My first kits shipped out Friday (October 4th) with the remaining pre-orders shipping Monday. Kits are still available and will ship 1-2 days after your order is placed. Until then, enjoy the unboxing video!
73, AI6YM
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Credit to Jack Purdum (W8TEE) for introducing me to this ingenious method of winding toroidal inductors.
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I’m still a little ways off from shipping the first kits but my shop is filling up with parts! Nearly all the components for the T41 kits have come in; thousands of capacitors, transistors, voltage regulators, relays, and more. That’s not to mention the packaging materials. Have you ever seen 3,000 zip-top bags in one place?
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Today on Stupid Solutions to Stupid Problems – a postage stamp sized PCB for putting an SMA port on, well, whatever.
Several times on recent projects I’ve had to try to pass RF around between boards that don’t have footprints for coaxial connectors. I’ve tried various methods such as just soldering a bit of micro-coax to the board or using 0.1″ headers but none of them are satisfactory.
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If you’re interested in a kit to build the T41-EP open source transceiver please send me an email (justin@ai6ym.radio). I’ve been unable to find anything in stock for myself so, with the blessing of the creators, I’ll be running a small batch of them.
The T41-EP is an excellent software defined transceiver (SDT) designed by Al Peter (AC8GY) and Dr. Jack Purdum (W8TEE) and published in their book Digital Signal Processing and Software Defined Radio: Theory and Construction of the T41-EP Software Defined Transceiver.
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Somehow I’ve avoided operating on Field Day for the seven years I’ve been licensed. Life always found a way to keep me busy on the fourth full weekend of June. This year I finally made it out, joining PAARA at Bedwell Bayfront Park.
I’ll admit that I skimmed the announcement so I wasn’t expecting super-stations run out of the back of U-Haul vans or to be operating from a part of the park normally inaccessible to vehicles.
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The availability and performance of Software Defined Radios (SDRs) today is incredible. Equally incredible is how poorly us Hams make use of the capabilities at our disposal.
A single HackRF One can simultaneously receive a 20MHz wide slice of spectrum anywhere from 1MHz to 6GHz. That means that a single device can simultaneously receive every amateur band from 20 meters to 10 meters or from 160 meters all the way to 15 meters!
In this post I’ll show you how to receive and decode FT8 on multiple bands simultaneously. These techniques can be expanded to receive WSPR, JT9, and every other digital mode in the received bands. Your CPU is the limit.
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I had a great time on Saturday operating from the P3 Orion preserved at the Moffett Field Museum. In honor of their 91st birthday the museum has opened up their P3 Orion for visitors (and brought out a few other special exhibits I won’t spoil for you). With the help of Mike “The Noisy Kid” Gitschel (K6QFO), CW stations are operating in both the museum and the aircraft.
Read more →Nearly every radio project needs a low pass filter at some point, the QRP-Labs LPF kit is a quick and easy build that can knock out harmonics for nearly any low power HF radio. This is a compact, modular kit implementing a 7-element low pass filter which can handle 10 watts safely. Variants are available for bands from 2200m through 1.25m.
The kit was developed by Hans Summers, G0UPL. With Tor F.I Anderson, SM6FWF, contributing the 2m and 1.25m variants. I’m using these filters as the final filtering stage of a 10-band POTA rig I’m building around the HackRF One.
For details on the kit check out QRP-Labs.com.
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The QRP-Labs Ultimate Relay Switched LPF Kit was developed by Hans Summers, G0UPL, as an extension to the Ultimate 3 and Ultimate 3S transceivers. It allows switching between six different Low Pass Filters (LPFs) and so operating the transceiver on six different bands instead of one.
I’ve used these relay-switched filter boards in several projects now and I’ve been surprised at how easily they can be adapted to uses beyond their design. The build below shows an unconventional use for the kit – switching multiple filter arrays from a single MCU pin. This is a part of a 10-band POTA rig I’m building around the HackRF One.
For details on the kit and more conventional uses of it check out QRP-Labs.com.
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