Today I finished construction on the circuitry for the RMS-to-DC converter described on the October 1992 QST article by W0IYH on measuring receiver performance. This is an article that I found on the EMRFD CD when I was searching for information on measuring the noise figure of amplifiers and receivers. I didn't find the article [...]
What's going on at the NT7S shack? The project currently taking up most of my shack time is the construction of the W0IYH RMS-to-DC converter so that I can make accurate noise mesurements. I'm probably about 2/3 finished with this project, with most of the components placed on the copper clad but none of the [...]
OK, maybe not the ancients, but it has been a lot of fun listening to the old Jean Shepherd clips that Bill from SolderSmoke has been posting on his blog. I guess that I didn't really get all of the raving that Bill was doing until I listened to one of the shows for myself. [...]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it [...]
Much to my chagrin, posting here has come to a screetching halt while I do my best to put out a big fire. I assure you that I shall return to more regular posting when I get things sorted out. Calgon, take me away...
Even though a homebrew return loss bridge is a relatively simple piece of gear to build, I've never gotten around to building one until now. Which is truly a shame, and something I don't really have an excuse for, except perhaps laziness. I'm excited to add this essential gear to my stable of test equipment, [...]
Continue reading about Dual Gate MOSFET Investigations - Return Loss
Some days I feel like I can't see the forest for the trees. After submitting my last dual gate MOSFET experiment to the EMRFD group for review, I got a nice note from Henning suggesting that I needed to bypass gate 2 directly. Of course, like a three-year old who has to constantly ask "Why?", [...]
Continue reading about Dual Gate MOSFET Revelations from W7ZOI
Having determined some basic characteristics of the biasing of the BF998 dual gate MOSFET in a previous experiment, it was now time to look into the gain and AGC performance of the amplifier. A few changes were made to the original circuit to turn it into a proper RF amplifier. Test Equipment Power Meter: M3 [...]
Continue reading about Dual Gate MOSFET Investigations - Gain and AGC
Lately, I have been using my Ubuntu Hardy Heron box for coding and programming my AVR projects using the simple combination of gedit, the avr-gcc toolchain and the USBtinyISP. It's a little bit of a pain to get set up correctly, but it works very well once it's up and running. I've been pretty happy [...]
Continue reading about Programming AVR Microcontrollers in Eclipse
