{"id":8920,"date":"2022-03-17T11:33:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-17T00:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2022\/03\/17\/colin-m1buus-homebrew-manhattan-sst\/"},"modified":"2025-07-22T18:03:58","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T08:03:58","slug":"colin-m1buus-homebrew-manhattan-sst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2022\/03\/17\/colin-m1buus-homebrew-manhattan-sst\/","title":{"rendered":"Colin M1BUU’s Homebrew Manhattan SST"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n
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Wow, especially on St. Patrick’s day I think it is appropriate to say ” ’tis a thing of beauty. “<\/b><\/div>\n

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Colin did a great job on his homebrew version of the SST transceiver<\/a>. It looks like his is on 30 meters. I especially liked his description of the troubleshooting that followed the construction. the assist provided by AA7EE’s blog was especially cool, and demonstrates the long-lasting power of internet-shared tribal knowledge. <\/b><\/div>\n

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Colin wrote (on Facebook): <\/b><\/div>\n

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I was inspired by Bill and his adventure with the SST-20, so I started gathering a few parts last year to build a Manhattan SST. I did a joint SOTA activation with a fellow homebrewer ham at the end of January and we started talking about classic portable CW rigs, it turned out that we both had an SST build on our ‘list’. I was challenged to build the SST for the next joint SOTA activation!<\/b><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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It took a lot of effort and a few late nights but I did manage to produce a rig capable of making QSOs for a joint SOTA activation of Fair Snape Fell, G\/SP-007. I’d done a solo activation of Pendle Hill G\/SP-005 a few days before with the rig for a trial run and I discovered that the AF was very low. After some troubleshooting I noticed that I’d soldered the LM386 gain set capacitor to an incorrect pad. Doh! I fixed my error and the rig had much more gain.<\/b><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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I found that with the improved AF gain, the rig would squeal if the gain was turned up. I was ready to give up really, but after a cool off period, I began researching the issue and it turns out that it’s very common and indeed I found posts from 1997 about it! It seems as though my recreation was so faithful to the original, I’d included the original flaws too! I added in a 0.1uF cap and resistor connected to pin 5 of the AF amp chip as per the suggestion on Dave AA7EE’s blog and now the squealing has stopped.<\/b><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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I’d made 14 QSOs during the joint SOTA activation, so I considered my challenge to have been met! It’s been a bit of an epic build!<\/b><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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73, Colin, M1BUU<\/b><\/div>\n

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Wow, especially on St. Patrick’s day I think it is appropriate to say ” ’tis a thing of beauty. “ Colin did a great job on his homebrew version of the SST transceiver. It looks like his is on 30 meters. I especially liked his description of the troubleshooting that followed the construction. the assist … Continue reading “Colin M1BUU’s Homebrew Manhattan SST”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[510,492,202,324,299,25,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-30-meters","category-aa7ee","category-burdick-wayne","category-sota","category-sst","category-troubleshooting","category-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8920"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8924,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8920\/revisions\/8924"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}