Posts Tagged ‘Homebrew’

B&Q Beam

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Posted 30 Apr 2012 — by Alex
Category Antennas

I’ve committed to ‘presenting’ the B&Q beam to the club in a couple of weeks so I better get on making it. The idea is one that has been done a few hundred if not thousand times over. Give some new / inexperienced hams the opportunity to build a perfectly adequate 3 element beam for 2m from parts found at a local hardware shop. In the UK B&Q is just about everywhere and it supplies just about everything, apart from the thing you want, generally.

Seriously the design is taken from any of your favourite calculators. I have found that they vary slightly against the original maths but I know my Sotabeam works very well so that’s a good starting point for dimensions.

Costs to date are in the region of a few quid but by far the most expensive parts are the nylon bolts used to hold the elements. I’ve bought a bunch so I’ll have a few attempts at drilling straight through the nylon without heating it up too much.

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Microcode built

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Posted 11 Jun 2010 — by Alex
Category Radio

After only a total of about 2 hours construction time I’ve completed the Microcode kit. Tested it and powered it up, and I’m happy to say that it ran first time. I had to adjust the contrast on the screen to get the characters up which gave me a little fright but all seems to be working ok.

So far I haven’t decided on how I’m going to box it up as something like a hammond extruded case will look a bit over the top and the sizes are not quite there. Maybe a sweet tin or something like that.

I had a small problem with the kit being short of 1 resisitor and no spare of that value in the spares box. But within a day I had one and a spare from Ron at Cumbria designs. Excellent service. I will be setting up the kit over the next few days, we have visitors this weekend so it’ll be next week I actually get to do the fettling but so far the construction was a simple affair. The instructions were excellent with a good explanation as to how the circuit works, which is good for me as I’m on a steep learning curve with these things. Hopefully one day I’ll de designing my own circuits, but for the time being making these kits is fun and simplified by the quality of documentation that comes with it.

I think I’ll enjoy using this gizmo and am very glad that it worked first time. Does your homebrew confidence the world of good.

Here’s a little bit of video to show you. The Yaesu VX3 has a cw training function that sews out random letter and numbers at a preset speed. The Micorcode hasn’t been adjusted at all, this is as built so treat it as a bench test.

Down load it Microcode build

Alternatively its onYou tube Here

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Cumbria Designs Microcode

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Posted 08 Jun 2010 — by Alex
Category Radio

Having made the two softrock hf-lite kits and thoroughly enjoyed the building process, I looked for another ‘thing’ to build.  I have had a PIC basic book for a while and one of the projects was a morse reader, so pricing up the parts from Farnell etc I also came across the Microcode from Cumbria Designs. Oddly enough the sum of the parts needed to build a PIC based reader from scratch was more than buying a kit.

Image from Cumbria Designs Website (www.cumbriadesigns.co.uk)

I did want to build up the reader from scratch and do the programming myself as I have just about managed to ‘program’ the thermostat before. But the temptation to build the kit was too much. It arrived the other day but what with visitors and other commitments I didn’t manage to do anything with it.

Last night I went through to documents and took a few piccies for my reference. Below is the ‘unboxing’, I’ll take a few more as I go through the kit

The kit looks simple enough for me to build and challenging enough for me to get some learning, so I’m looking forward to getting the soldering iron out.

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