Month: January 2009

I’ve been talking about it so long, I thought I should let you guys have a look at it. The box on the top is N3ZI’s FB freq counter. It sits on the top cover of the TX — the cover is made from the side panel of a dead computer that I found on a street in London. The metal cabinet is a “kickpanel” — the kind of thing they often put on the bottoms of frequently used doors. Mine was purchased at Farmer Brother’s Hardware on Fulham Road, London. One switch is for T/R. The other is for spotting (netting). I put the LED in there so I wouldn’t forget to turn it off (and because Billy likes LEDs!) Circuit diagrams and LTSpice models appear in previous blog posts.

Moving inside, we see that the “chassis” is actually a kitchen cutting board, this one from a Dyas store in Windsor, England. In the lower left there’s a board with the AF (mic) amp. Center front is the VFO box (elevated above the main chassis by wooden blocks in order to put the tuning cap in a comfortable position). The balanced modulator is on the left. The long rectangular board in the center-right is the 4 stage amplifier. Note the black wire suspended above the connectors — that’s an antenna for the oscillator — it allows me to hear the oscillator signal with my Drake 2-B while in “spotting” mode (while putting the TX and the RX on the same freq.)