Orlando Hamcation 2023

This year’s edition of Hamcation was pretty good. Definitely seemed more crowded this year than last year, which was good to see. By the time I got there on the first day (about 20 minutes before the gates opened) the parking field was pretty much full. On the second day, they were sending people over to the overflow parking area by the time I got there when it opened.

Didn’t find quite as many things to purchase this year as I found last year, but did pick up a few nice things.

Begali had a table with a bunch of their keys and paddles on display. It was a very popular booth with lots of people stopping by to check things out and send out some Morse code. After stopping by the table a few times to play with the paddles, I decided on the last day of Hamcation to pick up one of their Camelback straight keys.

Begali Camelback straight key

It’s a very nice straight key with a nice responsive action and a solid heavy base that’s not moving anywhere when I’m keying. Very happy with it. Just need to wire it up with a suitable cable now.

Out in the flea market/boneyard area, there were quite a few people with tables set out. Seemed like not quite as many as last year though.

An interesting item I found out in the boneyard was this board with an LCD display on it.

Gabotronics Xminilab oscilloscope module

At first I thought it was just an LCD display module, so I bought it along with a couple ESP32 boards and a book for a few dollars. When I had a chance to take a closer look at it, I discovered that it wasn’t a display module at all, but a tiny little oscilloscope! Should be fun to get it running and see what it can do.

For the workbench, I found this arbitrary signal generator. I’ve been wanting to have one for the workbench for a while. Haven’t tried plugging it in and turning it on yet, so it might be a great addition, or it might become a project.

Pragmatic 2416A arbitrary waveform generator

Looking forward to playing with my new acquisitions when I have some spare time.

The Radio Handbook

Another radio handbook has joined the collection, but not an ARRL handbook this time.

This one comes to me courtesy of a local ham friend who’s been downsizing a bit. A very nice gesture for which I’m very grateful.

The Radio Handbook (14th ed), edited by William Orr/W6SAI and published in 1956 by Editors and Engineers Ltd. It’s a well used copy and the spine is not in the greatest shape. It’s come unglued from the book and is quite literally hanging on by the threads of the cloth covering. I’ll have to see if I can do something about that. The rest of the book seems in reasonable shape for a 66 year old book.

Front cover of the 14th edition Radio Handbook edited by William Orr, W6SAI
Front cover of the 14th edition Radio Handbook edited by William Orr, W6SAI
Title page of the W6SAI Radio Handbook
Title page of the W6SAI Radio Handbook
Copyright page of the W6SAI Radio Handbook. The 14th edition is dated 1956.
Copyright page of the W6SAI Radio Handbook. The 14th edition is dated 1956.
Spine of the W6SAI handbook. The spine is well worn, blotchy and faded, not in the greatest shape, and needs to be reattached to the binding.
Spine of the W6SAI handbook. The spine is well worn, blotchy and faded, not in the greatest shape, and needs to be reattached to the binding.
The Radio Handbook, William Orr/W6SAI ed.

I haven’t gone through a lot of the book yet but based on the table of contents, it seems to cover many of the same topics the ARRL handbooks cover.

First page of the table of contents for the W6SAI Radio Handbook.
First page of the table of contents for the W6SAI Radio Handbook.
Figure of common crystal cuts from the W6SAI Radio Handbook
Figure of common crystal cuts from the W6SAI Radio Handbook
Radio mathematics and calculations chapter from the W6SAI Radio Handbook
Radio mathematics and calculations chapter from the W6SAI Radio Handbook
A few pages from the W6SAI Radio handbook

It might be an interesting and fun exercise to compare this edition of the Radio Handbook with the 1956 ARRL Handbook.

A 1985 ARRL Handbook

In this year’s ARRL Auction, I managed to score a 1985 ARRL Handbook to add to the collection.

Front cover of the 1985 ARRL Handbook

It’s in pretty decent condition, although the binding is broken in about the middle of the handbook. Going to have to see if there’s a good way to patch or fix that.

This handbook probably would have first gone on sale in late 1984, so I would have been in the middle of my first year of high school when this handbook came out. Even as late as 1985, there’s still a pretty big section devoted to vacuum tubes and vacuum tube gear. Aside from an old broken radio that was in our basement, I don’t think I had encountered any electronics that used vacuum tubes back then (well, televisions perhaps, but those are a different kind of vacuum tube).

The table of contents covers radio topics you might expect for radio technology from 37 years ago.

1985 ARRL Handbook table of contents

Interestingly enough, there seems to be more on vacuum tubes in the 1985 Handbook than there is in the 1980 Handbook. At some point between the 1980 and 1985 Handbooks, the Handbooks gained a considerable amount of weightpages.

Size comparison between the 1980 and 1985 ARRL Handbooks

Might be interesting to go through the two and see what kind of content got expanded on with all the added pages.

Tuning up the Heathkit IG-102

After spending some time figuring out how to use the Digilent Analog Discovery 2 USB oscilloscope I picked up at Hamcation earlier this year, I was able to use it to look at the output from the Heathkit IG-102 signal generator.

The Digilent AD2 is pretty cool. The software lets you use the AD2 as an oscilloscope, signal generator, spectrum analyzer, and several other things.

Using the spectrum analyzer function made it pretty easy to set the IG-102 to a frequency, see what the actual frequency was, and then tweak the variable inductor coil for each band setting to tune the output to the dial setting.

The output of the IG-102 is pretty low though, less then 0.3 V peak-to-peak. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be that low, but I expected it would be in the 3-5V range.

Well, at least it outputs something that’s reasonably well calibrated now. I suppose if I had to, I could build an amplifier to feed the signal into. I’ll see if there’s anything else I can do to get the signal amplitude up to where it seems like it should be. Maybe the IG-102 needs the tubes replaced as well.

Hammarlund HQ-100: Replacing more tubes

The HQ-100 manual conveniently provides a table of the voltages you should be seeing at the tube pins. After replacing three of the tubes in the HQ-100, I went through and checked all the tube pin voltages and ended up replacing two more tubes (the 6BE6 and 6AL5 tubes). I didn’t have a spare 6AL5 tube on hand, but I discovered the VoltOhmyst VOM I acquired a while back also happened to use a 6AL5 tube. After pulling it out of the VoltOhmyst and putting it into the HQ-100, all the voltages at the tube pins matched the voltages in the table.

Unfortunately, I’m still not hearing any static or audio from the radio, so there’s more work to be done. The realignment procedure described in the manual calls for a 455 kHz signal source, so the next task will be to get one set up.

Update 02-Apr-2023: Since I had them on hand, I replaced the 6C4, 6BZ6, OB2, and 5Y3GT tubes. Now the only tube that hasn’t been replaced is the 6AQ5.

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