Astatic RD104 “Road Devil” Battery Eliminator Mod…for radios with power at the mic jack
With the sunspot cycle coming to a point of good higher frequency propagation, I put a 10 meter radio in the car. Why not? The President Lincoln II+ has some…
SteppIR Antenna and Station Integration (Update)
Well, the original configuration (SteppIR controller passing commands between the radio and PW-1) worked… for a while. I suspect there was some collision or synchronization that fell out of timing…
Mini1300 Antenna Analyzer: Initial Impressions
I’ll spare the reader yet another glowing review for the Mini1300 analyzer. No I won’t – I’m still going to spew my thoughts on this thing. I picked one up…
SteppIR Antenna thoughts
Background Last year, I acquired a SteppIR “SmallIR 80” antenna… This is their “SmallIR” 20 – 6 vertical, with an additional coil for 30/40/80 meters. I don’t know if it’s…
Icom 7300 Front Panel Interface Box
I love the Icom 7300 – it has a TON of features. One of the intriguing features is the voice keyer – the radio has 8 memory slots, four of…
Semi-Smart 12V Power Panel: Design Details
For this project, the basic design was pretty simple. But now comes some details. This is where the design really needs to be broken into parts… inputs, outputs, extra features……
Semi-Smart 12V Power Panel: Initial Design
With multiple station accessory devices (Headphone audio splitter, DSP unit, multiple radios, just to name a few) powered from 12V, I had a realization. There’s a LOT of wall warts…
EMI – some basics…
I’ve been an electromagnetic interference (EMI) engineer for… well… a bunch of years at this point. As such, I’ve learned a lot about how to tackle problems, and how to…
Gear Junkie: My Digical workbench
Just like any other tinkerer, I want a completely instrumented workbench with scopes, analyzers, generators and power supplies… but there’s generally a tradeoff. Space, cost, accuracy…. Older equipment is less…
Gear Junkie: Lithium Drill Battery Adaptor
So, I hang out with a bunch of gear junkies. This means every problem has some unique solution – sometimes with a little MacGyvering included. In this case, this is…