One hell of a weekend June 15, 2009
Posted by N9IK in : Uncategorized , 2commentsMan, it has been a long, long time since I have enjoyed myself as much as I have during this past weekend! All of my boys are home at the same time, and all of them have “their women” with them, along with my two grandchildren. I am usually one of those that has a difficult time dealing with chaos and noise, but I’ve seen a bit of heaven here, with the lasses all vying with the lads for hot water in the showers, and good-natured ribbing about that eternal, incomprehensible, daily ritual of the goddesses called “getting ready”. And then there is the howling and posturing of the young males, each attempting to assert their dominance in the pack – none of them realizing that they lost it long ago, as soon as they were captured by the females. It’s especially poignant when one of the lads does, momentarily realize this, and gets that glazed “deer-in-the-headlights” look that is the best indicator of them having a “huh? Wha’ happened?” moment.
Fortunately, I am a wizened grandfather and well beyond the chest-beating and eyelash-batting so necessary of the younger generations for making their own way in the world. Well… that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Currently listening to: Al Di Meola – Consequence Of Chaos – Turquoise
Change is Gonna Come June 9, 2009
Posted by N9IK in : Uncategorized , add a commentAnother great song from the Playing For Change crew. This one is live, for the first time.
Astronomy Picture of the Day – Solar Cycle December 3, 2007
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Quote for the day November 4, 2007
Posted by N9IK in : Uncategorized , add a comment“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people. The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”
JAMES KATZ, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University.
Nano-Tech: World’s Smallest Radio November 2, 2007
Posted by N9IK in : Uncategorized , add a commentThe following is from a press release from the NSF.
World’s Smallest Radio Fits in the Palm of the Hand . . . of an Ant
Single carbon nanotube is fully functional radio, receiving music over standard radio bandwidth
This image, taken by a transmission electron microscope, shows the carbon-nanotube radio.
Credit and Larger VersionOctober 31, 2007
Harnessing the electrical and mechanical properties of the carbon nanotube, a team of researchers has crafted a working radio from a single fiber of that material.
Fixed between two electrodes, the vibrating tube successfully performed the four critical roles of a radio–antenna, tunable filter, amplifier and demodulator–to tune in a radio signal generated in the room and play it back through an attached speaker.
Functional across a bandwidth widely used for commercial radio, the tiny device could have applications far beyond novelty, from radio-controlled devices that could flow in the human bloodstream to highly efficient, miniscule, cell phone devices.
Developed at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems, a research team led by Alex Zettl of the University of California at Berkeley announced the findings online on Oct. 31, 2007 (http://pubs.acs.org/journals/nalefd/index.html). The findings are scheduled to be printed in Nano Letters in November.
“This breakthrough is a perfect example of how the unique behavior of matter in the nanoworld enables startling new technologies,” says Bruce Kramer, a senior advisor for engineering at NSF and the officer overseeing the center’s work. “The key functions of a radio, the quintessential device that heralded the electronic age, have now been radically miniaturized using the mechanical vibration of a single carbon nanotube.”
The source content for the first laboratory test of the radio was “Layla,” by Derek and the Dominos, followed soon after by “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys.
One of the primary goals for the center is to develop minuscule sensors that can communicate wirelessly, says Zettl. “A key issue is how to integrate individual molecular-scale components together into a system that maintains the nanometer scale. The nanoradio achieves this by having one molecular structure, the nanotube, simultaneously perform all critical functions,” he adds.
The new device works in a manner more similar to the vacuum tubes from the 1930s than the transistors found in modern radios. In the new radio, a single carbon fiber a few hundred nanometers (billionths of a meter) long, and only a few molecules thick, stands glued to a negatively charged base of tungsten that acts as a cathode. Roughly one millionth of a meter directly across from the base lies a positively charged piece of copper that acts as an anode.
Power in the form of streaming electrons travels from an attached battery through the cathode, into the nanotube, and across a vacuum to the anode via a field-emission tunneling process.
“The field emission process could be likened to a runner jumping across a ditch; you only make it across if you have enough speed, i.e. energy, to begin with,” says Zettl. “So electrons jump the physical gap from cathode to anode when you supply enough energy to the device from the battery.”
The stream of electrons along the nanotube changes when a radio wave encoded with information–simply a wave of photons that travels in a controlled manner–washes across the tube and causes it to resonate. This mechanical action is what amplifies and demodulates, or decodes, the radio signal.
Returning to Zettl’s runner analogy, the vibrating nanotube is akin to a ditch with a constantly changing width. Just as the runner’s chances of making the leap depend on how far the gap is, the chances of electrons making the leap depend on the distance of the nanotube tip from the anode.
“This coupling of the mechanical waving motion of the nanotube to the success rate of electrons jumping the gap is key to the functioning of the radio,” says Zettl. “What emerges from the anode is then the information signal, which can be transferred to additional amplifiers and a speaker to reveal the originally encoded music or any other data.”
By permanently lengthening or shortening the nanotube, a modification resulting from sending a short-lived larger-than-normal electrical current through the device, the researchers were able to control the frequency of the radio signal that the device could receive.
The researchers believe it would be easy to produce such nanotube radios for receiving signals in the 40-400 megahertz range, a range within which most FM radio broadcasts fall.
The researchers fine tune the nanoradio to a frequency, akin to a channel, by using the electrostatic field between the cathode and anode to tighten or loosen the nanotube, a process the researchers relate to the tightening or loosening of a string on a guitar. According to Zettl, the sensitivity of the nanotube radio can be enhanced by attaching an external antenna or by using an array of nanotubes that maintain the extremely small size.
While the concept of a miniaturized receiver for picking up broadcast music signals has appeal, the technology has the potential to assist in a range of interesting uses.
Adds Bruce Kramer, “The application of a fully functioning radio receiver less than 50 millionths of an inch in length and one millionth of an inch in diameter potentially allows the radio control of almost anything, from a single receiver in a living cell to a vast array embedded in an airplane wing.”
The lead author on the study was graduate student Kenny Jensen from Zettl’s research group and he was joined on the paper by postdoctoral researcher Jeff Weldon and graduate student Henry Garcia, also members of the Zettl group at the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In addition to support from NSF, the work also received funding from the Department of Energy. The research was supported through NSF award number EEC-0425914.
Additional information about the nanoradio can be found at: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~argon/nanoradio/radio.html
-NSF-
Thank you, Capt. Scott Hedberg, AD7MI/YI9MI August 8, 2007
Posted by N9IK in : Uncategorized , add a commentChecking my email this morning, I was quite surprised to see an email from someone that I don’t know, and not SPAM; this doesn’t happen often, but it’s kind of fun. Anyway, the note was from Capt. Scott Hedberg, AD7MI/YI9MI. Scott – I’ll take the liberty of calling him by his first name – is currently stationed in Iraq. Here is his note (hope you don’t mind Scott!):
Thor,
I’ve been reading your blog – I really enjoy your postings. Although my present duty station hasn’t allowed me to operate for a while, I’m able to stay engaged in amateur radio due to great blogs like yours.
Please keep up the good work!
73 Scott AD7MI/YI9MI
Taji, Iraq
US Army
Double surprise. My blogs (this one and “mind? what mind?“) were created strictly for personal consumption, and possibly my families’ – my mother, for example, is a ham, KE7CM/1 – and I never expected that anyone would bother reading them.
Looking Scott up on QRZcom, I see that his home QTH is Hampton, VA, and I followed the link to his blog site, AD7MI – spinning & grinning. His blog is well put together and interesting, worth taking a look at.
So, thank you, Capt. Scott Hedberg, for reading this blog and for your very kind comment. It’s in my prayers that you and all of your men and women serve out your tours and make it home safely.
73 Scott.
Do you REALLY need email? July 16, 2007
Posted by N9IK in : Uncategorized , add a commentThis story makes you think. At one time I had six different email addresses; was I crazy? Yes. It was nearly impossible to keep track of them all. Even today I have four, although one of them was created by default at at my ISP, Comcast, and one was created at Yahoo, although I never use either one other than for an occasional test. My other two — one is my primary email accout and one I use for ham radio related “stuff”.
Do you REALLY need email??
No Email?????? ……….. An unemployed man is desperate to support his family of a wife and three kids. He applies for a janitor’s job at a large firm and easily passes an aptitude test.
The human resources manager tells him, “You will be hired at minimum wage of $5.35 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address so that we can get you in the loop. Our system will automatically e-mail you all the forms and advise you when to start and where to report on your first day.”
Taken back, the man protests that he is poor and has neither a Computer nor an e-mail address. To this the manager replies, “You must understand that to a company like ours that means that you virtually do not exist. Without an e-mail address you can hardly expect to be employed by a high-tech firm. Good day.”
Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and having $10 in his wallet, he walks past a farmer’s market and sees a stand selling 25 lb. crates of beautiful red tomatoes. He buys a crate, carries it to a busy corner and displays the tomatoes. In less than 2 hours he sells all the tomatoes and makes 100% profit.
Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 and arrives home that night with several bags of groceries for his family. During the night he decides to repeat the tomato business the next day.
By the end of the week he is getting up early every day and working into the night. He multiplies his profits quickly.
Early in the second week he acquires a cart to transport several boxes of tomatoes at a time, but before a month is up he sells the cart to buy a broken-down pickup truck.
At the end of a year he owns three old trucks. His two sons have left their neighborhood gangs to help him with the tomato business, his wife is buying the tomatoes, and his daughter is taking night courses at the community college so she can keep books for him.
By the end of the second year he has a dozen very nice used trucks and employs fifteen previously unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. He continues to work hard.
Time passes and at the end of the fifth year he owns a fleet of nice trucks and a warehouse that his wife supervises, plus two tomato farms that the boys manage.
The tomato company’s payroll has put hundreds of homeless and jobless people to work. His daughter reports that the business grossed a million dollars.
Planning for the future, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. Then the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order to send the final documents electronically.
When the man replies that he doesn’t have time to mess with a computer and has no e-mail address, the insurance man is stunned, “What, you don’t have e-mail? No computer! No Internet! Just think where you would be today if you’d had all of that five years ago!”
” Ha!” snorts the man. “If I’d had e-mail five years ago I would be sweeping floors at Microsoft and making $5.35 an hour.”
Author Unknown
Past Projects July 11, 2007
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K1 Transceiver kit #1065 with all the options (except the back-light mod, which was not then available). (note: the image to the right is not of my radio, but taken from Elecraft web site. I do not have an image of my own radio with the KTS1. All other K1 images are my own.)
- K1-4 Four-Band 5W CW Xcvr
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- Includes: 40, 30, 20 and 17 or 15M (chosen at build time)
- KAT1 Internal ATU for the K1
- KNB1 Noise Blanker
- KBT1 Internal Battery Adapter
- KTS1 Wide Range Tilt Stand
This was a great kit for a first time builder like me. It was a lot of fun putting it together, was not too difficult, and did not require any expensive test equipment to get it ready for on-the-air use. I am not much of a CW operator, in spite of having an “Extra” license, but I did have fun with it, and made contacts ranging from almost next door to Europe and Russia. Now I regret selling it.
I can’t say enough about the kits produced by Elecraft – in fact, I can probably boil it down to one word WOW! I couldn’t do justice to the K1 kit. All I can say is that the kit is extremely professionally designed, the packaging well thought out, the assembly process documentation very professional and easy to follow. All in all, building this kit was extremely fun, and at the end of the project having a radio that meets or exceeds the quality and specifications of some of the equivalent mass-market radios is extremely satisfying!
Here are a couple of pictures taken after the basic radio was completed. After these first two pictures were taken, I completed and installed all of the options – the noise blanker, antenna tuner, and internal battery options.
PK-3 Memory Keyer
This was a kit from Jackson Harbor Press and sold by Morse Express. This was the first project I did, partly because I needed a keyer to use with one of my radios – the Kenwood TS-130s HF radio, and partly as a quick warm up before the Elecraft K1 arrived. It only took a couple hours to build, and it took that long only because I was savoring the experience. Here are some pictures I took while building it.
The PK-3 is a Morse code iambic keyer which offers:
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pot or paddle speed control, 5 to 39 WPM
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one 57, one 52 character memories and a callsign memory
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OR optionally one 57, two 26 and one 10 character memories
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pin compatible with Tick or K8 keyer chips
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ALSO, fully pin compatible with the PK-2 keyer
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mode A or B Iambic keying
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beacon mode, variable delay, up to 60 seconds
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one touch CQ using callsign memory
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embedded and manual pause of memory play
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machine pin socket for keyer chip included with kit
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speed readout – sends code speed via the sidetone
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optional autospace, paddle reverse and many other features
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low standby power (about 7 ua at 5 V, with regulator)
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low active power (1.5 ma max. at 5 V, with regulator)
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small size (1 by 1.5 inches)
The PK-3 has now been superceded by the PK-4.
FOXX-3 (No longer available)
The FOXX-3 from Kanga is also a single-band, QRPp radio – I’m building this one for 20-meters. As you can see from the picture, the PCB for the FOXX-3 is designed to fit perfectly inside an Altoids tin.
The FOXX-3 kit was very complete, the only pieces I needed to supply are a battery and and Altoids tin. The instructions were very complete, taking the builder through five separate stages – the Audio Amplifier, the Keying Circuit, the Sidetone Circuit, the Crystal Oscillator and finally, the Power Amplifier and Filter. The completion of each phase of building is marked with a test of that phase. If something doesn’t work, you find out and fix it before you go on to the next phase.
I’ve completed the FOXX-3, but I haven’t permanently mounted the radio in its enclosure yet (of course it’s going into an Altoids tin!), and I’m still testing it. I have not made any contacts with it yet; it’s more sensitive to interference from broadcast radio than I expected, although I was warned. I will have to come up with an appropriate filter. I think it is not quite working the way it is meant to; I can not adjust the Rx offset control very much – it needs to stay at nearly the full clockwise position.
Az ScQRPions Stinger Singer (No longer available)
The Stinger Singer is a CW audible frequency counter – in other words, it reads an RF signal fed into it, reads the frequency and instead of displaying on a meter or LCD, it sounds out the frequency in morse code. Very small (fits in the requisite Altoids Tin with a 9-v battery and room to spare) and light – perfect for the QRPer.
I ordered the kit from Bob, NK7M, and got the kit in the mail in just a few days. When I received it in the mail last week and opened up the padded envelope that it came in, I found a couple pieces floating loose. When it was packed originally, all of the parts were in a small zip-lock type bag, but the zip wasn’t locked! I didn’t do an inventory then like I know I should have, so when I went to build the Stinger, I found one of the capacitors missing. Shucks.
This is the board nearly complete – only the IC’s need to be plugged into the sockets and the board mounted in the Altoids tin.
The audio is pretty cool – the piezo is the silver disk you see in the picture. The piezo gets glued flat to the top of the tin’s cover, and the entire Altoids Tin becomes the resonant chamber for the speaker.
Final pictures of my Singer Stinger in it’s Altoids Tin will be coming soon – as soon as I clean some space in the garage and find my drill, that is. Instead, here’s a copy of what the final product will look like (picture copied from NK7M’s Az ScQRPions Stinger Singer data page.
VE3DNL Marker Generator
This is a small kit put out by the Fort Smith QRP Group. Now available from the NorCalQRP Club. The design originally came from Glen Leinweber, VE3DNL, who posted a simple circuit diagram for a crystal controlled marker generator on the QRP-L forum. The kit I’m putting together is a slightly updated version.
Since a marker generator puts out a signal at known frequencies, or “markers”, they can be used as a signal source to align newly built receivers and transmitters, dial calibration, etc. A handy tool to have around.
I’ve decided to put a switch on it to switch between it’s frequency options – 5K, 10K, 20K and 40 kilohertz. I’ll probably need a slightly larger enclosure that I originally thought about. I originally thought I’d use a small pill bottle – I have one that the PCB will fit into, along with a 9-volt battery. I’ll have to see how much space will be needed when I add the switch.
Sprat January 12, 2006
Posted by N9IK in : Uncategorized , add a commentI received my current issue of Sprat in yesterday’s mail. As always there is some good reading and some interesting projects to try.
Regrets November 7, 2005
Posted by N9IK in : Uncategorized , add a commentThese days I’m regreting selling the Elecraft K-1 radio that I built from a kit. The K-1 is a fun qrp cw radio, covering 20, 30, 15, and 10 meters. I’ll have to save my pennies to order another kit to build.