I recently bought a new signal generator, the Feeltech FY3024. I chose this unit after a good amount of research on various Ham Radio forums, and the ever-useful EEVBlog. The consensus is that of the various Chinese function generators, the FY3024 is the best combination of cost, features and implementation. There are others, but they fall short, often on the quality of output, which is pretty important in a signal generator.
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59,Since the last post, I had gotten involved in a Facebook group with a focus on the mcHF transceiver. As well as being a great forum for sharing knowledge and experiences, it gave me the opportunity to get a very nice case in a group buy organised by one of the members. The case is 2-part design, which is easier to work with than the one I bought ;previously. It also comes with buttons, a speaker and very nice machined aluminium knobs.
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I have been following the Sparetime Gizmos Yahoo group since I first heard of the SBC6120, basically a single-board computer reproduction of the DEC PBP8. It was based on the Harris Semiconductors HD6120, which is basically a PDP8 CPU on a single chip, as opposed to multiple flip-chip boards. So, in essence, turning this
into this…
However, the HD6120 is in very short supply, and expensive, and the Sparetime Gizmos board is out of production, and Bob Anderson has said that he will not be doing any future runs.
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57,I came across the highly informative and interesting website of DuWayne KV4QB through Bill Meara M0HBR who has the excellent Ham Radio podcast Soldersmoke. DuWayne has documented many projects on his site, but one that caught my attention is the SNA Jr II. An SNA is a Scalar Network Analyser, which is a device that has the capability to measure RF amplitude. The SNA Jr II is the second iteration of this project by DuWayne, and is based on a number of enexpensive modular components.
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Attenuators are expensive, especially the fancy calibrated ones, and it seems that they are the only ones available. SMD resistors are cheap, though, and I have SMA connectors, so I thought I would try to make my own. I used the calculator;here, to come up with a design that used resistors I had, gave an impedance of 50 ohms and an attenuation that was useful (10dB). The schematic for the attenuator is as follows.
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As a parent, I am somewhat torn regarding ‘parental control’ of Internet Access where my daughter is concerned. She is 8, so has limited access anyhow, but I would like for that access to be as unrestricted as possible while at the same time avoiding her stumbling any age-inappropriate content, which as we all know can often be only 2 or 3 clicks away.
I have decided on a multipronged approach, with the main home router, a TP Link N600 running OpenWRT Chaos Calmer being the crux of this.
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Meraki (now part of Cisco) are well known for their high-quality enterprise grade networking hardware. Over the last number of years, they have been promoting their kit by way of providing ‘evaluation’ units for the cost of simply attending a webinar. They specify that the attendee should be a ‘networking professional’, but it is possible that not every attendee is. I recently acquired a number of these, where the evaluation period had expired, and the cloud-management interface was no longer accessible without a license key.
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SamKnows;is a global Broadband Quality Monitoring service. They are funded by a number of national regulatory bodies, including the FCC and OfCom, and are to all intents unaffiliated. On sign-up, they will ship a heavily customised;OpenWRT, mainly for its rich collection of addons and customisability. It might be a little harder to get to grips with than Tomato or dd-wrt, but I fell the additional functionality makes it worthwhile. A build of;OpenWRT 15.
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Among other great features of the Raspberry Pi is the General Purpose Input Output array (GPIO). This is an array of pins that can be programmed to behave as pretty much any I/O type that can be represented digitally. The pins can be switched on or off to represent binary 1s and 0s and controlled so as to emulate any communication protocol that uses bits (I2C, SPI, RS232 etc. etc.). However, as a first attempt at working with GPIO, I took a recommendation from Steve EI5DD and wrote a program that will key a transceiver and generate morse code.
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Following a suggestion by Galway VHF Group mamber Steve, EI5DD, I thought I would give SSTV a shot. It’s not a mode I have any experience with, apart from hearing the transmissions at 14.230MHz when I tune around. Steve mentioned a cross-platform SSTV program QSSTV, which seems to run well on a Pi 2, so that’s what I decided to use. I have a Pi 2 that I use for playing with SDR and radio software already set up with the current Rasbian (wheezy).
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