Saturday, January 9, 2010

Projects for the New Year 2010

Well it's that time of year again when it's too cold to be installing antennas at the QTH. I want to wish all the best for this new year 2010. I wonder if I should refer to this year as 'twenty-ten' or two thousand and ten ?

I have a few projects for the work bench this winter and should begin building my DC40A direct conversion CW tranceiver from Hendricks QRP Kits. I've been tinkering with the pixie II but find it to be wanting. It has a problem that It receives transmissions from the Broadcast station three miles away. The station is louder than most 40M stations on the Pixie and I must wait until it goes of the air to do any hamming. No amount of bandpass filtering seems to help

I attended NearFest during the fall session and picked up a NEScaf kit . It is an Switched Capacitive Audio Filter kit and all indications is it will allow a degree of tuneability in the audio output. The kit can be obtained at New England QRP Club and the description is on their site including building info.

The other kit I bought was from http://www.pongrance.com/ an LCD Digital Dial/Counter.

I think this will keep me busy for a while and I intend to post my progress with these kits and if I can keep the cellar shack warm enough to work in. Maybe I can complete them before the lazy days of summer are back.

73 for now