AmateurRadio.com

From their website:

Airspy is an advanced software defined radio receiver capable of sampling 10MHz of spectrum anywhere between 24MHz and 1.7GHz – and even beyond with extensions. It all started when we needed a good performing receiver that’s still affordable but could not find a good solution in the market, so we designed ours. We believe that as of today, Airspy is the only serious wide band receiver solution that’s high performance and yet affordable.

Some specs:

• Continuous 24 – 1750 MHz RX range with no gaps
• 3.5 dB NF between 42 and 1002 MHz
• Tracking RF filters
• 35dBm IIP3 RF front end
• 12bit ADC @ 20 MSPS (80dB Dynamic Range, 64dB SNR, 10.4 ENOB) – Yeah, size does matter.
• Up to 80 MSPS for custom applications
• Cortex M4F @ up to 204MHz with Multi Core support (dual M0)
• 1.5 ppm high precision, low phase noise clock
• 1 RTC clock (for packet time-stamping)
• External clock input (10 MHz to 100 MHz via MCX connector) – Ideal for phase coherent radios
• 10 MHz panoramic spectrum view with 9MHz alias/image free
• IQ or Real, 16bit fixed or 32bit float output streams
• No IQ imbalance, DC offset or 1/F noise at the center of the spectrum that plagues all the other SDRs
• Extension ports: 16 x SGPIO
• 1 x RF Input (SMA)
• 1 x RF Output (Loopthrough, U-FL)
• 2 x High Speed ADC inputs (up to 80 MSPS, U-FL)
• 4.5v software switched Bias-Tee to power LNA’s and up/down-converters

Thoughts:

From what I’ve read, the big advantage of this over a standard RTL-SDR dongle is much less noise. I haven’t used one, but if it really lives up to their claims the $199 price point is actually pretty reasonable.

http://www.airspy.com / $199

It’s still beautiful even though most of the leaves are off the trees. I’ve gotten out the last two days. Yesterday a bike ride in East Andover… today I used the DSW in a field on Shute Hill to work Curacao, the Netherlands and a 2-way QRP QSO with Pennsylvania. I’ll start with today.

Judy and I hiked up the Rufus Colby Road and down the lane way into Will Ellis’s field. The beech trees are still glowing orange. I brought the beautiful DSW for 20 meters and a dipole. I decided to put the dipole up as a sloper… one end in a pine tree… the other end tied to a line and held down by a rock in the field. It didn’t go smoothly. I pulled off the PL259 connector from the RG-174 when it caught on some stubble in the field. Fortunately I had a knife and a little screw driver in the backpack, and I cobbled a connection together.

What a sweet rig. 2 watts… digital VFO with a built in keyer and nice filtering. As soon as I got set up, I worked Al WA3PTY in Pennsylvania! He was only running 1 watt. Wow… We’ve worked each other a dozen times before, but what a hoot to make this QSO from Shute Hill… 2-way QRP.

After that I went down the band and worked PA2EVR in the Netherlands. It was a quick 599/599 exchange. Then I worked PJ2/DL8OBQ in Curacao, an island just north of the Venezuelan coast. This was also a quick exchange. But what a lot of fun! A tiny rig, low power, simple antenna from the top of Shute Hill. It doesn’t get much better. Thanks Dave for designing the little DSW!

Bike Ride in East Andover

Yesterday, Judy and I rode our bikes about 5 miles on the old rail trail in East Andover. There were so many leaves on the trail, we couldn’t even see the ground.

I stopped at a little brook to operate and discovered that I’d left the backpack and the rig in the camper. This is not a good sign. Before heading home, we stopped at Highland Lake.

I tossed 33 feet of wire into a maple tree and sat down on the grass with the KX3. I started on 12 meters. W1AW/7 in Nevada was very strong and we made a quick exchange. Then I switched to 15 meters and called Oscar EA1DR. I’ve worked him in Spain at least a dozen times from the field. He’s always a welcomed QSO.

Things may look a lot different in a few days. There’s a forecast of snow for Sunday.

It was really all that on the bands last weekend. Easy fun as well. Just dial in 10 or 15 meters and stations back to back, with great signal strenght and from all over the world. Just blurt 59 24 into a microphone and the other party is as happy as a clam. My radio was alive and despite me being not too keen on contesting I did spend quite some hours on Saturday and Sunday giving away point, just for the heck of it.

More importantly, I did a side by side comparison of my 5m and 12 meter verticals. The 5 meter one is hooked up to a transmatch, the 12 meter one to an CG-3000 autotuner. The latter is prone to RF feedback, but since being partly above my roof it did perform better. I haven’t found the perfect lenghth of wire to cover all bands with the CG-3000, but for now I am satisfied with it.

I didn’t work any special stations, only VK9XSP from Christmas Island. They were easy to work in CW as well, because of the few takers. Unfortunately it left me with no time to participate in the CLE-188 as advertised by Steve VE7SL. I think I wouldn’t have heard much either, because when I tested the setup on Thursday there was so much noise I couldn’t even get clear signals from the local beacons. Never mind, there is always next time.

The only thing that made this weekend a little sad was to learn of the passing of Julian G4ILO. His blog was great and I am glad to have exchanged some mails with him. He will be missed. I hope conditions are always top where he is now.

From Julian’s blog:

Julian died yesterday on 24 October in the presence of his wife Olga and two Hospice nurses at home at 19-45 peacefully and painlessly. He will be always loved and always remembered.

See  http://onefootingrave.blogspot.co.uk/ .

We all knew this was likely but it saddens me greatly to report this here.

RIP Julian – you brightened our lives and we will all miss you. Olga, our sympathies to you in your great loss. Julian inspired a great many people. He will be remembered for a long time.

I have no details of memorials (flowers, donations, etc.) or funeral arrangements.

I can’t seem to find the time to do something substantial in the shack lately. If I’m there it is usually to tune around a bit, having some QSOs, but mostly lacking enough energy to build or repair something. It happens to us middle aged men, with a busy job, a family and kids to attend to. But I still have this itch to do something radio related and it needs to be scratched.

Luckily I have 10 minutes between the classes I teach and once in a while I get the urge to do something computer related. Now my computer skills are as good as my electronic skills: I don’t know much, but enough to get the job done. And when I get the job done the sense of achievement makes me happy for the rest of the week.

So for the last few days I have been spending those 10 minute breaks on automating the uploading of my logbook to my website. My coding skills are limited to Perl in combination with Linux shell scripts (plus PHP and HTML for the front-end). Luckily I can force myself to be structured, so I started with the sequence I had in mind:

1) retrieve the latest adif archive from CQRlog
2) unzip it and rename it to a standard name
3) read every QSO record into an array and filter out the ones you needs
4) extract the fields from a record and write it out to a HTML file
5) ftp the HTML file to the server

The great thing about Perl is that someone has probably done before what you want to do now. Retrieving the latest file from a directory is standard procedure, so a quick Google search provided some code I had to modify only slightly. Reading an adif file into an array has been done by Ted Pride as you can find here. Thanks Ted, now I only have to write out to a file, which I have done many times before. Easy peasy! Last step is to ftp it to the server, but Perl has an awkward procedure for that, so a bash script takes care of that.

It’s almost like playing with Lego. Take some blocks and build it into something you want. Sounds easy, but it can be frustrating, especially when you don’t understand the code from others, or when you make syntax mistakes. But Google is such a treasure trove of knowledge that you can usually find the answer to your problem very quickly. This time I got stumped by the fact that some code wouldn’t run straight from the command line. One 10 minute break was spend on searching and it turned out to be a new line problem, caused by some code having been written in a Windows environment. Dos2unix took care of that, so my Wednesday morning didn’t end in frustration.

So from now on every visit to the shack will end in running a single shell script which will update the logbook on my site, as well as all the QSO maps plus do a backup of some important files. Saves at least 10 minutes each time and a sore wrist from all those mouse clicks. You can see the result on pa2bx.nl –> Logbook.

I have been told that this 1W QRP TX from Australia, mentioned on the blog a few days ago, may no longer be available to order. I suggest you email the address on the Genesis website to see if it can be ordered. Certainly some of the SDR transceiver kits are only available in limited numbers. I am sorry if I got some hopes up only to be dashed.

See http://www.genesisradio.com.au/Q5/ . The website gives detailed schematics so you could always “roll your own”.

The interwebs are abuzz with reports that the latest Windows update is killing counterfeit FTDI chips. Future Technology Devices International (FTDI) — according to Wikipedia — “develops, manufactures, and supports devices and their related software drivers for converting RS-232 or TTL serial transmissions to USB signals, in order to allow support for legacy devices with modern computers.”

The latest Windows update includes a new driver that is apparently “bricking” the knock-off FTDI FT232 chips by programming the USB PID to zero. This causes the device containing the chip to become inaccessible on any operating system. After the PID reset, apparently the programming cable itself will be rendered inoperable even on a non-Windows computer running Mac OS or Linux.

What might you have around the shack that could contain a counterfeit FTDI chip? Well, lots of things including that cheap USB radio programming cable you picked up on eBay. It’s not yet clear whether the affected FTDI chips are in any widely distributed radio programming cables.

While many radio programming cables advertise that they contain genuine FTDI chips, a post earlier this year on Hackaday shows that it’s not always easy to tell a fake from the real thing. One difference, apparently, is that the markings are laser etched on the genuine chip are often just printed onto the fakes.

If you experience a “bricked” cable due to this update, please report your experience in the comments including any details about the cable you were using.