Ramblings of yet another nerd…
So – after moving, i was presented with a much smaller space to call my shack. Since my wife was working fomr home, we had to build her some office space. We arranged the space as an extra bedroom with walk-in closet. With this arrangement, she was only using the office during the daytime hours. …
Read More Another Shack Reboot
Another “older” project I want to post now, just for others to benefit from my learning experience… For years, I’ve wanted a repeater to tinker with. Back as far as my time in Rolla, I’ve had most of the parts, but have always been short on the final steps. It all started with an interest …
Read More Motorola R100 External Controller Interface
Well, I went on the trip…. and I couldn’t operate a single bit. The noise floor in the hotel was S9+… on ALL HF bands. It appeared to be the AC units in the building. While I have experience helping a friend troubleshoot AC units (“A Tale of Two Air Conditioners”, August 2016 Edition of …
Read More Soundcard Interface – A Different Approach… Part II
I haven’t given up on my custom PCB for a soundcard interface, because it’s a labor of love…. the first board has been populated, but needs some troubleshooting. I suspect the status LEDs are giving me fits. That being said, I had a trip lined up where I thought having a QRP HF setup would …
Read More Soundcard Interface – a different approachjust my experience using the PAT IF buffer from SDR-KITS.COM. power pick off point… 7.8VDC on recieve First IF tap point and coax connection to the PAT board. Note the shield connected to a ring terminal that goes under the closest screw to the IF connection, then the coax connects to the board in a …
Read More Icom 706 mkIIg IF tap
I was headed out to a cub scout campout, and needed an antenna for Jamboree On The Air (JOTA). I needed something flexible, robust, and visible. After digging in the garage a bit, I saw a couple orange extension cords in the corner and had an “aha!” moment. Feeding an extension cord from an autotuner …
Read More From my files: an older kludge… but it works
so…. an interesting development. The regional command vehicle that I help to support has been chasing down some network gremlins ever since it went to a heavily networked configuration. We’ve got 3 large switches – one in the front, one in the middle, and one in the back of the rig. These switches all connect …
Read More Ethernet in an RF Environment
I noted during some experimenting that my plots all seemed to have an upward slope – then I noticed, my Y axis was totally random… strange behavior to say the least. Did some modification to the code (namely calling my RSSI values as floats, i think they were strings originally), and it cleaned up nicely! …
Read More Python Programming… Pt 2
So, this started out as an exercise to see if could get Microsoft Excel (through VBA) to directly talk to my Uniden scanner. I’ve done this in labview quite a bit for a number of reasons. FreeScan is nice, but there’s times I want to be able to do things MY way. After some mucking …
Read More Python – just what i needed, another project
ok – this should be the final post…. I did one more batch of updates… this time I designed for EMI. Not only did I ensure I had full isolation between the radio and computer, I also added some ground plane breaks to control noise. I also did some trace routing to keep signals routed …
Read More Soundcard Interface: Design For EMI