I collected my old component rack from my mum’s loft a couple of weeks ago and in one of the drawers I found two pieces of breadboard with the same thing built on each of them. I built these when I was in my early teens and that’s quite obvious from the quality of the […]
Category: Construction
MKARS80 – Everything from bag two is fitted
The MKARS80 kit comes with all the parts in a number of bags, the previous blog post about it was when I’d completed bag number one and now spent some time fitting all the components from bag number two. I think it’s starting to look quite good.
MKARS80 – All the resistors are in
Inspired by listening to a couple of episodes of the Soldersmoke podcast, specifically Soldersmoke #130 I decided to ‘melt some solder’ this evening and pulled my MKARS80 kit back off of the shelf. I was given this as a Christmas present and all I’d done with it was to fit a handful of resistors. Tonight […]
Radio improvements – Tweaking things to make them better
I like things to work well. I like to tweak the best possible performance out of equipment and as such I’ll look into what I can do to make things better and do it. I’m not counting my current HF aerial in this as that was just thrown up at the spur of the moment […]
Days 35, 36 and 37 – A great ‘radio’ weekend
Day #35 was Friday and after work I had a quick word with Andy, IZ1MHQ on 40m. Later that evening I had a tune around on 80m and heard a really strong signal coming from HE3OM in Switzerland. It was a club station and I worked them and discovered that they were operating from Sottens […]
QRSS for the third time
As mentioned over the last two days, the G0PKT QRSS transmitter has now been spotted by a number of ‘grabbers’ around the world, the furthest away being just over 1400 miles away in Russia. Not bad for a transmitter and aerial that cost less than £20 to put together and runs around 150mW output. As […]
QRSS, woo!
I arrived at work this morning to an email from Mauro, IK1WVQ to tell me that he’d spotted the G0PKT QRSS beacon on 30m. This is the first time we’ve had a reported signal and looking at the trace he sent me, the signal really was quite strong. It stayed with him for a large […]
Day 9 – Namibia!
I won’t normally blog twice a day and I generally won’t blog on the same day as I had the QSOs but as I’m not going to be on the wireless again today I thought I may as well post. I’ve had three QSOs today, the first was on 7MHz where I worked IK4HLQ, Joe […]
Christmas!
Yes, it’s Christmas, no, I’ve not had much chance to do anything really on the wireless. I worked a couple of stations last week but nothing really of note and I’ve just had a nice couple of hours in the second of the RSGB Christmas Cumulatives. I’ll have another go tomorrow and then I’m back […]
10MHz QRSS Transmitter kit
I mentioned yesterday that I’d been building a QRP Labs 30m QRSS transmitter so I thought I’d go into a bit more detail here. QRS is accepted as the Q-code for ‘please send slower; in Morse and QRSS is a derivative of that in that it means ‘send extremely slowly’. Very slow Morse code is […]
