Ramblings of yet another nerd…
Radio, Electronics, Programming, and other technology related items
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
Over the past couple weeks, I have been tinkering more with the soundcard interface. I started using FreePCB (http://www.freepcb.com/) – which is a VERY nice PCB drawing program with gerber file output, and, well, i couldn’t complain about the price! Once I got the “as built” drawing done, I ended up ordering a set of …
Read More USB Soundcard Interface… update 4Yesterday I posted the project… now I’ve made some updates…. a few minor things, and one major thing. First, the minor things- I made the schematic a bit cleaner, and got it down to a single page. I also cleaned up aa few traces and some other minor formatting things. I improved the power supply …
Read More USB Soundcard interface…. version 3 – Update