Jason Milldrum on February 1st, 2012

I've got another grab-bag of miscellaneous news for this post, but I'm going to lead off with the big one: I'm going to be a presenter at the world's preeminent QRP convention: Four Days In May 2012. The tentative topic for my presentation will be about the free and open source tools that I use [...]

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Jason Milldrum on January 17th, 2012

The year is not starting out as well as I had hoped. Back during the beta test of the CC-20 I had set a goal to complete my revisions and be ready to sell production kits by 1 January 2012. Obviously that date has come and gone and I'm still not on the market. A [...]

Continue reading about Catching Up With Etherkit

Jason Milldrum on December 31st, 2011

This post is a bit late, but I wanted to be sure to document my first attempt at a SOTA activation and what I learned from it. The title is probably a bit harsh, but the eternal pessimist in me couldn't help it. I decided to attempt a SOTA activation after seeing a lot of [...]

Continue reading about SOTA Fail on Clatskanie Mountain

Jason Milldrum on November 4th, 2011

I'm in the process of selling off some of my ham radio stuff so that I can fund further development of the CC-Series. Right now, I've got a Yaesu FT-817ND along with a few other items for sale. I've also got a very lightly used Kindle with the leather case with integrated reading light. Occasionally [...]

Continue reading about Liquidation

Jason Milldrum on October 22nd, 2011

Progress on CC-Series development proceeds at a reasonably-good clip right now. One of my last big hardware bugs to stamp out is some nasty microphonics that seem to be generated by the combination product detector/BFO. Today, I believe that I made some significant progress towards solving it and wanted to share what I learned. I've done a [...]

Continue reading about Single-Ended Mixers and Reverse Isolation

Jason Milldrum on October 17th, 2011

I don't know exactly why, but I've had a bit of an obsession with the T32C DXpedition to Kiritimati since they got started a few weeks ago. Maybe because I found them easier to work than many of the DXpeditions that I've tried before. The fact that they are a very well-run operation has something [...]

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Jason Milldrum on October 3rd, 2011

I'm happy to report that the second of four CC-20 beta kits is completed and working! Mikey, WB8ICN got his all finished up with no major problems and made a first QSO with N1WPU. It looks like he made a nice custom enclosure out of some very sturdy copper clad. Very, very nice! Please click [...]

Continue reading about Another CC-20 Lives

Jason Milldrum on September 29th, 2011

During some discussions with AA7EE regarding a seeming lack of 20 meter propagation between us at any time right now, we both decided to do a bit of research into what was even feasible according to predictive software. Dave went to the VOACAP web service from OH6BG to get some nice plots which showed that indeed [...]

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Jason Milldrum on September 25th, 2011

Here it is, the first CC-Series beta unit completed by someone other than me! As is obvious by glancing at the photos, Dave AA7EE has done a magnificent job of assembling the CC-20, as well as creating a custom enclosure for the radio out of red copper clad using the WA4MNT technique. There's really not [...]

Continue reading about The First Wild Beta

Jason Milldrum on September 16th, 2011

No earth-shattering news to report on the blog, but a few little things to mention (hence the "junkbox" title). The CC-20 Beta 1 test is proceeding pretty much as planned. As of tonight, AA7EE has his receiver up and running now and a couple of the others are close behind. I'm eagerly awaiting the results [...]

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