From breadboard to Perma-Proto board

First I took the little Morse code kit and put it onto a breadboard. Over at adafruit.com, they have these neat Perma-Proto PCBs that are circuit board versions of a breadboard. Makes it easy to transfer something you’ve assembled on a breadboard to something a little more permanent.

I picked up a few a little while ago with the intention of transferring the breadboard version of the  Morse code kit to a Perma-Proto board and finally got around to it this evening.

Morse code practice oscillator
Morse code practice oscillator

A nice relaxing couple of hours spent melting some solder.

Working on 6m

Well, not only does the radio tune the antenna on 6m/50 MHz, but the radio and antenna seem to work pretty decently.

Spent about 3 hours tuning around on 6m in the  Central States VHF Society 6m Sprint contest last night in seek and pounce mode. Tallied up 10 contacts all from grid squares in the northeast plus one in Wisconson. Got some VA3/VE3 stations too. All of them were coming in pretty loud here. I came across several other stations that were just barely audible in the noise. I could hear something there, but not enough to try to work them. Most of the activity I heard was in the lower portion of the 50 MHz band, below 50.3 MHz. I went as high as 50.5 MHz, but didn’t go much higher.

A bit of Googling brought me to this ADIF mapping utility by K2DSL that puts my contacts onto a Google map based on the grid square. It’s kind of neat to see where the signals are coming from.



View Larger Map

I think I’ll add some kind of 6m antenna to the list of Things To Build for the summer. Will be interesting to see if I can make some more distant contacts with a dedicated antenna.

Trying out 6m

Coming up on Saturday is the Central States VHF Society Spring VHF/UHF Sprints. It’s a short 4 hour affair starting at 7PM and ending at 11PM (2300Z-0300Z).

After reading a copy of Six Meters: A Guide to the Magic Band that I found at a used book store, it seemed like it would be a pretty cool band to play on. I usually don’t hear much on 6m during my casual twiddling around on the radio dial. I really don’t know how the antenna performs on 6m aside from the fact that the radio seems to be able to tune it there. Hopefully this will be a chance to find out. Hopefully there will be some good propagation for me on Saturday.

Circuit experiment: Colpitts oscillator

To continue debugging my problems with CC1, I needed a signal source that I could feed into the transciever. Jason/NT7S sketched out a simple crystal based Colpitts oscillator circuit for me to try.

Colpitts oscillator schematic
Colpitts oscillator schematic

Fortunately I was able to find everything I needed in my parts bin to breadboard the circuit. I used a 7.030 MHz crystal and a 10 pF capacitor at the output.

Colpitts oscillator
Colpitts oscillator
Colpitts oscillator
Colpitts oscillator

Will give it another examination tomorrow to make sure I have all the right components and that everything is laid out properly on the breadboard, then give it some power and see if I get anything out of it.