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 of at least a couple of the builds so that I can get moving on the revisions for the Beta 2 circuit (which will hopefully also be the production PCB). I'm anxious to get the business up and running!

I got a very nice mention from Bill Meara on the latest episode of SolderSmoke. He talks up Etherkit and my blog, then mentions that he's going to try to use the single-ended passive MOSFET mixer from the VRX-1 in his homebrew WSPR transceiver. I hope that the experiment works out well for him.

As we approach the halfway point of the gestation of our new little one, I got to thinking about mortality a bit. I hope to be around for a very, very long time to come and have been taking steps to improve my health to make that more probable. But in the awful case that something were to happen to me in an untimely fashion, it seemed that I'd like my family to have a little bit of my own thoughts with which to remember me. At first, I thought that maybe I should do a private journal, but then it occurred to me that wasn't necessary. Barring a complete collapse of civilization, all of my descendants will be able to access an archive of all of my Internet activity. Every blog post, tweet, Google+ post, website comment...and perhaps even my email. If you Google my last name, I'm the first result. I'm active enough online that it's not entirely inconceivable that a reasonable avatar of myself could be created sometime in the distant future (given that Moore's Law holds up in some fashion for the next 50 years or so). Perhaps this is all pie-in-the-sky speculation and will look as foolish as the "flying car future" does to us now, but I'm pretty sure that I'll live on in human information space in some fashion long after I'm gone.

A Baxter? You Shouldn't Have!

Late Night Radio

I'm getting older. Why do I say that? Because I've been feeling a huge wave of nostalgia for hollow-state and other simple radios lately. I think it started out when I stumbled upon a YouTube video from someone who had built a replica of the classic TwinPlex receiver. That reminded me of the Lindsay Publications books that I purchased at Powell's a little while ago regarding the TwinPlex and other simple tube regens. I also bought a handful of tubes and variable caps from Antique Electronic Supply around the same time, but they've just been sitting in my closet. With all of the life changes we've been going through in the last year, there just hasn't been time for this stuff.

That video got me longing for some glow-in-the-dark radio, so I remembered that I had an old National SW-54 receiver that my uncle gave me, somewhere sitting in storage. A bit of digging through the plastic totes got me to my prize, and I was able to fire it up around 1 AM this morning after a long day. The paper caps in the poor radio are probably bone-dry, but it still works (for the most part). The antenna was a hunk of wire about two feet long. I plopped myself down in the recliner, put the radio on the arm of the chair, and gave the dial a whirl.

There's something to be said for the subjective listening experience of these old radios. Yes, in every quantitative area of measurement, the new stuff made in the last 30 years blows them away. But you can't discount the intangibles that the vintage radios provide, such as the easy and smooth tuning across a wide portion of the band, the warm audio from the light (or non-existent) IF and AF filtering, and the simple "cool factor". (By the way, I really like Linux, but this makes me want to cry.)

The audio on the AM broadcast band was a pleasure to listen to, with the exception of some nasty hum that wasn't masked out by the carrier on weaker stations. I'm one of those people who likes to occasionally listen to sports or evil talk radio on the AM band, so I can see myself setting this radio up for every day use. The SW bands were not as fruitful due to my tiny antenna, but I did come across the usual hellfire-and-brimstone and Spanish language stations that one regularly hears there.

I did come across something kind of neat that I don't recall encountering before (but you must remember that I don't do much SWLing). The "CW" mode of the SW-54 is a bit of joke as far as I can tell, as there is no BFO in the radio (it looks like it makes the IF amp oscillate, but I can't tell for sure). Up around 9 MHz, the radio pulled in a very strong CW signal, something I didn't expect. After a second, the quieting provided by a carrier told me that it was actually modulated CW.  Going back to the shack, I found the signal on 9.110 MHz, and a bit of searching on spynumbers.com showed that this was an M8a, or a Cuban numbers station delivering 5-figure groups in cut numbers. It's nothing particularly rare, but sitting in the dark, late at night, listening to my 40s vintage radio, I was transported back to the radio days of the past. It reminded me of being a kid and tuning the big, giant, console radio at my grandparents' house, and discovering this whole new world of the shortwave bands. It reminded me of being a nerdy teen, staying up late on Friday night to try to capture some exotic new signals and rare DX on my Radio Shack DX-440. It has strengthened that link to our history, when there was still magic in our radios.

Thanks to W8NF for the chuckles.

It's kinda big with thru-hole components, but the current plan is to use SMT in production. Does that sound like a good idea, or does the mere mention of surface mount turn you off?

Update

Due to "popular demand", I've decided to release a bit of information on this rig. This isn't a guarantee of final specifications, but the end product should be pretty close to this.

The rig above is a 40 meter CW superhet. Cascode JFET circuitry is used extensively throughout the radio. I'm aiming for this to be a trail-friendly radio. I don't have any hard specs yet, but here are some general observations:

• RX current draw is now around 30 mA, but I'd like to squeeze it down further if I can
• TX is Class E, so TX current draw should be pretty good as well
• Nominal TX output power is 2 W
• MDS should be around -130 dBm (500 Hz BW)
• VFO tuning range approximately 40-50 kHz
• VFO stability is very good (~2 MHz VFO frequency)
• ATmega88 microcontroller for built-in keyer, mute, frequency counter, battery status, etc.
• Other planned bands are 80 m, 30 m, and 20 m. Would like to tweak design for upper bands as well for a future date

Hopefully that will whet your appetite a bit. Let me know in the comments any features that you would find useful that would be appropriate for a radio of this class.

Finally, a brief message courtesy of my manager's whiteboard:

The article which I found describes a condition known as Pareidolia, as Wikipedia sums up quite succinctly:

Pareidolia (pronounced /pærɪˈdoʊliə/ pa-ri-DOE-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.

Long story short, our brains are supremely attuned to pattern matching, probably as a survival mechanism. At times, it is likely that it leads us to perceive meaningful patterns where in reality there are none. An extreme example would be those people who see images of Jesus in their grilled cheese sandwich or that nutty Reverse Speech guy, but we've all experienced minor versions of it at some times in our lives.

It seems that there must be some aspect of immersing yourself in CW that makes you even more susceptible to the phenomena for some time afterward. In my experience, sometimes it's taken an hour or two to shake it from my head. Even when I haven't been recently working CW, there are times where some random squeaks or beeps perk up my ears and get me in the CW copying mind frame. It's a funny and peculiar thing, to be sure.

Jason & Jennifer

So the people I work with are taking bets on how long before I bolt in anticipation of my wedding, which is only now a few days away. Well, not everyone there, just a few of the cynical ones. The truth of the matter is that I'm an incredibly lucky guy, and I count my blessings for having a wonderful woman such as Jennifer in my life.

I just finished up The 5000 Year Leap (an excellent book if you care about the U.S. Constitution) and came across a quotation from Benjamin Franklin, in an essay (oddly enough) called Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress:

It is the Man and Woman united that make the compleat human Being. Separate, she wants his Force of Body and Strength of Reason; he, her Softness, Sensibility and acute Discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the World. A single Man has not nearly the Value he would have in that State of Union. He is an incomplete Animal. He resembles the odd Half of a Pair of Scissars. If you get a prudent healthy Wife, your Industry in your Profession, with her good Economy, will be a Fortune sufficient.

I know, a bit old fashioned, anti-feminist, and politically incorrect, but ol' Ben was right (don't let the essay title fool you, he advocates marriage...mostly). I couldn't have said it much better. Jennifer has helped to set me on the path to becoming a better man. The sum is greater than the individual parts.

Anyway, once the good times are over and done with, I'll be back with some fresh content that's already in the hopper in draft-mode. Any time now, 4SQRP should be announcing the kit we've been working on for a while. I've got some blog posts related to that, and a bit more on the most popular topic on the blog (according to search hits); the dual-gate MOSFET. See ya around in a week or two, and we'll get back down to business.

Here's to another good year of blogging, I think that things are going to pick up in the ham radio world!