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Showing posts with the label NAQCC

NAQCC Sprint Results, A Closer Look at the Rig

 Only one QSO for the sprint. Still, TouCans did well with respect to noise and was spotted in Northern Europe! Also, I had a great QSO with an op new to CW, and that's one of the points of NAQCC, so I'm calling this a win. As the sprint was winding down, I made a video of the rig suspended above the back yard. You can see the arrangement of the Bluetooth transmitter I've been talking so much about lately . You can also see the edge of the Pico-W board that's handling the keying functionality for the rig. The rig made its first QSO of  the evening out to Utica, NY followed by two more QSOs into Colorado. The QSOs to Europe happened right at gray line

Things I Learned: The NAQCC Newsletter and Glue Stick Permeability Tuned Oscillator

 I hadn't realized the NAQCC has a newsletter! Also? Continuing this month's theme of glue and radio, I found out glue sticks are handy for ham radio as well. If you still haven't checked out the North American QRP CW Club, and you're into low power radio and Morse code, here's a little more enticement. They have a monthly, free newsletter ! I found the above glue stick trick there. I'm still leaning towards making an Arduino VFO rather than a purely analog VFO, but wow, choices! Update: Here's a really nice video demonstrating the construction and use of the glue stick PTO CW Practice Nets The club is also looking to add new CW practice nets : Github projects can have web pages!? https://docs.github.com/en/pages/quickstart

Things I Learned: Full-wave wavelength; Roy Hobbes; NAQCC

 Today, I learned about whole wave dipole antennas and their impedance problem; details I suspected about the novel The Natural; the nicest radio club I've come across so far, the North American QRP CW Club Full-wave dipoles First, lets talk about full-wave dipole antennas. Spoiler, do not  run out and build one without reading to the end, I almost did. It turns out that while the things offer some gain, they have this impedance issue which is... i nfinite impedance at the feedpoint !!! In other words, oh my goodness will your power reflect back into your transmitter without a matching network. Why was I reading about the cursed things? Well, that takes us to this ARRL article on QRP  (From April 1984 QST, p 52). The article suggested that what I really wanted was a full wave dipole: You know? If I had the resources to build an antenna tower, I'd probably also have resources and patience to build the impedance matching network so really it's a matter of resources that inf...