A Crummy Commercial

Saw this: Immediately wondered about the semi-obligatory inflated price: And because it is almost 2026, I am thinking of raising my postage charge on kit orders to $6 per order from the present $5, as someone would have said in the 1960s: "rats" Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm 

Continuing from yesterdays blog: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/12/short-circuits.html   Here is a simple, fun, discrete component AM Morse Code Transmitter from the Short Circuits volume 1, page 30: The circuit shows .1 uF audio timing caps for the flip flop but I changed them to .22 uF which  lowered the frequency to about 660 Hz: I can't remember where I got the ferrite antenna but it was the only one I had with 4 leads:      After hooking up the last transistor I got these waveforms at about 480 kHz: damped carrier about 6 div x .25 ms per div = 1.5 ms period or about 670 Hz damped carrier, 4.2 divisions x 500 us per division = 2.1 us period or about 476 kHz The bell shaped decay - is this similar to how a spark waveform would have looked ?  Anyway a functional simple circuit, worth trying but it needs work.  It is lower in frequency due to the scope probe capacitance as well as the solderless breadboard capacitance. The Short Circuits volume 1 c...

I saw these Jaycar (an Australian electronics seller) electronics books for beginners mentioned on the GQRP list (page down to the bottom): https://www.jaycar.com.au/short-circuits The idea is relatively simple and fun circuits that are easy to construct and understand.  The first volume has discrete circuits assembled on a solderless setup.  The later books have solder projects with circuit boards and parts kits sold by Jaycar.  For example this FM radio caught my eye: But then I looked for the TDA7000 and found that while it could be found on Ebay it is discontinued.  The prices on the TDA7000 chips that are available are high, probably would be cheaper to just get an old FM radio that used the TDA7000 ?  Here is a really interesting blog post on the TDA7000: https://www.righto.com/2025/08/reverse-engineering-analog-TDA7000.html BTW the blogger, Ken Shirriff, is one of the cast of the Curious Marc videos on Youtube !  Here is his traced out schematic for ...

It didn't really turn out that well: I still had 4 quarts of canned maple sap that I never drank (was going to use it for iced tea or lemonade or ?) so the decision was made to do a final boil to maple syrup.  Except that I forgot to measure the sugar concentration before starting.  So I stopped too early and got maybe twice the volume (7 oz) that I should have. It's sweet and will work OK to sweeten coffee or tea but a little too watery for pancakes. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm 

I do try to do computer backups on Saturday, mainly of this blog.  Today after the backup I checked and found this: Quite a gap from October 11 to December 13.  What am I doing wrong ?  I'm not sure.  But today I was signed into Archive, hopefully that will help.  I clicked the link at the bottom of the weekly listing of blog posts and then backed that weeks worth of blogs up.  In that way I was able to save all the posts in the gap (I think).  Luckily I have a pretty high threshold for boredom - it was 9 weeks worth of blogs. So a backup is worthless unless verified, especially with a somewhat slap-happy entity like archive :( update 2025-12-14: signing in didn't help, the Wayback dumped my backup attempt yesterday:    I will try a nastygram or maybe turn off the VPN ? Weird ! Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

I used to live/work in Northlake IL.  Recently I took a "drive" around Northlake using Google.  It's been over 30 years since I've physically been in Northlake so allow me a little curiosity :)  As far as I know the town was named Northlake because two main arterial roads, Lake Street and North Avenue cross at the western boundary of Cook County / Northlake - in other words a very practical place not fancy.  Suburb names in Chicagoland could be weird though, there is one called Oakbrook which had a big mall / shopping center, and then next to it is Oakbrook Terrace, maybe not quite as upscale but again, practical :) I actually had been looking for a building to the east on North Avenue that had an old Zenith plant: next suburb east of Northlake is Melrose Park, IL They made picture tubes there but of course picture tubes and Zenith have not prospered over the last 30 years.  One of the engineers at GTE used to work at this Zenith Rauland plant.  He said the...

I found this Ameco HP-300T during my eternal search: Here is the packaging: And the instructions: I have no recollection of buying this - must have been a tail-end addition to get to a minimum order amount ? I was thinking of maybe looking at it with the NanoVNA but then would need baluns and also possibly attenuators and became mentally exhausted !  :) I wonder if anyone ever needs these anymore ?  I remember the evening cries at my house when I was in high school:  "TVI - TVI !"   In other words, time to pull the switch, Chuck.  I don't know why I didn't have one of these Ameco or equivalent filters.  TVI always depended on the channel being viewed and the band being transmitted on.  But reading the instructions above, maybe the problem was harmonics from the HW-16 ?  A filter like this wouldn't have helped.  In a way I miss those days. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm