Buffalo Hamfest

My son Ben and I went to the MidWinter Madness Hamfest in Buffalo, MN yesterday. We
wondered around looking at the stuff on the tables and bumping into friends.

Ben bought a used Gameboy for $10.

I bought two old books for $5 each and last years ARRL Handbook for $15. I have been
looking at quite a few of the books at the recent hamfests. I would like to start
building a better RF & Electrical reference library here at the new house.

Look at the cover prices:

1948 - $2.00

1971 - $4.50

2007 - $44.00

There is a VERY nonlinear jump in the price of the books.

Solid State Design for the Radio Amateur

Someone browsing the Elecraft reflector saw some of my posts talking about my K2 project.
That person then followed my signature link to my website. In the midst of my K2 posts
he saw a note about my quest to obtain a copy of SSDRA and how nuts the eBay war had
become.

Roger WA7BOC made me an offer that I could not pass up. I appreciate
his help in advancing my reference library. This is a great book for understanding
the building blocks of RF design.



Roger is a great example of what I like about this hobby. Sharing information among
fellow hobbyists. 

 

K2 - Night Eleven

I squeezed in about 70 minutes of build time tonight while the boys played Xbox 360.
Page 50 is now complete. This was mainly a bunch diodes and TO-92 transistors. There
are about 30 pages of component assembly and alignment left. The RF board is about
1/3 to 1/2 populated now.

• 
  The next time at the bench will be spent installing about 75 capacitors.
  
• 
  Then it moves to the crystals.
  
• 
  Then it moves to the toroids. (There are 13 small toroids.)

The K2 project is progressing nicely given that I am also working on the drywall
in the basement and building model rockets with my sons.

Fiberglass Mast ideas & notes

I am thinking about some antenna ideas for Field Day and camping with our trailer. I
am thinking about using a fiberglass push up mast to hold up a vertical wire for an
antenna.

KitesOnline - Anothe recommended source:

http://www.kitesonline.com/flags/tpole.html

Ebay Search for Fiberglass
masts:

Notes on the dk9sq mast:

http://www.io.com/~n5fc/dk9sq.html

dk9sq mast info:

http://www.kangaus.com/pdf%20files/vertical%20antenna.pdf

I am using this blog entry as a place to capture some notes as I search for info.
I am thinking of ordering the 32' HD from KitesOnline. That will get me in the ball
park for 40m and the higher bands. I will need to work out some sort of base fixture
and radial system. N0FP is suggesting an elevated system.



I think that I will need to order some parts and then setup an experiment out in my
driveway to test and tune this idea. I will need to design some sort of
simple feed point balun, step-up transformer, and simple match with a coil (for 40m)
and variable cap.



Additional notes: The dk9sq mast uses carbon fiber which absorbs RF.

PS: Reformatted and reposted on 3/30/2008. The original eBay link was messing
up the formatting of the rest of this page.

Making Bread (the kind that goes in the oven)

I can never seem to find my wife's bread recipe when I am ready to make bread in the
evening as the boys and I make dinner. I more or less seem to remember it and simply
dump the components into the bread maker.  It
seems to work out pretty well so far.

Tonight I am trying to make a raisin bread using the bread maker. My wife pulled out
her generic bread recipe so I thought that I would put it up on my blog so that I
can find it later when I need it.

1 cup water (maybe a touch more)

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

2 teaspoon honey

1.5 cups un-bleached all purpose flour

1.5 cups whole wheat flour

1 teaspoon sea salt

2 teaspoons dry yeast

Bread maker option 1 (basic bread)

Rapid Option

1.5 lb option (instead of the default 2 lb)



It should take about 2:40 to make the bread with the machine.

If you manually bake it in the bread maker it is about 35 minutes bake time. I would
suspect that in the oven @ 450 degrees it would be about 20-30 minutes.

This is a pretty good generic recipe that you can modify to create your own variations.

Nice day for a walk

After spending a couple of hours working on drywall in the basement I decided to go
outside for a walk. A nice trip through and around the neighborhood and then past
the Kingston Community Center to the North Fork of the Crow River and then back home.

A nice end of winter beginning of spring Sunday afternoon.

Big Bertha - Construction

We have several rocket projects under construction. This morning I glued the fins
on the Estes kit called Big
Bertha.

This should be an interesting rocket. It is a pretty large rocket for an entry level
kit. I think that I finally came up with a method to attach the fins to the smaller
rockets with glue in such a way that it is not so painful during the tack
up process.

Spring in Minnesota is quickly approaching and we need to start working more
actively on the kits if we want to fly them this season. For the past several years
we have gotten too busy and then they end up in the closet or a box somewhere.

The link below is to someone else's video on YouTube with the same model:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4619gcTt2s

Boys Night

Jacob and Ben came home today from spring break at Grandpa's house up north.

This afternoon we watch some YouTube videos of model rockets then we built some model
rockets together. Then we ran some errands to picked up some tacos and burritos,
a movie, and a new Xbox 360 game. After dinner and a movie we played Xbox. Project
Gotham Racing 4 was pretty cool.  We like the street bike racing.

Ben and Joe are playing the Marvel heros/adventure game right now.

I am worn out time to call it a day.

K2 - Night Ten

I removed the panels for the case and separated the boards. This signals the beginning
of the Assembly Part II phase of the project. I think that page 48 probably took about
an hour. There are 50+ resistors on that one page.

I am happy to be back in the assembly & soldering phase again.

K2 - Night Eight & Nine

I got a little too positive and it caught up with me. I was working through the initial
alignment process and ran into a problem with the side tone test. --No Side Tone.



It took 2 evenings, several emails, and a second set of eyes to resolve.

It turns out that tone used to come from U6-25 and is now coming from U8-4. You
have to know to change the value in the menu.




The second part of this issue was that someone had sent me an email early in the build
process with a note that R11 & R12 are no longer needed in the Control Board assembly.
I highlight that portion of the instructions and updated the notes in my book. --R11
or a jumper in-place of R11 is required for the side tone to work. It is in the middle
of the signal path.

When time permits I should be able to finish the initial alignment and move onto the
next portion of the assembly process.