When I got up this morning I turned on the FT-817 with the Miracle Whip mounted on its back. There were a lot of strong stations calling CQ TEST. I didn’t quite know what kind of contest it was but a quick check on the net revealed that it was nothing less than CQ WW DX 2005.
Sparrow RX/TX Tests
Yesterday I finished the IF section and the TX mixer. Today I finished the last two sections, namely the TX driver and power amplifier. There were a few dificculties along the way…
MP-1 Overview
The MP-1 is a small, light-weight vertical antenna intended for portable use. The antenna consists of a base rod, a tuning coil and a telescopic whip. The coil is used for band change, while the telescopic whip can be used to fine tune the SWR on the desired frequency.
IC-765 Tuner Problems
When I was testing my newly acquired IC-765 last Christmas, I had some troubles with the built-in antenna tuner. From time to time, it would start re-tuning the antenna in the beginnig or even the middle of my transmissions.
Elevated MP-1 Antenna
I took a long weekend from 28. Oct to 1. Nov. The plan was to drive from Paris to Denmark by car and take some of my stuff home as part of my moving back to DK. I left Les Mureaux on the 28. around 1000 local time and I actually arrived in JO45 after 14 hours. Not bad on a friday.
Elecraft T1 Automatic Antenna Tuner
The Elecraft T1 is a stand-alone, miniature antenna tuner unit specially designed for use with low-power HF/6m transceivers. Despite its small size, it uses a built in 9V battery, provides a wide matching range and can handle powers up to 20 watts SSB/CW or 10 watts in FM/AM/digi. It is a very cool general-purpose ATU for mobile and portable use. The T1 is available either ready built or as a kit.
Gpredict Preferences Dialog
In the mean time I have done quite a lot of design work on the preferences dialog. I think I have arrived at a rather nice modular layout, whith which I will be able to present many settings without being too overwhelming.
Sparrow DDS
Tonight I have rigged the Sparrow DDS together to see what comes out of it. First, I hooked it up to a counter and could measure a coverage from 7.995 MHz to 8.105 MHz coresponding to 100 kHz coverage on the 40 meter band.
Locations Tree
Most of the time here in the begining of the gpredict for Gtk+ 2 development process will go with writing all sorts of small utility widgets, which can be re-used several places in the program.
FT-817 Remote Cable for the T1
Tonight I have tried to use the FT-817 remote cable that I bought together with the T1. First, I wanted to find the leaked RF info signals sent by the T1. According to the manual, there should be at least one signal on every ham band and I found one around 7024 kHz.