A Crummy Commercial

 I was searching on Facepalm for pictures of the Nike site that was across the street from where I went to first grade in 1961/1962 (Indian Hill School, River Hills, WI), didn't find any this time. Here is a picture I found online a while back, the Nike site outlined in red (the missiles hidden behind earthen berms were on the right, the radar was on the left), the school I went to is at the bottom right: the Nike sites on Brown Deer road, River Hills WI   Here is a larger aerial picture of the school I found on Ebay, note the driveway shape: Indian Hill School, Brown Deer road, River Hills WI 1960 I understand that in the 1960s three batteries of Nike Hercules missiles were based at the River Hills site.  The Nike Hercules had atomic bomb payloads used to bring down enemy planes coming south over the pole.  And those missiles were across the street (OK almost a highway, Brown Deer road in River Hills WI) from a little school with kindergarteners and first graders, ...

 I always try to twist the bare leads of a piezo together before mailing a kit, especially if the piezo is put in the same bag as the rest of the kit. bare leads twisted together (left side) Why ?  As seen here a piezo sounder is not only a speaker but can also function as a microphone: waveform of me yelling into a piezo And as seen here, if a piezo is rapped on a bench top it'll generate a substantial voltage of over 20 volts - don't want that applied to static sensitive parts. waveform of piezo brought down hard on bench AND, the piezo is a highly capacitive part, seen here measuring 63 nF (or .063 uF) the piezo measured at 63 nF , we don't want whatever charge is stored on that capacitor to be discharged into the other kit parts. Is shorting the leads together effective ?  I dunno, but most mechanical meter movements are stored/shipped with their terminals shorted together (also some VOMs have an off position that does the shorting), I figure it can't hurt to do the...

 One thing that anyone fooling with electronics and radio ought to have is a good magnifier.  It's not just a matter of getting old, even young folks who have no trouble threading a needle might miss the laser part marking on components or questionable solder joints.  A good light source is important but pair it with a good magnifier for best results. I've collected some freebie magnifiers over the years.  This classic style magnifying "glass" was from a 20th century IEEE "Cherry Hill" testing tradeshow: one of the better freebies Another was from Mill-Max, I might have sent in a bingo card for that. a handy pocket magnifier   BTW I do buy Mill-Max sockets for the kits so the magnifier was a good investment on their part :) I've also got lenses from various 35 mm SLR cameras that can be used as a magnifier now that the era of film cameras is ending. not that great as a magnifier   The 50 mm "normal" lenses have very high-quality glass lenses bu...

 There are several reasons for choosing Morse code for the output of a project (sometimes the input as well). 1) less expensive than the alternative (LCD / LED / OLED  etc)  -  it's just cheaper to have a single output going to a piezo speaker than to some alternative output.  Both for the cost of the speaker versus the LED/LCD but also the number of chip pins.    An 8 pin microcontroller is a wonderful way to do a project and Morse code helps a lot to fit it into the 6 available pins (excluding power and ground).  Sometimes the Morse output can be patched into an existing audio circuit as with a keyer or frequency counter in a transceiver. 2) Lower power - no wonder that QRP operators/builders love the Morse based kits because running an LED (or LCD display with a backlight) on batteries uses a lot of juice.  A Morse code kit can be sitting there sleeping and consuming almost no power until it is actuated. 3) Fun - some people like to c...

The computer does EXACTLY what I tell it to do (at least with PIC microcontrollers).  The problem is that what I tell it to do is often flawed logically, in other words  the computer does what I tell it to do, not what I want it to do. This happened with the LCD Metronome period timer: a period of 1.1767 Sec I just couldn't get it to work and then it finally dawned on me what the problem was.  Most LCD alphanumeric displays use a Hitachi chip known as the HD44780 (or a clone).  To save pins the data and commands are written to the 44780 chip in 4 bit blocks (4 bit nybbles versus 8 bit bytes, get it ?).  Although I had been writing the characters in two nybbles, with the control data I had only written 1 nybble so the display was jumbled.  An easy fix once I realized what was happening.   Not much of a blog post but sometimes I get frustrated. There are times when after clanging my head against the wall a sudden inspiration comes and the problem gets fi...

. . . refers to the time between the engine shutoff of a V-1 buzz bomb and the explosion of the 1 ton bomb payload.  It is also the title of a recent book by Jamie Holmes which covers the development of a counter to the V-1 and nearly all flying weaponry, the proximity fuse. The man behind the proximity fuse is Merle Tuve (pictured here at the left next to Enrico Fermi, Neils Bohr is at the far right) Merle Tuve, Enrico Fermi on left, Neils Bohr on right     Interestingly, we learn that Merle was a whiz at Morse code and also was a boyhood friend of Ernest Lawrence (of Lawrence Livermore Lab fame).  Btw, an excellent book about Lawrence titled: Big Science was written by Michael Hiltzik The proximity fuse is one of the most impressive developments of World War II.  It allowed an anti-aircraft shell to explode when in the near vicinity of a plane.  The amazing thing is that this was done with vacuum tubes, the circuitry was exposed to accelerations of as m...

. . . and the ARRL taketh away Alas my first blog post is already incorrect, the ARRL is going to revamp ARRL.ORG soon and maybe this was a part of it     https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/01/my-name-is-chuck-and-my-ham-radio.html Retrying the N6NWP search I got the same articles but the QEX articles can't be downloaded anymore :(  bummer the QEX articles can't be downloaded And my subsequent blog post on the NCJ articles being downloadable has the same result. https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/01/arrl-periodicals-archive-and-search.html and the NCJ articles can't be downloaded either It was nice while it lasted Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

 I woke on March 23, 2022 to the sound of my water distiller turning off, about 5:31am (it has a loud fan that takes a while to wind down).  After a second I realized that the power had probably gone out and it had.  It stayed off until about 7:55am.  Since then we've had a couple of blips but otherwise OK. The outages were undoubtedly due to the weather, temp was about 33 but it must have been a little colder as there was ice on the trees and when that happens branches and trees fall messing up the power. The only benefit of our RF noisy power meters noisy power meter in a different season   (see the Youtube videos:  http://wb9kzy.com/power.htm ) is that they "talk" to the co-op and when they stop "talking" the co-op knows that there's trouble and roughly where it is. To the north I could see that the lights were on so the power line fault must have been on the phase that serves this side of the road.  And about 6:47a I heard a few "dings" on the...

 I tried using the solderless breadboard concept along with an old portable radio cabinet to quickly put the metronome together into a usable form: packaged metronome It works fairly well, I wanted a 20k ohm pot for the range between roughly 40 to 50 beats per minute but didn't have any.  I did have some 10k ohm pots with detents which I had bought for another idea. They have 11 detents (I couldn't find any with 10) and all I could think of was: goes to 11 although I guess you'd really need 12 detents to go from 0 to 11 so it doesn't really apply.  In any case the pots weren't all that linear so I went with 10 position switches and 9 resistors for that project instead so I had the detent pots available.  Weirdly the rotary switches do have 12 positions so 0 to 11 is doable :) I didn't plan ahead so I had to cut two holes in the battery tray on the back of the radio cabinet to allow the pots to fit.  So that prevented a rapid prototype. holes cut in battery tray ...

After the previous FPM-200 blog post I was thinking:  what did the Allied catalog have in the October 1962 time frame.  Unfortunately I didn't find the 1962 catalog on the World Radio History site. so I did a search and noticed this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k14oj-4mExY Completely new concept to me, paging through a catalog on Youtube, brilliant.  However the http://www.alliedcatalogs.com site on the Youtube video just comes up blank. screen cap of FPM-200 in the 1962 Allied catalog So the Allied price is also $1995 although that seems to include the power supply, not sure on the mobile bracket.  So I suspect that $1995 was the original price of the FPM-200 bundle, this was during the era of "fair trade" but I don't recall seeing any ads in QST proclaiming discounts although most ham dealer seemed to tout trade-ins so plenty of leeway there for pricing. Here again is that WRL ad from QST World Radio Labs ad 10/1962 QST page 157 I did check the 1961 Allie...

 I finally got my conversion of the Morse Speedometer to Metronome Period Timer to work OK with an 8x2 LCD. Decided to quickly box it since the 8x2 LCD was already mounted to the box lid.  Instead of building the circuit onto a piece of perf board I just peeled the wax paper off the back of the little solderless breadboard and affixed it to the lid: small solderless breadboard back of breadboard with self stick foam solderless breadboard attached to back of box lid, LCD module on top, jacks on bottom Then I added a 3.5 mm input jack and a coaxial power jack.  Unfortunately this bogged down the quick boxing.  The plastic box (from our old, departed friend, Radio Shack) has a thick top so the shaft of the 3.5mm jack wasn't long enough to engage the threads of the retaining nut.  I replaced that jack with a rather expensive Amphenol jack which had a longer shaft.  Second the coaxial power jack just didn't want to work so I had to replace that one as well. Fina...

 Referring to my original blog post on the FPM-200 and the BLS online inflation calculator:  https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/01/bls-inflation-calculator-internet.html I noticed this item for sale on ebay:  https://www.ebay.com/itm/114783949492 WRL ad in October 1961 QST World Radio Labs is advertising (in QST from October 1961, page 157) the FPM-200 at a significantly lower price ($1795) than the one from the 1963 Allied catalog ($2650). The question is what the $2650 price from Allied included, maybe the power supply which WRL sells for $125 ?  The mobile rack is another $75 from WRL. Even if all three items were included by Allied at $2650 they would only have been $1995 from WRL, so a $655 difference. I'll just plug $655 into the inflation calculator:  that's  $6194 in 2022 dollars !    https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=655&year1=196110&year2=202202 Now the other factor is that the WRL ad is from 1961 and the Allied ca...

Some time ago Yahoo did the mass-kickoff of their user groups.  And they encouraged everyone to download the backups of messages and files.  With many groups this wasn't needed as there was a migration to groups.io.  But with others the Yahoo "event" was a termination of the group, it happens, sometimes groups just never have that core number of contributors to keep them going. Well, one day I was looking for some information from a Yahoo group I had been in, MUUG (which I don't remember what the initials mean ;) - it was a group about Traxmaker and Circuitmaker, abandonware for schematic capture, simulation and also circuit board design.  I really like the software and use Traxmaker especially for designing circuit boards. So I hunted around for my Yahoo backup - everything came in one lump - I had uploaded it to the cloud and finally remembered that I had put it there. I download it from the cloud and start looking at the MUUG messages.  I'm not finding what I...

In the process of working on the 555 metronome I was using my B&K 2190d digital scope. B&K 2190d   It has a lot of nice features including measuring the period of a waveform.  But it only does this to a precision of 10 milliseconds for a long period waveform (over a second in this case). I got out a frequency counter that I had purchased on ebay, but it doesn't measure waveform period.  I do have an HP 5328 counter but unfortunately it needs fixing. Then I recalled a Morse Speedometer project I had (see http://wb9kzy.com/projects.htm ).  I got it out thinking that it would "display" the period in Morse code.  But it didn't work.  So I dug into the code and got it to read half the period.  The resolution is 100 us. The 555 timer outputs a 15 ms wide blip up to 9 volts and then goes low for the rest of the period.   For 40 beats per minute the period is 60 seconds/40 beats or 1.5 seconds/beat so 15 ms high, then 1485 ms low for 1500 ms tota...

I exercise each day (unless of course I'm feeling lazy).  I've been using the Nordic Track ski machine for at least 30 years now.  But recently I decided to increase the time I exercise.  It didn't trigger any huge improvement in my health. I realized that I usually watch the clock a lot while exercising.  I listen to Old Time Radio or Chapter a Day while exercising.  The Nordic Track has a speedometer/odometer/pulse sensor thingy but I hadn't been looking at it because the non-backlit LCD display was hard to see (due to glare).   I was going to try building an analog speedometer (which I may still do) but first tried moving the Nordic Track speedo so that it was easier to see, this helped a lot. I still look at the clock a lot but now I also check the speedo, too.  I've noticed that my step rate is well below 60 per minute and that the speed is usually below 7 kph, just inside the "green zone" of the Nordic Track speedo.  As might be expected whe...

 When I was interested in investing I read a book by Peter Lynch (the former manager of the Fidelity Magellan mutual fund) called "One up on Wall Street"   The idea was that people know stuff from their everyday lives that may serve them well when investing.  And that individual investors are free to act on this knowledge where institutional investors either won't or can't make the same investments. I think something similar could be said for electronics / ham radio.  An experimenter has the time and insight to apply ideas to his projects that just wouldn't be practical or tolerable in industry (in other words, too expensive). I remember when I was starting out as an engineer, being in a quick, stand-up conversation between myself (an IC test engineer in Receiving Inspection), the QA supervisor and some design and production engineers.  They had a problem circuit that would only work with certain IC chips - they wanted me to test the ICs and sort them for this o...

This is one of those situations where I thought I had been smart and frugal.  Some time ago I had bought this cable on Ebay: blue RJ-45 to 9 pin D cable from Ebay on the FT-450d manual   It has a male 9 pin D connector on one end and an 8 pin RJ-45 crimp connector on the other end.  The idea was that surely since there were 8 wires going to the crimp connector that all 8 would appear on the 9 pin D connector. Nope. Only 7 of the 8 signals are present, the missing signal is the MIC GND which I suspect is needed. What I was hoping to do was to use the cable as is and have a 9 pin female D connector on a metal box of some kind.  This would allow me to have jacks for multiple items like a foot-switch, 1/4 inch phone jack for a Shure 444 microphone, 3.5mm jack for a Koss headset.  Also there could be switches for the UP/FAST/DOWN  capability just like the Yaesu hand mic. But I suspect I'll have to cut off the cable and add a short cable to a 3.5mm female jack a...

 I usually check the batteries in stuff on the time change day.  I finally abandoned alkaline batteries (except button cells where there's often no alternative) and started using Energizer Ultimate Lithium AA and AAA cells.  I use the Tenergy Centura 9V  batteries in smoke alarms ( Centura is the low self discharge Nimh line ). The reason for changing from alkalines is found in this box: box with items to be fixed "real soon now"   all the stuff where the contacts have been damaged by leaking alkalines: calculators, clocks, flashlights to be fixed And it's not like a spent alkaline cell provides these beauties: D cell carbon rod and AA cell carbon rod with metal cap    carbon rods from carbon-zinc cells (be sure to leave the end cap on, otherwise it's harder to make a connection). Another task for time change day is to change the non-radio clocks that need it like the thermostat.  And there's always one WWVB clock that didn't get the memo from Co...

 I updated noteindx.txt recently.  It's a chronological list of the page titles of my notebooks: The Sony 2010 is a shortwave receiver As shown, I use the find capability in Notepad to search for a key word.  It's not like using a true search engine but usually good enough to find the entry I want. As mentioned previously I try to write the date on any circuit and then have a corresponding entry in my notebook. date on the top of the K2 supply the dates just need to be close :) Although it's pleasant to leaf through a notebooks to look for stuff after more than one notebook it becomes kind of a chore: the over 20 lab notebooks on a shelf next to the bench so noteindx.txt became a necessity.  I write the time span of the notebook on the cover the cover of the first notebook with date range and also in noteindx.txt.  A more organized person would have color coding or numbering on the spine but this is good enough for me. an amplifier for the microphone output of ...

A customer emailed about an LM2936 regulator that worked with a 9V battery but got hot with a 13.8V supply, yikes !  As mentioned in previous blogs, the LM2936 is a fave of mine, it is low power and hard to kill.  I've never had a report of failure until now. https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/02/ldo-regulator-ic-chips.html I emailed the customer back, requesting more info.   Then I tried seeing if I could duplicate the problem.  First I tried reversing the LM2936, swapping the output for the input.  It used about 18 uA and no output voltage.   I put the LM2936 back the correct way but then reversed polarity from the supply.  There was a brief blip of current (maybe from the input cap ?) and then the meter just read 0. Finally I tried inserting the LM2936 as if it were a Seiko regulator (remembering that the reverse situation had caused a problem previously).  https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/03/a-kit-weakness-revealed.html    Bingo !...

I started playing the Wordle game recently.   https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html    It's fun and although challenging, it's not impossible and especially not time consuming since it's one-a-day.  BTW, for no really good reason my first guess is usually AEGIS Anyway I naturally thought about possibly converting it to a Morse code format.   The first step (in my opinion) was to get the full list of words to date.  I've put them into a text file and uploaded to the cloud where I'll update daily. https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZI7fVVZ7TnI69BQuAQjtg2SY1yzASRT4ngk I dunno if I'll actually create a keyer type version, the basis is there in the MegaPK-II but the word storage would be limited.  It might be better to have an external eeprom of a larger size that could be filled with a computer connection. A keyer chip plus an eeprom might also be used for something like a Morse book ?  A book in text format could be downloaded from Gu...

 I received an inquiry about the Simple Keyer kit:  http://wb9kzy.com/simpkeyr.htm The Simple Keyer kit was an elegant, 2 chip design by N1HFX.  I had made some slight changes to lower the standby power usage. People always claim they hate menus and want simple stuff but really, simple doesn't sell.  Another reason for discontinuing the kit was because I hated prepunching the tin. The circuit board is relatively cheap/easy to bring back.  The sockets and passive components aren't a problem. Not sure if I have the pot/knob, also the connectors.  Connectors have skyrocketed in price if you can get them at all.  The last bunch I bought didn't fit the board so that is an issue.  Also I used to be able to buy the metric retaining rings for the 3.5mm connectors from Mouser (along with a tool to tighten them) but they aren't sold any longer. I do have one of the ICs and the other is still available from Mouser. I guess the bottom line is that it would be...

Every January the USPS raises the postal rates.  Actually in recent years the USPS raises rates in December, surge pricing for the holidays.  But one year the price for 1st Class Parcels only went up slightly.  BUT the USPS raised the minimum weight from 1 oz to 4 oz where it is in 2022. Since I was paying for 4 oz at a minimum I thought that I might as well stop buying bubble pack mailers (3 x 5 000 size) and start recycling the shipping boxes I receive as smaller boxes for mailing kits. I developed a small box using a Digi-Key box as a starting point.  I made up a pattern box pattern which is then traced onto a larger piece of cardboard (hopefully with minimum folds). pattern box clamped to cardboard traced pattern on cardboard the new box after cutting on the lines score lightly on fold lines with scissors and straight edge here is the pattern box and the new box folded   new box weighed, a little over and ounce Strapping tape is used on the three axes to se...