Category: Equipment

Posted on

Two low cost items for the shack – a Signal Generator and a Hotspot

Our April meeting was held on Wednesday 17 April 2019 at the Lutheran Church Hall, King St from 7.30pm.

Mike ZL1AXG demonstrated his recently acquired $103 Signal Generator (KKMoon FY6800). This goes nicely with his new cheapie Hantek 5102p Oscilloscope. He put the signal generator through it’s paces, demonstrating different waveforms, amplitude and modulation effects, frequency changes, etc.

Malcolm ZL2UDF also talked about his D-Star Hotspot that plays into a 30w 2m transceiver to open up D-Star to all comers in Lower Hutt.

Posted on

City Windom

Mike ZL1AXG hosted Evgeny UA3AHM recently, and Evgeny left behind a gift of a “City Windom”.   Evgeny is a manufacturer of amateur antenna equipment and commercial duplexers.   He is a talented OM and designed the City Windom himself.    You can read all about it in an article he prepared here.

Posted on

Oscillator designs and the uBITx

Single valve oscillators were all the rage in the 20’s and 30’s.  We found out all about the origins and features of these oscillator designs at our 21 February meeting thanks to research done by Glenn Kingston ZL2KZ.   Glenn featured these designs in the construction competition in August 2017.

This was followed by a presentation from Mike ZL1AXG on the uBITx transceiver.  A separate summary and link to the presentation will follow.

Posted on

Some of us brought out our construction projects

The October meeting featured the annual Blackwood Cup.   Three entries were received – one each from Bernard ZL2BD, Ted ZL2TB and Mike ZL1AXG.   The trophy went to Mike ZL1AXG for his adaptations of the BITX40 transceiver.  But voting was very close.   Mike will be writing up his BITX40 mods on the Arduino section of this website as time allows.

Blackwood Cup 2017

The other projects included:

  • a 4 way antenna switch (from Bernard ZL2BD) which was beautifully presented (the case was made with 2 aluminium channels and a ).  Channel isolation was found to be around 70dB (i.e. excellent) with insertion loss in the fractions of 1dB;
  • a collection of home brew single lever paddle (from Ted ZL2TB) that use magnetic latching to provide a nice key “feel”.  Ted has a few for sale as well if anybody is looking for a nice non-iambic paddle.