Techie bits, the back to front bit...

I'm sat here with a pile of bits and a spaghetti mess of wires which is the partially developed radio interface.

This mess, above, is a working USB-CI-V, PTT and sound card interface.

Which connects to:

The audio isolator and PTT Isolator board
All connected to this, my IC-718.

So the big question, does it work?
I'd say that's a yes.
Heard 5051 kilometres away !

Colour me impressed but that's with 5 Watts into a random length of wire, roughly 15 metres in length and tuned by the AT-130.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Free GPS and a Merry Christmas

Image
 Season's greetings to one and all. I've been fascinated with GPS and GNSS in general for quite some time now, it feels rather miraculous that, for only a few pounds, I can buy a module not much larger than my thumb that will reliably provide my position anywhere on the planet to within a few metres by receiving signals from flying atomic clocks several thousand miles above my head. I've probably got far too many GPS receivers but recently someone posted an offer of free for the cost of postage receiver modules to the GQRP mailing list and it was too good an offer to turn down.  A few days later some nice little Leadtek modules arrived, complete with coax pigtails. As well as the modules, there was a zip file with pinout for the 1mm (?) pitch connector on the underside and a datasheet for the module itself. While they're quite old, they have a SiRFStar chipset which is a decent performer and I've always found them to be reliably fast to get and hold a fix.  Unfortun
Read more

MiniPA 70 build, almost there.

Image
A quick update, I needed a heatsink so I found one from an old PC which is more than adequate, weighing in at almost 650 grammes I reckon it should be able to handle the heat. Problem though, it's not flat. Which makes it kind of difficult to mount the board. Now, I could use some standoffs, PCB pillars cut to length but I'm a little light on machine tools to make an accurate job of it and it'd annoy me that it was 'wobbly'. As it happens, I recently bought myself a new toy. A Flashforge 3D printer so this seemed an ideal opportunity to learn to use a CAD program and find out how dimensionally accurate the printer is. It turns out, it's pretty good. And the PLA takes a thread really nicely. So, my Mini PA board now has mounts, I just need to drill and tap some holes in the heatsink.
Read more

Replacing the Teensy 3.2 with 4.0 in the GQRP SCD Sudden Digital VFO

Image
 Place holder for GQRP SCD Digital VFO Post   The chip shortage has struck down the Teensy 3.2 which was used in the GQRP Digital VFO here: https://www.gqrp.com/suddenvfo.htm   Obviously that's a problem.  However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, the Teensy 4.0 is pin compatible so could be a drop in replacement.   I downloaded the 'sketch' and tried to compile it, which failed with what looked like potentially simple to resolve errors and a *lot* of warnings about unused and uninitialised variables. The information below shows the changes I made to the V0_13 sketch and get a successful compile.   Compiled for Teensy 4 using Arduino IDE: Version: 2.1.0 Date: 2023-04-19T15:31:10.185Z CLI Version: 0.32.2 Errors with unmodified sketch when compiled for Teensy 4  "Sorry, i2c_t3 only works on Teensy LC and 3.x.  Use Wire for Teensy 4.0, 4.1, MicroMod." To fix: Change every instance of i2c_t3.h to wires.h In:  SCD_2021_V0__13.ino Si5351.h Si5351.cpp To mop up s
Read more