A Crummy Commercial

C'mon AI, you can do better than this: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLD29BMGu48 This is what Mike Kovak would have used, even in the late 1950s early 1960s, a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic (or equivalent), here is Charles Bronson as Mike Kovac holding one: I actually have two Kodak Duaflexes (the camera in the thumbnail) around here somewhere.  One I bought, the other was a gift from a nice lady in Whitefish Bay when I was a kid.  It took decent pictures but no, it wasn't capable of newspaper quality ! Here's a nice page on the Kodak Duaflex, with this photo of Vivian Vance: The Duaflex suits Vivian Vance better than Charles Bronson source:  https://www.jeremymuddphoto.com/blog/2023/8/27/kodak-duaflex-iv The focusing was strictly by guess, the finder was only for framing the shot.  With a camera like a Rollei the photographer would compose and focus the picture using the top lens.  The Duaflex exposure could be varied but only slightly.  It used 620 ...

The black Moscow skies later resulted in oily rain I was watching Ukraine: The Latest on Youtube: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scnurany_C8 I used to listen to this podcast a lot but you know how it is, you get tired of stuff - also the original host of the show, David Knowles, died while on vacation in Gibraltar in 2024, that kinda cast a shadow over the podcast for me. Anyway, the footage of the drone attack was amazing, Little Brother has been busy.  Was this what the V-1 attacks were like on London during World War II ? The trouble with shooting drones down is that the stuff in the air still comes down to earth (the people in Honolulu found this out during the attack on Pearl Harbor): A crane tower functioned as an anti-drone fortification: The lid of this oil tank was blown off: Take that Red Baron ! Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm 

Continued from yesterday: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/06/morsemaster-ii-shaped-code.html   I did try the MorseMaster II sidetone on the solderless breadboard.  It actually works pretty well.  Here is an short pulse from the LM380 output with the RC filtering: It seems to me that I tried this circuit before but found it thumpy.  This time the thumping is minimal.  The two high pass RC pairs may account for this - I may have not used the spec'd parts before.  The only problem, noticed with headphones, is backwave.  There is a low level audio signal coming from the 555 chip which is running all the time - think of it as an on frequency QRP audio station which is key down all the time ! The backwave can be reduced by adding a series resistor to the headphones, I tried 180 ohms but more experimentation might help. Update, 2026-6-18:  I tried a 1000 ohm resistor in place of the 180 ohm, really seems to knock down the backwave, of course the  v...

How many zillions of 555 based code practice oscillators are there beeping away ?  Probably quite a few - I remembered that my MorseMaster II project has one, previously mentioned here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/02/bad-cap.html     But the original MorseMaster II design by Mike, KJ4LN cleverly upgraded the 555, adding shaping to the waveform and RC filtering: So I thought about adding those circuits to my MorseMaster.  One interesting note: the 555 in the Morsemaster II runs continuously so really the circuits add keying, shaping and filtering.  The steady 555 current doesn't matter that much considering the power used by the microcontroller is fairly high. First, using a solderless breadboard, here are the full pulse and the zoom in on ramp up / down waveforms all at the the collector of Q4: . 4 ms rise time 8 ms fall time Next, here is the shaped square wave, with rise and fall zooms: That's about as far as I gotten so far, I'll add the filter and LM380...

Sometimes I'll get an inquiry on a kit: can you build it for me ? I've almost always answered: NO Why not ?  several reasons: I end up making choices on the enclosure and other parts that the buyer may not like. I am getting older, it's getting harder to build even through hole kits now - I just can't see as well. magnifiers help but being able to see well without optical help is really handy for building kits Building also takes time, even at $15 per hour that mounts up. As a kit seller I would be skirting the FCC regulations by selling something built which may or may not pass EMI requirements.  But a home kit builder doesn't have to worry about this.     Note that this isn't really true of unclocked kits, like the Keyall series.  And consider that if you do buy a built version of a Keyall with similar specs (a MOSFET SSR) a buyer will find they are fairly expensive in comparison to a Keyall HV.   Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ha...

I get an email from Nuts and Volts magazine weekly with some links to free articles (see the newsletter signup link at the bottom of the page): https://www.nutsvolts.com/ This article caught my eye recently: https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/some-simple-transistor-and-ic-circuits Here is the web site of the author, KE3FL:   https://www.cs.yrex.com/ke3fl/ The circuit that interested me was ramping the brightness of an LED up and down slowly to blink it.   I finally read the article, the circuit is a phase shift oscillator but at less than 1 Hz so the caps are big (electrolytics).  The author's video looks good although it's in subdued light.  I had a little trouble getting the circuit to play (didn't have a white LED at hand) so I tried simulating it with LTSpice: the green trace is out, the blue trace is sine this is the collector voltage Since it does seem to simulate I tried fiddling with it - got it to sustain oscillation by increasing the series res...

I didn't know about this: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41U78QP8nBk But of course Arthur C. Clarke knew: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8N72t7aScY 1968 was 58 years ago and about the only thing we've accomplished above and beyond  2001: a space odyssey is that computers now can sing Daisy better: https://soundcloud.com/midnightalchemist7/daisy-bell-ai-evolution Or maybe (depending on your opinion) not even that ! Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm