A Crummy Commercial

 For example:  August 12, 2012   just punch in:  day of week aug 12 2012  into your fave search mechanism and you get: an insignificant date for me but it was a Sunday Easy !  Fast !  Assume it's correct :) I used to work for a Windows "shop" - our main program used email for group calendaring.  This was pre-internet, 386 boxes, windows 3.1, 10 megabyte hard drives, wired network with Netware,  et cetera (the stone age). But people were interested in answering silly questions with our program like: what was the day of the week their nephew was born ?  As long as the date wasn't too far back, no problem.  Just proceed backwards in time and view the calendar for the date you were interested in. But with an older date there could be problems.  For example:  November 22, 1963, December 7, 1941 or November 19, 1863.  Problems happened because the program would kerchunk in a non-zero sized file for each time period (...

 I finally found some 470 pF caps, hundreds of them, polystyrene, what was I going to do with them ?  Anyway, that was the part I was missing for the G3UUR oscillator. I tried searching for the published source of the G3UUR circuit on the internet, no luck.  I dug out the "Technical Topics" book I have, these were columns from Radcom, the magazine of the Radio Society of Great Britain, nothing found.  I did find articles by G3UUR in QEX magazine but none had the circuit.  Finally I looked at W7ZOI's article in the June 1995 issue of QEX, that seems to be the first mention of the circuit in ham radio literature. I built the 2 transistor circuit on a small white breadboard as seen here: G3UUR circuit at lower left, imperfection in the cover hides a 3 so 4,915,379 The output is a decent 1 volt or so square wave, plenty to drive the ebay counter. Here are the results: included all the digits As expected the correlation with either the NanoVNA or the Butler oscillato...

 Got out the NanoVNA to try measuring the crystals.  It's almost scary to turn on the NanoVNA due to all the email traffic on groupsio - people have trouble with updating the firmware, connecting to other computer apps and myriad other items.  So I've left the firmware as it came, only "problem" is that there are "only" 100 sample points in a sweep.  So I zoomed in to  100 Hz  from 4,915,150 to 4,915,250 Hz.  This way each sampling point is 1 Hz so the resolution matches the ebay counter. I viewed the W2AEW video on measuring crystals with the NanoVNA:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9zZRNzhsEE I noticed the crystal fixture W2AEW used.  I tried something a little different (see it on the left) using two male SMA connectors and a hunk of circuit board.  A Swiss army knife was used to cut the channels - kept cutting until the ohmmeter told me I had gotten rid of all shorts.  Pin sockets are used for the crystal connecti...

 I dug out the red counter red counter upper left and the W1FB crystal test board from Jan. 1990 QST, page 21 W1FB board upper left as well as the Butler grounded base oscillator still on the 3M breadboard  (see the previous blog: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/07/series-resonant-crystal-oscillator.html )  for a comparison.  All measurements were made with the clear top ebay counter.  The "red counter" was just used for the crystal oscillator.  The W1FB board is from FAR Circuits, only the oscillator part was built. The measurements were all made after a 30 second minimum "soak", the counter had been allowed to run for at least an hour.  I closed the window to make sure that there weren't any breeze effects.  The room temperature was 75F. only the last three digits of the frequency were entered And I don't see any perfect correlations, even between running the Butler oscillator in two different sessions.   It may be time to try the G3UU...

 I was trying to download a QST article by Rod, W9BRD from the ARRL site  http://www.arrl.org/members-only/qqnsearch.html   I kept getting this response: I doubt the sincerity of a website's sorrow Yes, I am signed in. I tried other articles by different authors, same thing. I filled in a web form (aka nastygram), hopefully they will fix it. I'm telling you whenever the internet changes it's almost always for the worse. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

 The heat/humidity broke today, a little more conducive to bench work.  So I thought I'd get back to a receiver project I was working on.  The circuit will be a cut-down version of the Norcal 40 rig using the inexpensive board from the QRP-L Tech group.   I had gotten to the point in the build where the crystals used in the filter (and BFO) need to be sorted/matched/tested.  In the Norcal 40 these are 4.9152 MHz crystals.  Normally people connect the crystals to an oscillator circuit and then measure the frequency.  The crystals which are closest in frequency are used.   The oscillator circuits mainly use the parallel mode of the crystal so the frequency read by the counter is going to be a little higher than the series mode. But I thought that since the crystals are being used in the series mode why not use a series mode oscillator circuit ?  I found this circuit on page 125 of Crystal Oscillator Circuits by Robert Matthys.   This ...

 Sometimes you need a louder sidetone than a piezo sounder can deliver.  One way is to feed the sidetone into an audio amplifier.  But that can be a pain, square wave audio has thumpy artifacts that are unpleasing.  Another way is to use the Piezo Loudenator kit  http://wb9kzy.com/louden.htm   previously mentioned here:  https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-4007-or-what-about-that-piezo.html One way that I mentioned back in the days of the PK-2 keyer was to use a dynamic speaker.   See:  http://wb9kzy.com/apntpk2a.pdf Page 4 has a simple transistor circuit to buffer the keyer chip output.  And you can see the difference in audio output between a small piezo and a dynamic speaker on the next two pages.  One reason why a small piezo isn't loud is that the fundamental frequency isn't being output.  This gives an idea why piezo elements are used in filters. For the heck of it I tried a slightly different circuit: slightly ...

source: https://media.newyorker.com/cartoons/62d1f96dfe240a421840d3f4/master/w_600,c_limit/220725_a25786.jpg Roz Chast is my favorite New Yorker cartoonist.  She abhors white space, wallpaper still lives in her world, perfect for the New Yorker since she is the wordliest of the cartoonists. source: https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/2/kafka-age-ten-roz-chast.jpg This one struck home since I started reading the obits about 10 years ago: source: https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large-5/new-yorker-october-25th-1993-roz-chas.jpg But my favorite New Yorker cartoon of all time is a Charles Addams:   source: https://live.staticflickr.com/4023/4654734691_feca0077a3_b.jpg   Can't remember if this was a cartoon or a cover ? Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm       

 Friday July 22, 2022: Good old N119RF was back again in the morning laser scanning the waters of Lake Michigan. maybe this is a Wisconsin thing ?  The seem to stop at the state boundary line with MI   A brief rain came through so they went down to Sturgeon Bay (airport: SUE) for early lunch. It wasn't a very ferocious storm, just a little rain and thunder But then they were back in the afternoon, still working that invisible grid over the lake.  They did seem to be making more do-over loops today. mistakes !   Maybe it's just like changing lanes on the highway when you are bored.  But if they were plowing a field those mistakes probably wouldn't be appreciated. they seem to like to add a last 90 degree pass at the end Wonder if they will fly on Saturday ?  We'll see. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

 Thursday July 21, 2022:  Just for grins rechecked N119RF again and there it was finishing the island scan but then it kept on scanning over Lake Michigan. finished the island and then started on the lake, and a quick pit stop to Escanaba   Not sure why, I wouldn't think that the laser could image below the waves.  The east side of the island is pretty shallow.  During low lake levels it's almost possible to walk to the adjacent islands like Rock Island and Hog Island. Although I heard the early passes I couldn't see the plane, just the tops of the trees to the east. They did come back in the afternoon and kept on scanning the lake. you can also see a couple of do-over loops It may have something to do with the lake depths.  Most of the towns in Door County are on the bay side of the peninsula (west) where the water is deeper near shore.  And they didn't seem to be interested in scanning the waters of Green Bay. I will check again on Friday and see if ...

 Wednesday July 20, 2022:  I tried looking for n119rf again  (see previous blog: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/07/spend-that-money.html ) this morning on the internet and yup, back again finishing the scan. back again I also caught N95912 on flightradar24 and flightaware.  This seems to be a weekly flight from the island to Oshkosh.  It appears that 2P2 is the designation for the Washington Island WI  airport. a quick trip to Oshkosh I also found this flight by N54246 (54246 is the zip code for Washington Island). this is a more expected "see the sights" type of flight, no straight lines Back to our friend, the scanner, I tried putting a 2x teleconverter on the 500 mm lens but this was about the best picture I could get.  It's hard to find the target with that much magnification.  Also:  "lead 'em a might, Jethro" - the sound from the plane is "behind" where it actually is. a handheld shot at 1/1000 of a second - I couldn't find my monopod...

 I heard a plane somewhere over the island (Tuesday July 19, 2022) and with the fly-in fish boil fresh in my mind I looked on flightradar24.com and noticed a plane on a weird flight path, making a series of parallel passes over the island. from flightradar24.com What was this pilot/plane doing ?  Kinda like it was cutting the grass using a mower with a lousy turning radius. Flew up from GB so probably not an islander, then all those passes (27?) from SW to NE.  Taking a training flight, taking data or photos or ? I tried looking up the N119RF and found this alternative to flightradar24: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N119RF Flightaware.com seems to smooth out the waypoints in a less jarring fashion than flightradar24.   Then it did one pass across the island from se to nw and then seemed to take a quick jump over to escanaba mi for  pit stop ? ended with a 90 degree pass and then flew over to Escanaba, MI 5 hours of flying, 777 miles. Looks expensive !...