Eugene

CRX1 Mixer

Made it up to the mixer stage of CRX1 tonight. The bandpass filter is the next section and has a couple of inductors, so I thought that would be a good stopping point.

Also soldered on header pins for attaching the external bits. How I’m going to attach the external bits to the header pins, I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to try to find some header pin connectors from somewhere.

Applied 12V power to the board, and there was no smoke or flames, so I’ll take that as a good sign. Saw 11.8V – 11.9V at a few places on the board. so hopefully that’s another good sign.

Etherkit CRX1 now available

Want to try your hand at building an Etherkit CRX1? They’re now available over in NT7S’s Etherkit store!

Since it’s a kit using almost all surface mount components, assembling can seem a little daunting if all you’ve done so far is through-hole stuff. Jason offers up a good surface mount tutorial for beginners, and there are plenty of videos on YouTube to watch that will show you how to do surface mount work. It’s easier than it seems, but does require a little more care and attention to detail. Many people I’ve talked to seem to end up preferring it to through-hole stuff after a while.

I’m enjoying building mine so far. Don’t know if it works yet, but hopefully I haven’t done anything to mess it up.

TN QSO Party 2013

As a bit of a warm up for the SC QSO Party in a couple of weeks, I spent a few hours on the air yesterday playing in the Tennessee QSO Party.Started off slow, but then it started picking up late afternoon/early evening. Made 22 contacts in S&P (seek and pounce) mode tuning around 40m, including the K4TCG bonus station. Not a whole lot but I was content with it. According to N1MM, my score should be 620.

I wandered around 15m and 20m, but the only TNQP activity that I could hear was on 40m. Picked up plenty of rag chewing and nets on the other bands, but zero TNQP activity. I thought it was kind of odd, but maybe those signals were just skipping over me.

Logging was a little easier this time around because now I have a connection between the laptop and the radio, so N1MM is able to get the actual frequency from the radio instead of me having to go back and edit the contact afterwards.

Had fun making contacts. Looking forward to participating in the SCQP on the 21st. There were apparently no QSOs from Charleston County last year, so maybe that will make me a much sought after QSO.

CQ WPX results

Got an email informing me of the log check report for my submission and final results for the CQ WPX contest I participated in back in March.

I had 82 QSOs, lost one because I either heard or entered the call sign incorrectly, so a net of 81 QSOs counted for the contest. It’s too bad. The lost call was a multiplier for me too.

Two stations copied/entered my exchange incorrectly and one station copied/entered my call sign incorrectly, so I guess I wouldn’t have counted for their scores,

Final score ended up being 17520. Good enough to rank #54 in 4-land, #262 in North America, and #967 in the world. With the Rookie overlay, I ranked #6 in 4-land, #22 in North America, and #69 in the world. Not bad for only participating in it 12 out of 48 hours.

Fun contest to operate in. Looking forward to trying it out again next year.

CRX1 IF Amp

Made it up to the IF amplifier stage of the CRX1 build. Got a helpful critique of my soldering technique from Thomas/LA3PNA before I started working on it today, so hopefully the parts I did today look a little better. Made it up to the point where T1 gets attached before I decided to call it a day. Figured it was a good stopping point.

Still haven’t applied power yet so I don’t actually know how the assembly is going. I think once I get T1 put on, I’ll work on attaching the header pins so I can attach some of the external components. Then I can run through some of the tests.