A bit low sound volume and shaky, but you get the idea 🙂
More work on the shack
Posted by sm2wmv
on February 10, 2013
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I took a few days off work to get down to SJ2W and try to prepare it for the contests. I had some plans to maybe do ARRL CW next weekend and I have not yet decided if I will do it or not. Right now I don’t really feel motivated but we will see, if not I will do it part time remotely or if the girlfriend wants to come here next weekend I might go down with her.
These days I have almost gotten position for radio 1 and 2 (also SO2R position) running with some small things left to do. I have also plans to get the IC-7400 (Pos 4) up and running so that SM2LIY can listen to the beverages. However the neighbor has cut down trees so half of them are broken and there is a lot of snow, so fixing them is out of the question. Positive thing is that that piece of the forest wont be worked in for 25 years…
I also made it possible to turn on and off the electronics in the basement, so that we can reboot everything if needed remotely. The openASC system seem to be quite stable, but a few times this winter SM2XJP has had to go here to the station to reboot it. Now we can do that remotely so he should not need to go here *knock on wood*.
I am pretty happy with the result, its a huge improvement but still a bit left to do. I am gonna try to save some money to get another radio for position 3 or 4 so hopefully we’ll have 3xFT1000 MKV in the future, which would be really nice since it would also be a spare rig when doing SO2R contests. But first, the summer projects need to be paid 🙂
PowerMeter electronics
Posted by sm2wmv
on January 24, 2013
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I milled some circuit boards at work and smuggled in a few of my own designs as well. A few boards which are ULN2003A driver cards, a couple of ethernet module boards for the openASC box. I also designed a few peak-hold circuits which I plan to test with the PowerMeters. I have a problem that the new 16-bit A/D converter is too slow so the time between the FWD and REF sample is too long and the SWR calculation does not get accurate. And since the sampling time is too slow I can not do any proper filter either except a very slow one. So I am going to try using an LF398 chip so that I can hold both channels for enough time, that I can get a couple of samples and do the calculations. I guess we will see tomorrow if it works or not 🙂
Aurora recording
Posted by sm2wmv
on January 16, 2013
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Hello lads, not much going on except some programming right now. But I had a recording that I haven’t shared with you that SM3JLA made of me during the CQWW CW contest on 20m, which shows what facinating things the aurora can do. I think this is a lot more common on VHF than on HF and this is the first time I’ve ever heard it.