Last summer at one of the radio club meetings, one of the older hams brought in a small stack of QST magazines that he didn’t want any more and asked if I’d be interested in them. Being newly licensed, I said sure!
I’ve gone through them a few times now, and with Connie’s collection of QST, these are duplicates now so I thought I’d pass them along to someone else to enjoy.
There aren’t a whole lot of them. I have Oct 2011-Feb 2012 and April-May 2012. Would prefer to hand them off to someone local, but I’d also consider shipping them.
At long last I’ve finally gotten around to putting the coax and interface cord on the Softrock Lite II receiver. The cord to plug into the sound card came from some old discarded speakers, and the coax is a short length of RG58 with an SMA connector that I picked up a while ago. I was originally going to use it for an antenna project for the VX8-DR, but figured I could always get another one later.
Now I just need to find some time to get it on the air. If I want to use the antenna, I’ll have to find an SMA (female) to SO-239 adapter, or make some jumper wires to connect the ends.
My ARRL VE (Volunteer Examiner) credentials arrived in the mail today! Got a nice certificate to hang on the wall and a laminated card to wear at testing sessions. Now I can help out at testing sessions and help certify new hams.
Now that I’ve finally got my scanner to work under Fedora, I thought I’d use the opportunity to scan the manuals I got with the Heathkit IG-102 signal generator I picked up a while ago. I was also lucky enough to find an assembly manual on eBay for the HD-10 keyer I picked up at Hamcation so I scanned that as well and converted them both to PDF files.
There’s another manual for the IG-102 that’s quite a bit larger (168 pages) that will take me a while to scan and convert, but I’ll get that done eventually.
Day 2 at Orlando Hamcation was spent looking for antenna things and CW keys. Lots more people at Hamcation today than there were yesterday, which was expected. After wandering around to the different tables in the swaps area and wandering around the bone yard, I had a better idea of what I wanted to get.
Picked up some stranded copper wire, coax and ladder line for antenna projects, and then it was out to the swaps building.
First acquisition was this J-38 straight key. It’s a little dusty, the flat knob is a bit chipped and the shorting switch is missing, but it had the best action of the other J-38 keys the guy was selling. It needs some cleaning, but I’m looking forward to learning more about this style of key and wiring up to play with.
Wandering around the bone yard, I came across a few other things that I thought would be nice to have. One of the benefits of cruising through the bone yard towards the end of the day is that people are looking to get rid of their stuff (so they don’t have to haul it back), so sometimes pretty good deals can be had. The flip side is that by then, most of the good stuff is probably gone.
A breadboard, some 7 segment LED modules and some kind of metering panel that I’ll use for parts.
The next acquisition was this Heathkit HD-10 keyer. The guy selling it had it in his shack gathering dust for years and wasn’t getting too many bites at the price he was initially looking for, so I managed to pick it up for a great price. Plugged it in and it works pretty well.
Toward the end of my bone yard wanderings I spotted these variable plate capacitors on the table and scored them for $2. Some of them are a bit oxidized and need a bit of TLC, but I think I’ll be able to put them to work doing something.
