Often I receive emails from people asking for the dimensions of the HF2V elements because they want to build one themselves. Well, here are the dimensions for all the coils and capacitors. Good luck with your experiments!
40m
Sparrow Overview
The Spatz (German Spatz) is a small monoband CW transceiver kit designed by DK1HE and distributed in kit form by the German QRP Project. Despite the small size and relative simplicity of the kit, the Spatz is a quite advanced transceiver featuring goodies like DDS with RIT/XIT, 8 pole Cohn Filter with 400Hz bandwith, AGC with high dynamic range, heavy duty PA, built-in keyer and full QSK. The kit can be bought with DDS ready built and tested and is available for the 80, 40, 30, 20 and 17 meter bands.
Pile-Up on Me
Finally, an evening without any significant QRN on 40! I was doing pretty well, working UA9O, UN9, 4L1, when suddenly there started to be a small pile-up on me.
Listen Twice as much as You Speak
I am sure there are many biological reason why a human has two ears and only one mouth. However, some poeple chose to interpret this fact as humans are supposed to listen twice as much then they are speaking.
New Strategy for HF2V Tuning
Tuning the 80 meter coil of the HF2V messed up my settings on 40 and 30 meters in a way that I ended up with barely acceptable SWR on all 3 bands. I definitely needed a new tuning strategy.
Tuning the 40m Coil
With the current settings on 30m (26cm 2.5 turns shorted), fc on 40 shifted to 7.188 MHz – even with 8 turns shorted. Moving the shorting strap to 7 turns, fc shifts to 6.988 MHz. With 7.5 turns shorted fc = 7.039 MHz.
Butternut HF2V for the 160-30 meter bands
After my DX-88 died in a winter storm, I have decided to give the Butternut HF2V a try. This antenna is a 10 meter long vertical for 80 and 40, with extensions available for the 160 and 30 meter bands. I was rather curious about it since this is the only vertical antenna that provides the four lower bands in one package. Moreover, having used the HF6V previously, I had quite high expectations to this one. Although rather expensive, my success with antenna have been very satisfactory so far. As a bonus it even works well on 15 meter band with flat 1.2 SWR between 20-22 MHz.
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…
Resuming the Sparrow
Ok, I don’t know what happened… For some reason, no sparrow progress since Oct last year. Anyway, I am back, and working on the Sparrow again!
More Sparrow Progress
Today I finished section 4 containing the VFO mixer and frequency counter read out. This is also where the ready built DDS comes into the picture.