Category: Hobbies

Things I do for fun

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QST magazines available

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.

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Softrock Lite II ready to put on the air

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.

Softrock Lite II ready to get on the air

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.

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I’m a VE!

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.

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Scanning manuals

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.

Heathkit IG-102 manual cover
Heathkit HD-10 manual cover


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7 segment LED adventures

One of the items I picked up in the tailgating/bone yard area of Hamcation was this bag of 7 segment LEDs. Out of the 10 in the bag, 8 of them are marked CSS-3115RJ, one is marked MTN1130-ASR and the other is marked MTN1130-CSR. 

7 segment LED modules
7 segment LED modules
Side view of some 7 segment LED modules

A bit of Google-ing turned up data sheets for the MTN1130 modules, but very little on the CSS-3115RJ modules. Of the three types, it appears that only the MTN113-ASR is the odd ball.

Adafruit has a great tutorial when it comes to learning about LEDs and how to use them in circuits. I’ve got power supplies that will give me 3.3, 5 and 12V. Will work out the resistor values to use for these modules at those voltages, then have a bit of fun testing them out and making the segments light up (I hope). Then I’ll have to find something that I can use to control them and make them display something useful.