneous parts. Some of the are unidentifiable other than their form factor and others have never been used.

The third bin is kind of a mish-mash of parts – pre-wound coils, resistors, things that looked like variable capacitors. Quite a few components in this bin that I have never seen before.

The capacitors bin contains some interesting capacitors. Lots of electrolytic caps, and some really big caps in the mF range that I guess could be used for power filtering.

The fifth bin contained all sorts of ICs and EEPROMS. I’m not sure how much of what’s in here will be useful, but I’ll need to try to identify them first. There are even a bunch of Z80 CPU chips in here. I wonder if I could do anything with them.

I’m going to need more shelf space.

CQWW 2013 raw scores

The raw scores (pre-log checking) for the 2013 CQ WW contest are now available.

My claimed score of 70716 (had someone notify me that I didn’t appear in his log…must have made a typo or something entering it) was high enough to give me a rank of 856 out of 2020 in the Single-Op Low-Power All-Band category for the world and 290 out of 651 in North America.

Seems acceptable to me. The top 46 call signs in this category scored 1M+ points and it’s not until #693 where the points drop below 100k.

If CQ WPX is any indication, I expect log checking process will take about 5-6 months and then the final scores will be released.