No news ??.... No... no news.....

Hello all.....

Just wanted to post a little thing here explaining why there has been no news about the vfo/pa of my bitx, or any other news to be honest....

Well , there are 2 main reasons......

1.
We have had some horrible weather lately.... the temperature refused to drop below 24c at night , and during the day temperatures exceeded 30c easily.... and i am not kidding you... we had an official heatwave.....
And to make my life a complete living hell..... this upcoming week there will be an even hotter heatwave.....

Now I can hear you guys think , but its 45c here and its fine..... yeah it would be if the humidity is LOW.....
Well not here in Holland.... humidity is high.... so you start sweating from places you never imagined you could sweat out off....

The average temperature in my shack has been around 35c all week.... No, I am not entering that room!!! TOO <fill in favourite swear word here> HOT......

Maybe a field day soon when temperatures drop a little...

2.
Reason 2 entered our house last tuesday.....
And her name is Myra......

She has a lot of energy and runs around 24/7...... she's 9 1/2 weeks old....
Alya , our 3 yrs old cat had a lot of adjusting to do , but as I am writing this post, just 4 full days after we got the little one , she seems to be doing OK , and slowly starts to play... or set hierarchy between them.... sometimes hard to see with the older one as she has no idea that playing wit an animal 1/4 of her weight should be a little more careful sometimes.....


Well....
I hope the temperature drops below 30 soon in my shack so i can post techy stuff again :)

73's
Alex
PA1SBM

Again a new toy in the shack... A LCR meter

Saturday my new gadget arrived in the mail....

A LCR meter......

It is a Vichy DM4070.... i never.... and i realy mean NEVER ever heard of this brand.....
Well until Hans, PD0AC told me to get this one....
It costs close to nothing..... The cheapest on eBay.com is $24.90 !!!

And i do understand why now.. looks and feels very rugged... And for accuracy ... the tolerance of a capacitor itself outweighs the tolerance of the DM4070...

I did not use it yet to see how it all works but that will not take too long, i'm sure....


for the techies... some shameless copy from ebay....

Technical data:   

Basic function	Range	Basic accuracy
Capacitance	200pF/2nF/20nF/200nF/2uF/20uF/200uF/ 2000uF	±(2.5%+5) ±(5.0%+5)
Inductance	200uH 2mH/20mH/200mH/2H 20H	±(3.0%+5) ±(2.0%+5) ±(5.0%+5)
Resistance	20 Ω 200 Ω/2k Ω/20k Ω/200k Ω 20M Ω	±(1.0%+5) ±(0.8%+2) ±(2.0%+5)

Special function	DM4070
Low battery indication	Approx. less than 7.5V
capacitor discharge protect	v
Auto power off	It will power down about 20 minutes if no any measure.
Function protect	v
Anti-shock protect	v
Sampling rate	0~ 5s
Operation way	Manual range
Max. display	1999
LCD size	65x41mm
Battery	9V (6F22)
Power dissipation	Quiescent current approx. 6mA

General characteristic:

Weight	0.65 LB (including battery)
Meter size	7-1/4" x 3-5/8" x 1-3/8"

untill the next post.....

Alex

PA1SBM

BITX20 - 23. VFO working !!!!

Hello all,

Sorry for not posting a while, i wanted to do a lot , but first my gf came down with the flu and a huge cold.... and after that off-course i had to get it too , and i am still not 100% better....

A few days back i received this email which made me forget my flu/cold/headache and made me wanna jump into my shack and start to fiddle around with my bitx20 vfo again.....




I can only say one thing.... Danny , you are awesome......

As you can see , the vf0+bfo is now at a proper frequency!

I still have a tine problem to get the bandwidth (14.000 to 14.350) set correctly but i guess this is because of the coil i made (and me not having read the manual properly how to set it) . It is not the correct wire , much too thick. needed to adjust the number of winding's slightly too.

I'll do some shopping on eBay tonight to get the proper gauge... because off course ... i did not have any.... nothing near it either.... murphy's law i guess....


Again Danny, thanx for the sollution you totally made my week !!
Succes at last !!! on to the next Bitx20 battle!


73's
Alex

PA1SBM

The person guilty of getting me excited for the BITX20... PA1ED.....

Some things you just have to share..... This one of them....

The BITX20 virus was given to me by this HAM amateur that was talking on PI3ZDM, the repeater i always use when driving from and to work....

His callsign is PA1ED, and we all call him Ed.
By now he has build 3 Bitx20's i think.....
And like me he started a blog, so without typing to much here , if you wanna see some realy cool stuff... go look at his blog! It's realy worth it !

pa1ed.blogspot.com

Be warned though!! this site is highly contagious !! you will be building your own bitx20 in no time !

Don't say i did not warn you !

73's 

Alex

PA1SBM

Hello Linux, goodbye windows, please don't come back.....

I did it.... it took me a while..... had doubts.... was scared...

But yesterday evening i made backups of everything , and loaded the Debian 7 cd into the dvd drive...
I took 2 minutes of silence while Debian quickly and effectively killed my windows partitions and took over my system....

And after apt-getting a load of tools .....

Not sorry yet, do not think i will be..... the system performs like a amd64 4000+ with 8gb of ram again...
Not like an old slugish pentium2.

CQRlog is what you see running... in a few weeks i will write a post concerning installing and using this awesome tool.

Linux in your shack....

The title, "Linux in your shack" could/shoud have some other title's then this for what this post is going to be about....

• New competition for HRD
• Linux now good enough for all kinda HAM's
• CQRLOG... omg !

Let's start with some background about me... I am a IT consultant, and i do this for most platforms available today, window, Mac and most UX flavours. I even remember some OS/390 and mainframe from the days. The reason I made the choice not to be a windows only consultant is.... well i just don't like to use windows.... I love it because it makes sure I have a nice income and plenty of work.

So do i use windows in the shack.... Yes i do.... Do i like it... no not at all....
Then you all probably wonder why i did not throw windows out and installed Linux.
 Well for 1 reason... I use Ham Radio Deluxe 5.... Which is in my opinion the best all in one free (wel version 5 is) solution for a ham. Or isn't it....

There already was a really nice alternative on the MAC, being MacLoggerDX
The people at "dog park software ltd" made a realy nice piece of software.
But it will cost you 95USD (which is not bad tbh as HRD6 is 99.95 )

But now for linux...
I tried to find a good replacement for HRD for a long while now and i did not find anything near to HRD. This does not mean i did not find any good software on linux, just not 1 program (or set of programs that communicate together)  that will do everything. Until a few days back....
I stumbled on CQRLOG ,  don't ask me how, but i did...

Now.... CQRLOG.... this piece of software has been developed by 2 Czech Hams...
Petr, OK2CQR and Martin, OK1RR, and they made what I think is the 1st real alternative for HDR for when you want to swap to linux.
Now for screen shots look at their website. The screen shots  show a part of what the program can do.
User screen shots are there as well and look awesome

Yes, CQRLOG has (almost) all!! Log, cluster, rig and rotor control, QRZ and HAMQTH, LotW/eQSL, and the list goes on and on .....

Now, the main thing with linux.... installing niece software can be a pain in the a$$.
Is this the case with CQRLOG.... uhmmm yes and no.
I installed it on Debian Weezy (7) and all went fairly smooth until i started to do rig control.
I forgot to add my non root user to the dailout group. and the debian installer does not do this for you!
Now i imagine this is the same for ubuntu, but i don't use that.
So after smacking myself over the head (which did not help my headache) I added myself to the dailout group , and tried the whole install again..... and it worked immediately!

Now the last remark i am gonna make..... on their website you will find this piece of text....
 Anyway, CQRLOG is here and is for you. Try it out and if you decide to stay with this logger, we will be pleased. Of course, it will be very heartwarming if CQRLOG will became the reason to leave Windows and migrate to Linux.

Petr and Martin, if it is the reason to migrate to linux, i don't know... But with your piece of software, 1 main reason for me to stay on windows, just disappeared....

p.s. no they did not pay me or gave met shares in their compagny ;)

73's
Alex
 

I'm addicted to.... Kenwood....

For those who never really took a look at what i run in the shack....

I LOVE KENWOOD!!!!

So this week the local ham club had an auction to help the club financial funding.
Amateurs could have the stuff they did not want anymore put up for auction. the i think 10% would go to the club.... Next time they should raise that to 25% :) serves a good cause.

so what comes on for auction ... a Kenwood tr-7200g
And i cant help myself... it's old, its kenwood, i gotta have it ! so i got it...
for sure the best EUR 12.50 i ever spent.

I borrowed this pic from the internet, due to me having no time to make my own pics yet....
But its AWESOME! , and it works... now how cool is this....

On the wishlist for this summer is still a R5000 (recv) and a th-79e (ht)

73's
Alex
PA1SBM