Electronic Kitbuilding and Experimentation

Years ago when I was living in California I was active in a ham radio club.  We met monthly, and after the club business was taken care of there was a guest speaker.  (I was a guest speaker one month, but that's not what this entry will be about).  One guest speaker was a YL, ham radio slang for "young lady", and most ham radio operations who are OMs (OM means "old man", regardless of your age) will tell you that the hobby needs more YLs.  (XYL is "ex-young lady", which means "wife").

Well that speaker was technically an XYL, but we'll regard her as a YL in this post.  Her talk was on QRP, which means "low power (operation)", and about how she built her own transmitters and experimented with QRP, and her experiences with using it.

QRP is one of those niche interests, among several, that can be found in ham radio.  A longtime friend of mine was into it, and me, for all those years I was active I would run with an input power of 100 watts, which is definitely not QRP.  I remember talking to one ham who was only using one watt of power, and his signal was surprisingly good.  It wasn't pegging my meter or anything like that, but I had 100% copy of him on the 40 meter band.  He was in the L.A. area and I was in San Jose, and he was hearing me as good as I was hearing him.

Anyway, what the YL said was that some hams didn't want to waste their time talking to her.  A lot of hams are into DX, that is, "distance", which means that you want to hams who are very far away, and yes, working DX is quite the thrill.  But the seed that she planted in my mind then, was to get into experimenting with electronics, and a few days after her talk I was at one of the surplus electronic parts stores in Silicon Valley (All-Tronics?  Haltek?) getting integrated circuits to experiment with on a breadboard.  I also realized that I would need a power supply, so I visited a Radio Shack, bought a book on how to build power supplies, and I spent a week or so in the garage building one of my own.

I'm going to backtrack a little bit here as that I wasn't new to building things.  I built my first radio in 1974, a very simple crystal set that could only receive one station.  I built a second one later on that year, as part of a class in high school.  It was finished in January 1975, and to my amazement it worked, and using the instructions I was able to align the IF (intermediate frequency) cans to where it worked fine.  I still have it, it's in the garage, and probably what I ought to do sometime is build another one that's similar to it.

But let's get back to the later years.  I built that power supply, and used it for experimenting with some simple computer circuits, and that went on until some life changing events that visited me during the last few months of 1998.  The power supply moved with me to Arizona in early 1999, and it is still with me as that I figured that it would be useful in some future endeavor.  Earlier this evening, I went out to the garage to look at it, after finding a notebook that I started to document my projects and experiments.

So why is this now happening?

I've been thinking a lot about getting back into shortwave listening these past few weeks, and I'm also thinking of resuming my ham radio hobby.  Right now the house is a little on the crowded side, but eventually one of the stepdaughters is going to move out, and that will give me a chance to reclaim one of the bedrooms as my "radio room".  Until then, I might be able to operate out of the master bedroom, which although is a little cramped, I think I can set up a table and get one of my transceivers back into commission.

And, I'm now thinking, maybe it's time I build a QRP transmitter, and see what I can do with it.

I've been spending the past few days visiting websites about transmitter design.  Eventually I would like to homebrew my own transmitter, but existing QRP kits can be had for $40 or so, and I'm thinking that I should purchase one of these kits and have some fun with it.  Of course, my intention is to build one of my own, and to see what I can do with that.

Next month, I might be in San Jose again, and if that happens I plan on visiting my favorite surplus stores with a list of parts to look for.  In the meantime, I'll be combing thru some boxes of parts that I already have, to see if I can jury rig a small transmitter, just for the fun of it.