Archive for the ‘hamradio’ Category
Setting a Baofeng on FIRE!
October 20th, 2015 | 
Author: I came across this video through the qrz.com forums. K5CLC did some extreme testing of a Baofeng UV-5R, including setting it on FIRE! The results are interesting. Skip to 2:57 to see the flames. I really like my Baofeng HT…not as my primary radio but as the one that is with me when I’m working on the farm, tinkering in the barn, or anytime I’m likely to have dirty hands.
Setting a Baofeng on FIRE!
I came across this video through the qrz.com forums. K5CLC did some extreme testing of a Baofeng UV-5R, including setting it on FIRE! The results are interesting. Skip to 2:57 to see the flames. I really like my Baofeng HT…not as my primary radio but as the one that is with me when I’m working on the farm, tinkering in the barn, or anytime I’m likely to have dirty hands.
The builder bug
It looks like I’m coming down with another case of the “builder bug”. That’s what I call it when I get the urge to make stuff. For the last couple of years, I’ve been content playing with digital repeaters I’ve cobbled together, or wiring up a TNC for a Raspberry pi in recent months. But now, I’m looking at Arduinos. These boards are a little lower level than the full-blown Linux system I’ve come to love with the pi. The Arduinos have incredible potential because of their simplicity. With very lower power consumption, and nearly instant power up, I can see many uses for these wonders of the 21st century. My youngest daughter is working on a project to provide weather data from the high school’s crop test plot 4 miles away. That led us to looking at building a weather station from scratch, which led to Arduinos, which then led to…well you get the point. I’ve now found at least four other projects that I could accomplish with these little microcontrollers. I placed an order for an $4 UNO last night. Let the fun begin!
The builder bug
It looks like I’m coming down with another case of the “builder bug”. That’s what I call it when I get the urge to make stuff. For the last couple of years, I’ve been content playing with digital repeaters I’ve cobbled together, or wiring up a TNC for a Raspberry pi in recent months. But now, I’m looking at Arduinos. These boards are a little lower level than the full-blown Linux system I’ve come to love with the pi. The Arduinos have incredible potential because of their simplicity. With very lower power consumption, and nearly instant power up, I can see many uses for these wonders of the 21st century. My youngest daughter is working on a project to provide weather data from the high school’s crop test plot 4 miles away. That led us to looking at building a weather station from scratch, which led to Arduinos, which then led to…well you get the point. I’ve now found at least four other projects that I could accomplish with these little microcontrollers. I placed an order for an $4 UNO last night. Let the fun begin!
Project updates
The last few weeks have been very productive on the ham radio front! I cleaned up the coax routing for my Icom 2820 I had installed in the new pickup. While it was only slightly messy, the extra tie wraps and cable management make me feel better. I also installed a GPS puck antenna so the 2820 now shows my position on every D-STAR transmission I make. I had this setup with the 880 in the previous truck, but never had this setup on the 2820. It was very simple – plug in the antenna, change a few settings, and you’re good to go. I used a $10 antenna from Amazon.
I moved the antenna for my FlightRadar24.com ADS-B feed radio to a higher location at the end of the pole barn. This required also moving the ubiquiti 2GHz data radio I use to provide internet access to the radio. Luckily I had enough spare mast clamps and hardware to turn this into a nice afternoon project.
At the WX9WX D-STAR homebrew repeater site, the building owner called and wanted our AREDN mesh antenna moved a bit higher. The initial request was for the antenna to be low enough that it couldn’t be seen from the road. Now we needed to move it higher so that workers on the roof wouldn’t be at eye level with the transmitter. Having worked in the corporate world for quite some time, changing requirements or expectations is something I’m used to. So up to the roof we went, and up another 6 feet went the antenna!
This week Tom KJ9P and I moved the repeater to its newly coordinated frequency. Changing the frequencies on the Motorola radios was a piece of cake thanks to software and a laptop. Re-tuning the duplexer at the site was more of a challenge. I’ve tuned quite a few duplexers in the last three years, but never one at a site. I found that without a portable signal generator that could go down in the microvolts, it was difficult to do the precise tuning I normally do on the bench. Luckily a quick phone call to Fred KC9REG, who was 27 miles away, resulted in an EXCELLENT weak signal for final testing!
The next projects involve cleaning up the shack. Does anyone ever finish cleaning up the shack? Maybe I should lower my expectations. Finally, I must get an antenna up for 160m before the winter. Plans for a skywire loop are underway. Now to find 600′ of 12 gauge wire and some ladder line…
Project updates
The last few weeks have been very productive on the ham radio front! I cleaned up the coax routing for my Icom 2820 I had installed in the new pickup. While it was only slightly messy, the extra tie wraps and cable management make me feel better. I also installed a GPS puck antenna so the 2820 now shows my position on every D-STAR transmission I make. I had this setup with the 880 in the previous truck, but never had this setup on the 2820. It was very simple – plug in the antenna, change a few settings, and you’re good to go. I used a $10 antenna from Amazon.
I moved the antenna for my FlightRadar24.com ADS-B feed radio to a higher location at the end of the pole barn. This required also moving the ubiquiti 2GHz data radio I use to provide internet access to the radio. Luckily I had enough spare mast clamps and hardware to turn this into a nice afternoon project.
At the WX9WX D-STAR homebrew repeater site, the building owner called and wanted our AREDN mesh antenna moved a bit higher. The initial request was for the antenna to be low enough that it couldn’t be seen from the road. Now we needed to move it higher so that workers on the roof wouldn’t be at eye level with the transmitter. Having worked in the corporate world for quite some time, changing requirements or expectations is something I’m used to. So up to the roof we went, and up another 6 feet went the antenna!
This week Tom KJ9P and I moved the repeater to its newly coordinated frequency. Changing the frequencies on the Motorola radios was a piece of cake thanks to software and a laptop. Re-tuning the duplexer at the site was more of a challenge. I’ve tuned quite a few duplexers in the last three years, but never one at a site. I found that without a portable signal generator that could go down in the microvolts, it was difficult to do the precise tuning I normally do on the bench. Luckily a quick phone call to Fred KC9REG, who was 27 miles away, resulted in an EXCELLENT weak signal for final testing!
The next projects involve cleaning up the shack. Does anyone ever finish cleaning up the shack? Maybe I should lower my expectations. Finally, I must get an antenna up for 160m before the winter. Plans for a skywire loop are underway. Now to find 600′ of 12 gauge wire and some ladder line…
Creating open-source ham radio hardware with Kickstarter
When I started my company last year, it was mainly set up as a design consulting outfit to pick up a few jobs on the side. At the end of 2014, it became much more when I decided to plunge full-time into my own work. At the time, one of my respected friends and colleagues, Don Powrie of DLP Design, said to me that the only way to make consistent money is to have a product line rather than rely on consulting work. I’ve been thinking of how to bring that to market ever since. I could certainly design some familiar products to me, but they would get lost in the plethora of similar items. I needed something unique.
I started out with a 5V @ 5A design. I drew the schematic and completed the PCB layout and started to check pricing and availability of the parts. Most everything was available at Digi-Key, and the Anderson Connectors from Mouser, but the total was getting close to where I wanted the selling price to be. For a $35 computer, I couldn’t justify a $70-$80 power board!! The DC-DC converter also had a very large ground pad for heat dissipation. I wanted this project to be able to be hand-soldered and started wondering about that large pad. That design got scrapped and I started looking for another buck converter. There were several TI and Linear products I considered, but they would have required a reflow oven – either with a center pad, as a BGA, or leadless formats. Then I found the Alpha & Omega AOZ1031AI. This is a 8-pin SOIC without any special pad. The only heat-dissipation suggestion was that pins 7 and 8 do not have any thermal relief, but connect fully to the surrounding plane. I selected larger commodity parts (0805) that could be seen without a microscope and created the layout, and all parts were in stock at either Digi-Key or Mouser Electronics. I got everything on order, and even managed to get a couple free PCBs from Pentalogix. I had attended a Pentalogix-sponsored Cadsoft Eagle webinar at Newark and the perk was a code for two boards. I just had to cover shipping.
I did other tests: Let it run for 8 hours (check), ramp voltage from 6 to 18V input (check). At 7V input, the Pi kept rebooting. At 8V, it was solid – well past the design spec. Same at 18V.
Next up was the load test. With 2A going direct to load resistors, I was still able to run the Pi with all four USB ports occupied. I even dipped the supply to 8V. The bench supply showed about 1.8A output. Based on an approximate 80% efficiency of DC-DC converter, I calculated I was drawing about 3.5A on the 5V side – a little past its limit, so backed off the load. I’ve been running this directly from my radio supply now for several days, and the Pi keeps chugging along.
I’m a believer in open-source hardware and software. This project will be published in the coming days, probably on GitHub. Eagle uses XML design files, so version control should work just fine. I still need to write the manual, but everything will be made available as soon as I get the proper README and LICENSE files in place. All of my work for this project is published under the Creative Commons Attribution and Share-Alike license. The hardware itself is published under the TAPR Open Hardware License.
