Ripples in the Ether

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. —H. L. Mencken

A few photos from our trip to Cannon Beach this weekend. The subject of most of my photos was Haystack Rock. (BTW, Jennifer and I are now engaged!)

Dave W8NF has been kind enough to post a short video demonstrating the effect that RF clipping has on a SSB transmission. You can see that peak voltage isn’t affected, but that the power density of the output waveform is increased as the amount of RF clipping is increased. The trade-off is in the sound quality, but that extra bit of processing is helpful for getting more intelligibility into your signal without increasing your output power.

Hey, I just saw the incoming link from Blazer’s Edge. Hello all you Blazers fans! I don’t post much other than my ham radio geekery here, but I am a longtime Oregonian and Blazers fan. I had the pleasure of chatting with Ben via Twitter, and got him hooked on my other, much nerdier pastime. Have a look around the blog and thanks for stopping by. I might have to unleash some of my horribly ignorant opinions about the team now that I’m getting some love from Blazer’s Edge. LOL!

Last week, I was informed that everyone in our company would be receiving a temporary (but indefinite) 10% reduction in pay. To make matters worse, it looks like we will be taking more mandatory shutdown days in the current quarter; we’ve got five coming up over the next few months. This is also another open-ended cost cutting measure; there is a possibility of more shutdown days in the upcoming quarters. As might be expected, my first reaction was anger and frustration, but I’ve cooled off a bit since then and let rationality replace emotion. The truth of the matter is that they economy sucks real bad, and only appears to be getting worse at the moment. I believe the company leaders when they say that this was done to avert more layoffs. Given the choice between a 10% reduction in pay and a 100% reduction in pay, it’s pretty obvious what the best option is. I still can’t say that I’m terribly thrilled, but this wasn’t entirely unexpected either.

So now the belt needs to be tightened a bit more at our household. Given my personal theories about what’s going on in the world, I seriously doubt that this is the worst that we will see. Let’s just say that I will be extremely grateful if I still have this same job in a year from now. With that in mind, I have been giving serious consideration to getting into the kit-selling business. Not that I expect to ever get rich selling kits to hams, but I really enjoy design and it would be nice to at least be able to supplement my income now that it’s taking a pretty big hit.

Along those lines, one of the reasons why the technical content has been light around here lately is that I have been working on a kit for a well-known QRP club. I don’t know when I can spill the beans or how much I can say about it, but I think it should be an interesting and fun kit for a lot of builders. Keep an eye on the blog for more details about the kit when I’m able to release them.

Furthermore, I have some other kit ideas that sprang from this original design. Those are the ones that I would like to bring to market under my own banner, along with some other unique designs that aren’t currently on the market. At best, it will still be months before you see anything commercial coming out of my lab, but I’m going to do my best to get the ball rolling very soon since I’ve now got a fire lit under my butt. I’m still going to post other technical content when I can, just don’t be surprised if that category is a bit light for the next few months while things spin up over here.

Being such a long time since our last breakfast get-together, W8NF and I decided it was time for another gathering of the Portland Eggs & Coffee. The call went out far and wide, via the pQRP reflector and the ARRL Oregon section website. This time we had a great turnout, a total of seven participants: Carl WS7L, Dave W8NF, Dan KK7DS, Stewart KE7LKW & Cathy KE7QBI (who made the drive from White Salmon!), Paul (sorry, somehow I missed your callsign in my notes), and me.

KK7DS demos D-RATS

The E&C commenced with a leisurely breakfast meal and chat as folks trickled in. I brought along my new iPhone, so I managed to snap a few photos with my new toy. Although the meeting was called together under the auspices of the pQRP club, the topic often wandered off into other areas of ham radio. I invited Dan KK7DS to come along and give a quick demonstration of his D-RATS cross-platform software, which provides messaging, traffic handling, mapping, and file transfer capability across a D-STAR link. Not the traditional fare for a QRP meeting, but I’m really glad I was able to convince Dan to come along to the meeting to show off the capability of his software and give a lot of us our first introduction to D-STAR. I hope that he will continue to come back to our future E&C get-togethers, as I enjoy hearing about many diverse aspects of our hobby.

NT7S Digi Station

Since we were on a computer kick, I dragged out my Asus eeePC netbook so I could show off my new portable digimode setup. I’ve had the eeePC for a little while, and liked it OK, but I could never get fldigi to work properly on the stock Xandros OS distribution. The sound card input worked fine, but there was a horrible popping that would occur on the output which rendered the netbook useless for digimode transmission. So I just tucked the eeePC away and only took it out on occasions where I needed a very small and portable way to access the Internet. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a modified Ubuntu distribution customized for the eeePC that goes by the whimsical name of Easy Peasy. I’m already an Ubuntu fan, so it took no arm-twisting to get me to try this new distribution. The bottom line is that it works a whole lot better than the Xandros distro that comes with the eeePC, and better yet, the sound card drivers work perfectly. The newest version of fldigi (3.1 at this time) was able to run with absolutely no problems once I resolved the necessary dependencies. Couple this netbook with a Yaesu FT-817NB, a homebrew rig interface, and an EFHWA, and you have a complete portable QRP digimode station.

Stewart KE7LKW brought up the subject of local QRP nets, both CW and SSB. He participates in the local Monday night pQRP net (where most of the participants are our Washingtonian neighbors) but was curious if he was missing any from the Portland area. I tend to shy away from CW nets, since my code is only comfortable at about 15 WPM (I don’t even have a set of paddles, just straight keys). So I didn’t have any suggestions for him. Carl WS7L mentioned the local Oregon Section Net, which is on 3569 kHz daily at 1830 and 2200 local. Other than that, no one seemed to know of anything, so perhaps this is an opportunity for a future activity, especially the possibility of trying a QRP SSB net.

LogiKlipper Proto

LogiKlipper Guts

The final show-and-tell item was the prototype of the upcoming LogiKlipper SSB speech processor by Dave W8NF. He explained to us the theory of operation, then cracked open the top of the case so we could have a peek inside. The prototype consists of a variety of circuit boards stacked on top of each other. At the very bottom (you can barely see it in the photos below) is a printed circuit board (which is control circuitry if I remember correctly). The rest of the functional blocks are on other individual Manhattan constructed circuit boards. Dave is fairly new at Manhattan construction, and he was able to nicely demonstrate the evolution and improvement in his build methods over the various boards. All of them were very well-built and a wonder to behold, but you could see how there was incremental improvements in the confidence of the layout of each board. Unfortunately, time ran out before we were able to have a live demo of the LogiKlipper, but I hope to be able to link to some enlightening videos soon.

LogiKlipper Up Close

I believe that I can speak for everyone in saying that we had an enjoyable time. It seems like the 2+ hours went way too quick, as I could easily have stayed longer shootin’ the bull with the other folks. We’re going to have to do this a bit more often in the future, and perhaps try to branch out with some building activities some time. I don’t know if the locals will be interested in it, but maybe we can try our hand at a simple group build sometime this year. I’ve finally got my garage organized, and that might be a great place to set up some card tables and soldering irons for the build. If you happen to be in the Portland area this sounds interesting, shoot me an e-mail or a Tweet!