Category: Amateur Radio

Amateur radio posts

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Almost ready for the shack

The gadget panel is back on the desk with the components rearranged slightly to make things work better for the desk’s new location

Ended up having to take the power squid off the panel because the cord wasn’t long enough to reach the wall, so now everything is plugged into the UPS. Except for the computer and monitors, I think most everything else is a relatively low current load so I don’t think I’ll be overloading the UPS (I hope).

Now to clean up the space where the shack will go and start preparing to set up the radio.

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An OpenBeacon to play with

Thanks to Matthew/W2MDW, I now have an Etherkit OpenBeacon to play with.

Etherkit OpenBeacon

It’s a kit that I’ve been thinking of getting to play with in the near future. The one Matthew sent me was one of the early beta models and has had some modifications done to it, but it works. He didn’t have much time to mess with it anymore and thought I could put it to good use.

I’ll need to get an antenna for it and figure out how to program it, but it shouldn’t be hard to get on the air.

It looks like a pretty easy kit to build, so I’ll probably pick up one of my own to assemble and get up and running. Looking forward to getting this one going and seeing who picks up the signal.

I wonder how hard it would be to modify to broadcast on 6m.

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Antenna bits

The coax and ZS6BKW antenna are both here!

It probably won’t be until after Christmas before I can get everything up and running though. Still need to finish getting the office and the computer back into shape, then make room to set up the radio (which mostly involves finding enough flat surface space for everything). Then I’ll invite some friends over for an “antenna raising” and see about getting the shack operational.

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QSL card v0.2/v0.3

Rearranged the elements and made it a one-sided card with address information going on the other side.

Version 0.3 adds some captions to the two radiographs. I think I like this better.