K2 - Night Five

Tonight after dinner and once the kids had headed off to bed I managed to spend about
another 90 minutes working the K2 project. I am now working on the main RF board.
There are a LOT of components on this board. As an example there are 17 relays to
install in one of the first steps of this section.

This board will probably take me several evenings unless I can find a 3 or 4 hour
block of time this weekend to dedicate to the project.



Working on the drywall project in the basement has been dominating much the weekend
time that is not spent with the family. The K2 seems to be more a week night project
once everyone heads to bed... I sneak downstairs to the work bench for 30-45 minutes
and melt solder.

K2 - Afternoon Five

The front panel & board are largely complete. The front now looks like a real
radio. I have to admit that the knobs are a little close together even for my small
fingers. It is clear that the design of this radio is to appeal to the portable/field
use as much or more than being the main stay of the shack.

I have now completed 32 of the 80 build pages of the manual. -That is pretty cool.

During the assembly of the front panel board I also added the Internal
Mic Adaptor mod from Rework Eliminator folks.

The radio is far enough along that I should probably post some pictures now that it
looks something like a radio. If time permits after support and family game night
I would like to start working on the main RF board in section 6 of the book.

K2 - Night Four

I managed to squeeze in about 75 minutes of assembly time in tonight. The board for the front panel controls is now complete. The next step is adding the SSB parts to front panel and the mic adapter kit.



I would not even have the SSB option kit except for the fact this radio will be the
IF rig for some of my transverters. Otherwise it would be a QRP CW rig for me.



Tonight's assembly was pretty straight forward. I will need to try to take some more
pictures if/when time permits. It was very relaxing to melt some solder and follow
the assembly instructions.

Inflation Fears

It drives me nuts when people talk about "cost of living" and inflation.  The
government and many other places that report the data adjust the numbers so that it
does not include food or energy items.

Hello... I still have to pay for food and energy so it is a REAL cost. Please
do NOT adjust my real costs out of your formulas to make things look better.




Here is an example:


3 month rate ending 2008:


All items: 6.8%


All items minus food and energy: 3.1%

Check that out... the real number is DOUBLE what people are reporting.

----Most folks are seeing salary raises in the 1.5-3.5% range.


----Our real cost of living is growing at 4-7.5% a year.

We are in a recession.... our costs are raising faster than our incomes. Our government
is growing faster than the people that have to pay for to it.

I don't know about you but our family has been trimming costs for a couple of years
to try to live within our means.  --Call me a fiscal conservative.

Ruby on Rails?

I was reading a little bit this morning before work. I have not really been following Ruby
on Rails very much as I have slowly been drifting away from development over the
past 2 years. I watched a short
demo and felt very inspired and enabled after seeing a demo of how easy it is
for someone to build a web app with Ruby.



I have a couple of things in mind so I am going to try to find a little time
this weekend to research this a bit further.

K2 - Build Night Three

After the boys went to bed (it is a school night... lights out by 8:30p) I went down
to work bench to melt some solder. I have the control board finished up.

Of course when I went to validate all of the test points with my DMM... the batteries
are toast and I don't have any spares. I had to fall back to an older Fluke bench
model DMM. I don't really trust the older Fluke because I picked up used and I have
not built relationship with it yet.



The point of validating the test points in this step is to look for shorts in the
soldering at some key points. There do not appear to be any shorts... but some of
the values do not match what the book says.



I am going to take this with a grain of salt until the real check out phase of the
control board later on. (By then I will have some new or rechargeable batteries in
my main DMM)

I have to say that it was a blast being able to spend an hour or so working the K2
kit project tonight. It will probably be Saturday or Sunday before I can get back
to project as we have family plans for Friday night.



I am trying to make this a more regular project every night or every other night.
(Otherwise it will never get done.) I would really like to have this on the air for
Field Day. Better yet, I would like to have this done so it can start driving my VHF/UHF
transverters which is it's real purpose in the life.



(I will try to post some pictures this weekend if time permits.)

Basic home emergency management plan

We had a small snow-sleet event today. Around 4:15pm the power went out. I decided
to implement our basic emergency management plan.... I rolled the generator outside
and flipped the sub-panel from shore power to the generator. That provides basic power
for the fridge, well pump, furnace and a few lights and outlets in a couple of spots
in the house. Nothing fancy but enough to live on.



We took this as an opportunity to go out for supper. (We could have cooked on the
grill or done something else if needed.)

Our builder laughed at us for putting in a generator sub-panel and having a few of
the circuits moved around. He response was that the power never goes out.  --Yeah,
right. The power has gone out several times in the 2.5 years that we have been at
the new house. We bought the generator this summer when we had longer power outage
after some big storms rolled through. (We had the panel but did not own a generator
that was compatible with our new home... go figure.)



I wish that we had spent the money when we built the house and bought one of the automatic
cut over systems to have everything on the generator system. Then the generator
would run on the big LP bottle that feeds our whole house.

Overall we can survive here during the standard kind of emergencies as long we can
top of the gas cans once in a while. It probably points out that we should stock up
our food shelves a little more and think through a bigger plan.




If you have a plan the chances are that you will not need to execute on it... if you
don't have a plan Mr Murphy will force you to make plan to execute.

Building the K2 - Night Two

I spent about 45 minutes working on the K2 tonight. I am working on the control board. I am a little confused about jumpers for R18 & R19. I just sent an email to the Elecraft mail reflector asking for some clarification.



I think that I have 12 parts left to apply to this board and then it is complete...
then I can start the next board.



I have not been working on the K2 project recently... most of my spare time has been
spent working on drywall in my basement or trying to get VP6DX in the log on as many
bands as possible.

VP6DX - two more slots

Two more slots. Last night I turned on the radio for a few minutes and worked VP6DX
on 30m CW and 40m SSB.

I think that they begin to pack up today. I would suspect that these are the final
contacts that I will make with Ducie Island during this DX Expedition. It is incredible
the signals that they are able to work in the noise.

VP6DX - worked on 17m RTTY

Sweet... I just got them on 17m RTTY.  Now I need to focus on 10m and 30m.