Category: Hobbies

Things I do for fun

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More workbench gear and parts

Thanks to Jason/NT7S for enabling my growing homebrew electronics ambitions. I now have a bunch of stuff to add to the workbench.

There’s this big bag-o-parts to augment the parts bin. It’s filled with resitsors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, inductors, ICs and crystals.

A bag of capacitors, resistors, diodes, transistors, inductors, crystals, and integrated circuits

He also sent along a first version of his HF return-loss bridge kit and an M3 frequency counter/power meter for the workbench. With the return-loss bridge, frequency counter/power meter, a signal generator and oscilloscope, Jason tells me I’ll be able to make all kinds of measurements for testing and characterizing circuits. I guess I’ll need to spend some more time with the Heathkit signal generator to see how operational it is. I’ll also need to pick up some BNC connectors and jumper cables.

Jason also recently acquired a couple of TI Tiva Launchpad boards, so I got his surplus TI Stellaris LM4F120 and MSP430 boards to play with. Not quite sure what I’ll do with them yet, but maybe they’ll push me to brush the cobwebs off the C I’ve learned.

I also received most of the components I’ll need to build some version of a sound card interface that I can use to connect to the radio for using digital radio modes. I think I’m going to have fun working on that project.

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Wedding special event station

As part of the wedding festivities, Connie and I decided it would be fun to get on the radio for a special event the morning of wedding day (July 19).

We don’t have a special event call sign and are just going to operate on the radio using our regular call signs (AB4UG and NR4CB).

We’re only going to be on the radio for a couple hours (band and frequency pending, but anywhere between 40m to 6m but not 30m) from 11AM-1PM EDT (1500-1700 UTC). We’ll be self-spotting ourselves on Twitter, so follow me (@imabug) or Connie (@NR4CB) to find us. We’ll also use the #CQMahWedding and #WATwitter hash tags. We’ll stay in the general portion of 40m-12m and in the tech portion of the 10m band so that everybody will be able to join in the fun. If you’re near the radio, tune in and work us!

We’ll also make some QSL cards using some of the wedding photos so if you’d like to get one, send us a card.

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Barcamp session idea

There’s an idea for a BarcampCHS session brewing in my head. Something along the lines of open source software and amateur radio. There’s a fair bit of it out there, most of which is something I’m interested in learning more about (like GNURadio). What better way to make yourself learn about something than to try to give a presentation on it, right?

The idea isn’t very well formed yet and may or may not happen, but it’s there. I’ve got until November to figure it out. Plenty of time, right?

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From breadboard to Perma-Proto board

First I took the little Morse code kit and put it onto a breadboard. Over at adafruit.com, they have these neat Perma-Proto PCBs that are circuit board versions of a breadboard. Makes it easy to transfer something you’ve assembled on a breadboard to something a little more permanent.

I picked up a few a little while ago with the intention of transferring the breadboard version of the Morse code kit to a Perma-Proto board and finally got around to it this evening.

DSC00703.JPG

DSC00704.JPG

It turned out pretty compact and can be powered by a 9V battery, or three CR2032 button cells (shown). The clicky button still isn’t great for tapping out Morse code, but it mostly works.

A nice relaxing couple of hours spent melting some solder.

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Circuit experiment: Colpitts oscillator

To continue debugging my problems with CC1, I needed a signal source that I could feed into the transciever. Jason/NT7S sketched out a simple crystal based Colpitts oscillator circuit for me to try.

Schematic of a Colpitts oscillator

Fortunately I was able to find everything I needed in my parts bin to breadboard the circuit. I used a 7.030 MHz crystal and a 10 pF capacitor at the output.

Colpitts oscillator laid out on a breadboard
Colpitts oscillator laid out on a breadboard

Will give it another examination tomorrow to make sure I have all the right components and that everything is laid out properly on the breadboard, then give it some power and see if I get anything out of it.