Collaborate Disseminate
When [Pete Juliano] sat down to design a sideband transceiver for the 20 Meter (14 MHz) ham radio band, he eschewed the popular circuits that make up so many designs. …read more Continue reading PSSST! Here’s A Novel SSB Radio Design With Only Seven Transistors
Artificially constrained designs can be among the most challenging projects to build, and the most interesting to consider. The amateur radio world is no stranger to this, with homebrew radio designs that set some sort of line in the sand. …read more
Continue reading Getting On the Air With a 10-Minute-ish Ham Transmitter
The humble ATmega328 microcontroller, usually packaged as an Arduino Uno, is the gateway drug for millions of people into the world of electronics and embedded programming. Some people just can’t pass up the challenge of seeing how far they can push the old workhorse, and it looks like [Guido PE1NNZ] …read more
Join us on Wednesday, March 18 at noon Pacific for the Amateur Radio Homebrewing Hack Chat with Charlie Morris!
For many hams, the most enticing part of amateur radio is homebrewing. There’s a certain cachet to holding a license that not only allows you to use the public airwaves, but …read more
We’ve frequently talked about amateur radio on these pages, both in terms of the breadth of the hobby and the surprisingly low barrier to entry. It’s certainly the case that amateur radio does not have to mean endlessly calling CQ on SSB with an eye-wateringly expensive rig, and [Bill Meara …read more
Sometimes the best projects are the simple, quick hits. Easily designed, fast to build, and bonus points for working right the first time. Such projects very often lead to bigger and better things, which appears to be where this low-power temperature beacon is heading.
In the world of ham radio, beacon stations are transmitters that generally operate unattended from a known location, usually at limited power (QRP). Intended for use by other hams to determine propagation conditions, most beacons just transmit the operator’s call sign, sometimes at varying power levels. Any ham that can receive the signal will know there’s …read more
Continue reading Temperature Sensor and Simple Oscillator Make a Value-Added HF Beacon
QRP radio operators try to get maximum range out of minimal power. This term comes from the QRP Q-code, which means “reduce power.” For years, people have built some very low-cost radios for this purpose. Perhaps the best known QRP kit is the Pixie, which can be found for less than $3 on eBay.
The QRX is a new DIY QRP radio kit from QRP Labs. Unlike the Pixie, it has a long list of features. The QRX operates on the 80, 60, 40, 30, 20, or 17 meter bands at up to 5W output power. The display provides tuning …read more
There are a variety of techniques employed by electronic constructors seeking the convenience of a printed circuit board without the inconvenience of making a printed circuit board. Dead bug style construction in which the components float on a spiders-web of soldered leads above a ground plane is one, Manhattan style construction in which pads made from small cut squares of bare copper-clad PCB are glued on top of a groundplane is another.
[Freestate QRP] has another take on this type of electronics, with what he calls “Scribble style” construction. He cuts away copper from bare board to create pads and …read more
Continue reading Scribble Your Way To Quick Printed Circuit Boards
[Pete Juliano, N6QW] built a 20 M QRP CW transmitter using just a handful of parts. That in itself will not raise any eyebrows, until you find that he built it using one of the very first RF transistors manufactured all the way back in 1955. That’s from before the time most of us were born and not many years after the invention of the transistor in late 1947.
QRP in HAM-speak technically stands for a request to “reduce power” or an offer of “should I reduce power” when appended with a question mark. A QRP transmitter is designed to …read more
When you get to a certain age, you get unsettled by people calling “your” music oldies. That’s how a few of us felt when we saw [Mikrowave1’s] video about Retro QRP – Solid Gold Years (see below). “QRP” is the ham radio term for low power operation, and the “solid gold” years in question are the 1960s to 1980. The videox has some good stuff, including some old books and some analysis of a popular one-transistor design from that time. He even tries a few different period transistors to see which works best.
[Mikrowave1] talks about the construction techniques used …read more
