Whole Lot o' Crazy Stuff Goin' On!

Many years ago I got into searching for single-purpose ICs that would or could be used to make a decent radio. Just something to replace, say, all the tubes & shock-box parts in an old Hallicrafters S38 probably come off the factory floor when I was still in diapers.
     I came across quite a few ICs, actually.
     There's the TDA1072AT, which I will extrapolate on below.
     The TDA1572 chip is the gussied up version of the '1076 with a separate IF output for whatever uses one might dream up.
     There the TDA1083, which is everything you need for a receiver, including a small .25W audio amplifier. It's laid out a little weird but it looks like a promising trip. (I say looks like because I have ten of 'em and have yet to fiddle with a single one for any purpose at all. Limits.)
     Then there are a handful of other ICs, most of 'em Sony chips, many of which are no longer available except in vast quantities from warehouses here and there in the Orient or wherever. Among these are the TCA440, which is a pretty neat little RF/OSC/MIX/IF chip for which the builder must provide a detector & AF am circuit. If I could find a handful to play with, I'd be cool.
     The TDA1046 IC, identified on the website for the data sheet as "AM Empfängerschaltung mid Demodulator" also travels under the name of TDA4001, which is identified on its data sheet as "AM receiver IC with Demodulator." The chip is what it says it is, but looking at what information there is leads me to suspect that it wouldn't make a very good HF radio. The oscillator is only spec'd out for 1.5 MHz and the IF is shown only at 455 kHz. Still . . .
     And there's the TBA651, which is shown as a tuner & IF amp for an AM radio. Like the TCA440, this chip is the basic IF section of a standard AM radio. There's an IF output to a transformer in the design notes, with the output of the IF transformer being a simple diode detector feeding an external AF amp. Replace the diode with a product detector and it might make a good CW/SSB radio . . . if you can do that at the spec'd 455 kHz IF.
     The TAD100, an IC from the late 60s, is another of the "basic AM radio" chips. The datasheet suggests a circuit covering LW and MW bands. And a two transistor AF amp. Yeah, it's that old.

Out of the whole batch, the TDA1072 (and the TDA1572 version) is the most sensible of ICs to go with. First off the oscillator is spec'd to 50 MHz. And the IF has proven in experiments to work in the 4 to 9 MHz range. It has a detector bypass (which must be capacitor grounded to get any AF out of the detector) which in one online application provides for BFO injection. There are two AGC lines, one of which must be coupled to ground for the detector to work. And the chip has a mute line that must go to ground in receive.
     The next possible winner is the TDA1083. With this one you get a nominal mute line (which actually shoots between an AGC function or an AFC function; the IC is touted as a AM and FM receiver) & AGC. You get the ability to use an external oscillator (with a weird looking coupling mechanism that others have used successfully). And there's a pick-up point at the second of two IF amp stages to use an detector outside the chip itself (or to inject a BFO signal). And there's the .25 W AF amp, which is one less thing to fight with if you're like me. The only drawback is the way the IF system works and what to me looks like a kind of haphazard IC pin layout. There are a couple designs on the InterWebs using this IC, including one for a 75m SSB transceiver.
     Of course, if you don't want to play with one or two ICs to build a radio, then you've got the NE602/MC1350/NE602/LM386 circuit common to a whole list of tiny radio kits.

Now I started on this madness over ten years ago, at least to my reckoning. Over that time, other than amass a small fortune in ICs, some of which I parceled out to friends with greater levels of determination than I, I've done nothing with the idea.
     Then I found a design on the web from one of the original unindicted co-conspirators. That design, using a 4.915 MHz IF, seemed reasonable and, with as few parts as the design had, possible for my shaking hands and short attention span.
     Now, after months of burning things up and winding tiny toroids and all the other accumulated million aggravations that beset any project that I start, I've gotten to the point where I can say three things about the single-chip radio project:

• 1. It is possible to use the TDA1072AT chip to make a shortwave radio with nearly single-signal detection, even using 455 kHz ceramic filters. (I used a 455 kHz ceramic resonator for the BFO.)
• It is possible to get a reasonable CW/SSB system out of all this accumulated soldering, burning, cursing and quick turn down of the AF gain pot.
• If you want to build one of these, I'll be finished writing up what I've found – much of it with the help of my fellow unindicted co-conspirator – for eventual publication in some QRP ham radio magazine. And note that I said eventual publication. I don't do command performances any more.
• Oh, one more thing: I'm tired of working on this . . .

That being said, here's a picture of what happened the last time I messed with this design. It isn't that bad of a radio, really. The only problems I have – and they're problems that I feel are more owing to my klugish way of putting things together before I get out the real metal working tools – are oscillation & instability in the input circuit. And there's a small problem with the BFO injection level and more importantly, a bit of trouble getting the BFO frequency set solid. Minor stuff, right?
     After that, it's a good enough deal to listen to Radio Habana on, which was the original goal nearly a decade ago when I first got a bug up my kilt over this single-chip receiver madness.
     

Very, Very Small . . . Verrry Smallll!

I have gotten to the point where I am so old I can't remember when I started getting all the physical symptoms of getting old. But somewhere in the last century or so I came down with what the medicos call, among other things, "essential tremor."
     My hands shake. Sometimes real bad. Usually when I have a dangerous tool like a knife or a soldering iron or a drill in my mitt. Makes soldering tiny parts a real pain in the tuchus.
     At any rate, even before I discovered this shaking thing, I had a distinct aversion to surface mount stuff. It was just too damn tiny and, with my propensity to drop things for no apparent reason (also part of the tremor thingie), I just didn't feel all that much good about trying to build stuff using SMD. Surface mount devices.
     Of all the things I've built over the past twenty-odd years of living at this rendition of the estancia, I can't think of but one or two things that had SMD on 'em and all of them, all two of 'em, were a pain in the ass. Stuff that I thought was spiffy would be thought better of if I discovered in the process of research that there was SMD solderin' going on in the process of building.
     Things that had standard, thru-the-hole-on-the-board part placement & construction were preferred.
     And once the shaking started, none of it was fun any more.
     I thus at first limited myself to building things that had no more than 20 parts. Voltage regulators. Charge controllers. SWR bridges. Direct conversion receivers. Stuff like that. Ten, maybe twenty parts max. And no SMD.
     The only time I fell of that wagon was in buying and building up to the part of putting a box together for it a SW40 from Dave Benson. And the PFR-3 that I bought from Doug Hendricks last year at Dayton, which is another story after this one.

So last summer I take the FT817ND that my eldest gave me for Christmas the year before and a bunch of other claptrap down to the beach house for a week of relaxation and Corona-by-the-pool drinking. I took along an Elecraft T1 auto tuner, which I had successfully built and then subsequently blew up. And I took an LDG auto tuner that survived the madness very nicely, thank you very much.
     But I realized almost immediately that I'd have been better off bringing the home-brew Z-match tuner that had served me well for many years prior.
     Only problem was the size of that version of the Z-match. It barely fit in the bag when I had only a K2 and there weren't no room for it in the bag that I had gotten for the '817. (Which bag, by the way – and we're talkin' of the '817 here – is a Maxpedition Sabercat Versipack [$109.99 from Lapolicegear.com].)
     Upon getting home from the beach, I began investigating my options.
     I didn't really want to build another damn tuner, so I sprang the cash for a MiracleAntenna QPack Precision tuner, as noted in a previous and boring entry of this blog.

Upon getting the QPack Precision, I still needed a SWR bridge. And my previous experience with SWR metering had proven many times that a simple LED is a lot more rugged and a damn sight easier to figure out than a mechanical meter movement. Thus I searched up a couple version of the N7VE/Dan Tayloe SWR bridge and found two simpler version of the circuit, the last of which had one part less than the first.
     So I sprung for $60 worth of circuit boards and built a little bridge to fit inside the QPack Precision.
     It woiked great.
     I could sit under the backyard chestnut tree with my '817 back-and-go station and play radio from 75m through 6m. All I had to do was flip the appropriate switches on the tuner and tune the appropriate LED to the appropriate darkness. And there was a lot o' switches, yo.
     
Are you waiting for the "But then . . . "?

Well, then I started thinking about how small the QPack Precision was compared to the Z-match and that got me looking for a box like the QPack box, which led me to the Hammond 1445 series extruded aluminum boxes, which led me to building anew another version of the first Z-match tuner, which led to a discovery.

One of the reasons that QRP loonies can get away with the simple circuits and the low grade components that they often use in very creative ways is the low power levels at which they play. There is a huge difference in building a resistive network for five Watts versus building one for 100 W. In a resistive bridge the usual deal is to run two Watt resistors for a five Watt tuning bridge. Try that with 100 W and you get smoke in da room, yo.
     The streets is real, man.
     Recent technology has led to the availability of what looks like a five Watt non-inductive resistor which in fact is really quite inductive under that pretty twenty-first century covering.
     But recent technology had led to the development of so-called "thick film" resistors, some of which are monstrously sturdy for their size.
     A 100W, non-inductive, thick-film resistor is now available in a TO-247 case.
     Seriously.
     But you need a heat sink.
     In the mean time, there are now SMD, non-inductive resistors that come in 10W and 20W ratings. They're about the size of an unused clump of kitty litter.
     Seriously.
     But you need steady hands to play with 'em.
     I know 'cause I have messed with six of 'em so far and the results have been, well, tiny. And they cost about $6 each. That's a trade-off.

The rebuilt Z-match has a tiny SWR bridge in it using three Bourns SMD chip resistors and a couple thru-hole parts on a board ain't much over .5x.875". The switch solders right to the edge of the board and the LED stands off it a few inches inside the box.
     And it works.

Only thing is, I now have about 30 tiny little circuit boards for which I could take the time and buy enough of the little resistors to build 30 of the little bridges which I could then sell off to recoup the money spent on getting the boards done.
     I could if I was nuts.
     But I have intervention now and they won't let me solder that much crap. Not even stretched out over a couple months, like's been the case with the PRF3.
     Nope. I'm done.
     I have tasted the waters of SMD and I have found them, well, frustrating has hell. Between the hands wandering around in spasms of joy and indelicacy and the family getting tired of my cussin' and the parts flyin' around in all directions with the cats immediately taking interest in them in flight or on the ground, I've had enough.
     I'll leave the SMD work up to younger hands and eyes than mine.
     The next SWR bridge I build will use those big sucker resistors.
     And a meter. A big meter with large numbers that I'll be able to see from across the yard. Yeah, from across the yard. Like a goddamn scoreboard.

That's the ticket!
 

Another Trip into Antenna Valley

One of the joys of QRP is portable operation. As in: the radio & all the accouterments fit into a small space and, if the set-up is properly planned, doesn't weigh more than a six pack. The opposite of that joy, that "go anywhere/fits in my pocket" ham radio set-up, is the discovery upon unpacking, that the antenna doesn't work or the radio's batteries are toast.
     I can usually set up ahead of time for the batteries & the radio and all that. It's the antenna – by far the most important part of any station – that always kicks me in the ass.
     Happened last year in NC.
     Probably will happen again this year, if we can afford to go on vacation like so many years before.
     Happens a lot, actually.
     See, I get the whole station set up on the card table or picnic bench or on top of the cooler under the umbrella slathered with 40-weight sunblock. Beer in hand and wire aloft I push the button on the auto tuner and behold: nothing happens.
     Or I get out the other auto tuner and it resets in the middle of calling CQ. Or in the middle of answering somebody else's CQ.
     Takes the fun out of it right there, it does.

After this past summer's experience I decided that I'd had it with auto tuners. I decided that I needed to get back to using the trusty ol' Z-match that I'd build off a circuit I found on the web. I'd built the little box (a couple times) back some eight years maybe, when I first got the K2 up and running.
     Took it to the beach one summer and worked a VK on 18m in the middle of the night with a wire out the kitchen door & aloft on a 30 ft telescoping pole.
     Then I bought a LDG tuner and ran that for a while. It was impressive. It worked. I bought another auto tuner, a SG239, and put it out in the antenna shed at the end of a long chunk of coax and a nearly as long chunk of control cable. That worked so good I bought an Icom AH4 to go with the IC706mk2G that I had.
     Took the '706 to the beach and played some radio with it and the AH4. Worked great except for the switcher PS noise being radiated by the control cable between the '706 and the auto tuner.

In between one or the other of the above events I sold the K2 (and a bunch of other stuff too) and bought an Icom IC718 HF transceiver. Then I bought the '706. Both radios work real well with the SG239 out in the shed and, the few times I've run 'em with it, they work with the AH4.
     So all is well in auto tuner land.
     Until this past summer.
     Now, don't get me wrong: the Elecraft T1 tuner that I bought to use with the FT817ND that I got for Christmas some years back works quite nicely with the '817. Well, it did.
     The T1 stopped working in the middle of the week at the beach. I'd brought the LDG tuner as back up and it worked great with the '817.
     But I knew in my hippy little heart that I could have saved myself the trouble with the old Z-match in tow.
     As soon as we got back to the estancia I set to with finding an easy and small – and small is the most important quality – manual tuner. It was then that I discovered that I could spend money or I could spend time and money.
     In the end, I did both.

After much fiddling & figuring, I ordered a QPack Precision manual tuner from Universal Radio, down the road a stretch from the estancia. It arrived in short order & I gave it the test ride. Worked great, 'cept for not having a built-in SWR metering circuit.
     So I built a version of the N7VE bridge. Once I had that idea working, I even sprung some money for a small circuit board upon which to build the bridge so it would fit cleanly inside the QPack Precision box.
     Then I started thinking about how the QPack worked against how my clunky homebrew Z-match worked.
     The QPack Precision is a pretty solid box manual tuner. It has two big knobs that twist 360°, two four-position switches, BNC input and output connectors and a little switch on the end of the box to ground the ground-tending line on the main coil for unbalanced loads.
     It tuned a chunk of wire hanging from a curtain rod and a big chunk of wire strung between two trees in the back yard. Worked real well and, with the SWR LED indicator doodad stuffed inside, made a pretty neat addition to the QRP go-bag station.
     The homebrew Z-match has two knobs to tune with. The only switches are one for the SWR indicator circuit and the switch that grounds the ground-tending side of the output coil, just like the QPack. But without the two four-position switches.
     And I seemed to be spending more time switching things back and forth on the QPack during tune up.
     The Z-match is a simple two knob twist: one knob position depends on band/frequency. The other knob dips out the indicator for the load. Switch out the SWR bridge and I'm on the air.
     So the Z-match just seemed more simple. And a lot easier to use.
     But by this time I'd spent on the SWR bridge in the QPack – which involved getting a new set of end panels for the QPack box – I'd discovered a whole new set of aluminum boxes that I could put the old clunker in.
     'Cept that I really didn't want to take the old clunker Z-match apart. I'd put too much time and energy and cussin' into getting it to work good.
     So I sprung some more money on a bunch of extruded aluminum, two capacitors and, eventually new toroid cores to build the beast with.
     And along the way I'd discovered surface mount thick film 10W resistors that aren't much bigger than a match head. And a couple capacitors, smaller in size than the ones in the QPack but not much different from the capacitors used in the original circuit (above)
     Which meant another jigger of cash.

All this spending and discovery led to the present version of the Z-match shown here. It's a lot easier to use than the QPack and doesn't take up much more space, even if the box is higher. The knobs being on the front panel, I discovered, makes the tuner a little easier to use. (I'd discovered using the QPack that I needed an extra hand or some means of tying the QPack down while I twisted the knobs and fiddled the switches, a serious design criterion for QRP pack-and-go set-ups.)
     The SWR bridge switch and LED are right there in front, between the two knobs so they're easy to find and see. And the little SMD resistors are rated well above any possible power level I'd use with this tuner.
     All is just spiffy.
     Only problem is now having to figure out what I'm gonna do with the extra cores, SMD resistors, capacitors, enclosures and circuit boards I sprung for in the process of trying to improve on an already cool enough design.
     That and finding time to use all this stuff in some cool, vacation-like way without being desanguinated by the end-of-summer mosquitoes or smacked in the head by falling chestnut pods or looked at real funny by the neighbors as I sit in the yard and play with the radio, tuner, keyer paddles & whatever else I drag out there.
     I mean, it's not like I have money left to go to the beach, even as much as I'd like to before the snow accumulates feet deep in the driveway & I have to pay some guy with a truck to come clean us out of the fluffy white.
     Which reminds me: I gotta start researching a solar panel power source. For at the beach, where there's so much sun.
     Ah, yes . . .
     The sun.
 

About Half a Mile

For many years now Cindy's been gettin' all up in my grill over how much exercise she thinks I get or don't get. She's into the Nautilus machines at the local Y. She goes there three times a week for a couple hours of joggin' on the belt & runnin' through the weights and all that. She gets a lot out of it, not the least of which is weight control and a better spirit. I have no problems with her going & I have even so much as tried to go there regular for a while before it just got to be, well, something I was never into.
     Because of my lack of interest in the set-up, Cid cut back from a family to an individual membership with the Y and that was that. We – me and the young'n – didn't go or seem interested, so it made little sense for Cid to buy a membership for herself and two non-attenders when a single membership for her was cheaper by a few bucks.
     No problem there, neither. The less she has to spend trying to make sure me and the young'n is healthy, the more we have to spend on things like heavy desserts, high-kick lattes & espressos & spumoni ice cream.
     Yeah, that stuff.
     But still Cid gets up in my grill over this exercise thing. She doesn't think the mile I put in every day at work before 8:30 a.m. counts, even if it does involve going up or down stairs and pushing carts into classrooms so teachers can amaze their students with such computer savvy as they can muster without too much effort. Nor does the many walks I take every day from one end of the campus to the other simply to show somebody which buttons to push.
     And yet it ain't enough, seems.
     All this, of course, falls flat on it's little complicated noggin when you consider the amount of effort that I can put into printing 200 copies of something trivial.

See, I have an old-fashioned letterpress print shop in my garage. Actually it's Cid's garage but she lets me park my three cast iron presses, a half-ton of type & other printerly accouterments, a paper cutter and a print shop cat in there next to or in front of or around the side of her fancy car with the moon roof and all that.
     Just moving the stuff in there was exercise. But then it makes sense that such would happen, given that the largest press is listed in a 1928 ATF catalog as having a shipping weight of 1800 lbs. Shy of a ton. And the smallest press weighs in at about 500 lbs, shy of a quarter ton. But that ain't the point, all that weight.
     One of the presses, which was built in the days before electric motors could do much more than amaze people by their size and heat, was originally sold with a treadle. Like one of those things you stomp on rhythmically with your foot so as to turn a crankshaft which imparts motion to some other parts of whatever mechanism. That press, the one with the treadle, weighs about 1050 lbs according to the catalog. It was built between 1874 and 1900 by the George Phineas Gordon Press Works in Rahway, NJ. The chase, which is the frame holding the type, is designed for a 9x13 printed space, although it'd put some serious strain on the mechanism to print something that large. The day it was made it sold for about $250, shipping charge of $20 not included. It's a helluva machine and it's over 130 years old.
     It's motive power is a treadle. Remember that: a treadle.
     Many a time, presses of this size and age are usually run – or were usually run, back when there were more of 'em – by a belt over the flywheel and a small electric motor on a plank of wood behind the press. At that point you or I or anybody with quick hands and an understanding of the machine as possibly dangerous could get maybe 1000 copies an hour of it, all things considered. A fast person with the press running off steam (as it was originally advertised) or motor might get up to 1500 but that'd be pressing one's luck.
     Now, when I originally bought this press from John Renner back in 1983, he was running it with an old washing machine motor on the floor. I dragged it into the garage and ran it that way until, one day, the motor went up in spoke. From there I hosed up a treadle with a 2x4 & some aluminum strap. Ran it like that until I gave it to Tom Ebbert, who, upon discovering that it took five treadle pushes per impression, put the motor back on it. He ran it like that for a couple years and then got a larger, more 20th Century press.
     So last December I got it back from Tom and set to restoring it to operating condition. And no, I didn't pressure wash it and clean each and every tiny little part and make it look like it was a piece of statuary in a studio. I got the rollers recovered by a company I just learned about in California, Ramco Roller Products. Then I got a treadle from Hern Iron Works. And once that was done, I took some type that I'd set for Treasure Gems, a limited edition communal publication of the Amalgamated Printers' Association, and plonked into the chase & set up to run.
     I put the ink on the press and got that pretty well distributed by treadling the press a few ten or so impression cycles, which works out to about fifty pushes on the treadle from five revolutions of the flywheel going into each impression and the flywheel turns once per push on the treadle.
     Then I had the stock counted out into stacks of 50 and turned to with the printing.
     I got the first 50 done and took a break. I was getting a bit winded.
     I printed the next 50 and took another break.
     The next 50 I pumped with my right leg. I'd pumped the press through the first 100 with my left leg only. And the last 50 I treadled off with first the right leg and then the left.
     Then I took a break. I went inside and got a drink and went out and cleaned the press up. Another fifteen or so impressions to get the ink dissolved in the cleaning fluid (usually mineral spooks or kerosene) and then maybe one or two more treadled impressions and I was done.
     Then I took a break.
     The next day I got up, cleaned up the shop some and distributed some type. Stuff I'd set for another job that I'd run on the C&P, the larger press that runs off a motor, although I could get a treadle from Hern Iron Works for that one too.
     Later on that afternoon I put the other side of type on the Gordon and treadled off the next 200-odd impressions, taking breaks along the way every 50 copies. Then I cleaned up the press again and took another break.

Monday morning I got up and went to work. My legs weren't feeling bad. I was ready to do my morning walk about and push equipment into rooms as needed and all that. While I was at it I counted out the steps around the central building core tunnels. It came to about 400 footfalls of one leg counted each step (as in two steps, left & right, equaled only one step, in this case the right leg only) for a quarter mile. I compared that to the 1000 kicks of the treadle that I'd had to push just for the 200 copies (not including the ink up and clean up treadling that I'd done) and figured that three trips around the core tunnels would have been 1200 kicks.
     So I ended up with a bit more understanding of how much exercise I was getting out of having this press out there in the garage. And I was thinking also about having had another treadle press out there, a 7x11 Pearl of early 20th Century vintage, upon which I could have printed the piece that I'd just done.
     The Pearl was easy to treadle. It had probably never been run any other way and its mechanism is much more simple and less convulsive than the Gordon. But I gave the Pearl away because I didn't have the room for it, even if it was a foot smaller in two dimensions than the Gordon.

Now all this consideration of what it takes to print 200 copies of anything fed directly into my remembering all the Army and Navy books on mobile and portable radio command communications systems. There's always a picture somewhere of some soldier – and maybe every now and then a sailor – cranking away on a generator to keep the voice of command on the air. And from my experience at riding bicycles, now and when I was younger & in my prime, so to speak, I have some idea of what it might take to keep a 100 W radio crankin' out the jams.
     A lot. It'll take a lot of crankin' to do that. Run the radio.
     Which is why I am into batteries and solar panels, mostly, and seldom would even think of using foot power to play radio. It's too much to coordinate at once. And a lot more to coordinate than runnin' a press.

But now at least I know now how long it takes to print 200 copies of something on the Gordon. It's not that long, really. Just a little more than half a mile.
 

Why, That Radio Ain't Got Knobs on It!

Been a while since I had to buy any ham gear. I've got 18 radios now in one room and a couple more stashed elsewhere around the estate. The most recent acquisition is the Yaesu FT817ND that I got from the eldest two Christmases back. The oldest is either the Viking Ranger transmitter out in the garage or it's the Korean war vintage R174 receiver I bought many years back at a Hamvention. Fresh out the warehouse and into the surplus market, box & extra tubes & manual and all. Sweet little radio.
     In between all that I've bought, built & sold an Elecraft K2, a home-brew solid state HF amp (bad experience a couple times), an SG2020 transceiver & a bunch of other little radio bits, some of 'em still on the shelf.
     The most recent serious radio has to have been the two Icom transceivers I got after finally coming to my senses about the K2, the SG2020 and all the steps between QRP and QRO that cost me way more than the original two radios aforementioned.
     So now my main radios are an IC718 HF transceiver and an IC706Mk2G. I bought 'em both with one or two extra filters in 'em and I have 'em all fixed up and ready to rock, all memories full and all that.
     Like I said, it's been a while.
     Of course, when anybody goes to the Hamvention as I have been doing for the past 36 years, it's pretty easy to see all the new stuff, which is how any hams squeal like pigs & apes when they find something that the sales brochure says they must have. That's what keeps the radio manufacturing companies interest in ham radio.
     If the world of radio was all commercial, nobody'd have any radios like we have now 'cause we'd all be dedicated to cell phones and satellite ship-to-shore links &c. But since there's this little bunch of weird radio tinkerers, ham radio gear gets designed and bought and everybody but our wives or other creditors goes home happy.
     At least that's the story, even if I don't quite believe it and ain't too worried about sticking to it one way or the other.

The other night I was listening to the usual crowd of loonies on 3.675 MHz, the failed hippie non-egalitarian hot-shot old codgers used to be radicals net, and they were talking about menus and pull downs and settings of this and that and the other thing. And I got from listening that Gary was working with someone, maybe Dave, and they were trying to get Gary's radio to work like Dave's radio or whatever.
     After a few minutes I realized what they were talking about.
     An SDR.
     A "software defined radio," like you get if you use the computer to control all the conversion, filtering and processing functions that you find fixed in place and unalterable inside radios like I've been buying. And I've been buying or paying attention to people who buy radios since about 1957 or so. Just after the transistor became the big-ticket deal.
     Well, an SDR is different than any radio I've seen yet.
     Basically it's a computer that acts like a radio. As in all the conditions of signal path & processing, from the input and output filters to the conversion gain & the IF filtering and audio digital and analog processing is done inside a computer box.
     You have a box with a power switch somewhere on the front and you hook a keyboard, mouse & computer monitor up to it. Then you hook the antennas to the antenna holes, microphone to the microphone hole and you turn it on.
     After that it's all menus.
     A menu to change the speech processing frequency roll-off. A menu to change the power output for various modes. A menu to choose between a whole raft of different IF selectivities, if you want to consider direct conversion a radio with an IF.
     See, that's the neat part: with the computer controlling input filtering both in what's called "roofing filters" and in the filters that work at the frequency of intended reception, you don't need an IF. You just chose with phase relationship you want to pick your sideband and, if you're on AM, you just listen to it as if it were still a sideband signal. The computer processes the audio so you think you're listening to AM.
     Yeah, like that.
     So after listening for a while it was obvious that (a) Gary had a new radio and (b) neither he nor Dave nor anyone else listening in with the same kind of radio could figure out how to make Gary sound like anything but Gary.
     As in: after an hour or so of fiddling with the settings on the microphone audio spectrum processing, the only thing that the two of 'em, Gary & whoever else I don't remember was working with Gary, could say they'd accomplished was to have reset to default a couple times already.
     Yeah. They screwed around with it until it was unintelligible so they rest the computer's control of the way things worked to the factory default settings.
     And it still sounded like Gary.
     And how much did Gary possibly pay for this experience?
     Hold on to your teeth, Jasper. The SDR radio in question has an InterWeb suggested price of . . .
     Simple most radio of the two offered? Only $2,799. Direct from the factory.
     Most expensive with the most goo? Why that's just $4,799. Hell, cheap that one is, yessiree.

I remember when I saw a radio that cost nearly a kilobuck. Made me wonder what sort of people would pay that much for a radio they were ostensibly gonna use as a hobby toy. Never could myself come to grips with that much money for a toy.
     And yeah, I know: the '706 goes today for about $900, which is about $200 more than I paid for it something like six years ago or so. The '718 was only about $500, if that much. Entry level radio they called it.
     And here's Gary and at least one other LNR crazy has plunked down between nearly $3k and $5k for a radio that has so many menu options that he has to go to factory defaults after messing with stuff all over the place.
     After an hour or so of listening to this futzing around and looking at the picture of the FlexRadio thingie on my computer I turned off the '706 and went to bed. All the way through the process of getting from the radio room, through the shower and all that and finally falling into bed I could only shake my head in dismay.

We've come a long way, us'n's have, from the day when radios had tubes and a good radio had more than five, although I'll admit that the R174 is a helluva radio for a five tuber. Right after that came the transistor craziness, with most radios having at least four and the more you had the more prestige it bought you.
     Long way from the Viking Ranger to the FlexRadio Flex-5000 with all it's doodads and menus and geegahs and whatever else it has that makes it worth $5k. Long way from that.
     No wonder I don't get on the air that much any more.
     Ain't no fun if the radio has more knobs than it can have on one side and all them knobs don't turn, not even in default reset.
     Na.
     Don't think I'll ever see the sense of having one of those. Not this old codger. Got better things to do with my $5k, when I have $5k or if I ever find $5k that I want to part company with like droppin' a turd in the bowl. And yes, I know that makes me sound like one of the geezers on 75m complainin' 'cause everybody's gone off using AM and now it's "all that Donald Duck noises."
     And besides, radios are supposed to have knobs and switches on 'em, which the FlexRadios obviously do not.
     Another reason to stay grumpy.
 

"I Already Did That!"

You have to understand how the system works. Basically there's a hole in the wall that you plug the main power hose into. That hose leads to these two circuit breakers, which you can trip if you wish, to turn the power off to the rest of the equipment. This panel & circuit breaker on the left turns the power on to the left side of the desk, that is: the Mac and the ServeSwitch. The panel & circuit breaker on the right runs power to the PC & the DVD/VHS player.
     Now the Mac or the PC signals get sent to the projector on the ceiling by pushing the button on the ServeSwitch. Number 1 is the Mac; number 2 is the PC. These buttons on the top of the desk select the signal you're going to send to the projector and give you the power on/off for the projector.
     
Got that?

It makes sense to me because I've been working with this same equipment for the past 29 years. I've put the stuff in the rooms, I've tested the set-ups, I've replaced broken gear & made numerous trips to any of the seventy-five such rooms on the campus to help folks figure out which buttons to push.
     Yes, they're all academics, the most of 'em.
     And most of them have been living with this technology at one level (deeply involved) or the other (touch-typing and basic mousing) for over twenty years.
     But the longer I do this and the more I see of how people completely ignore everything that goes into understanding how things work in this culture today, the more I'm sure that the majority of folks on this planet have less awareness of basic problem solving than a four year old with a screw driver and a hammer.
     If the kid can't get into the box with the screw driver – most often as a result of not-quite-synched up manual dexterity – said child will resort first to crying for mommy, followed immediately after the first wimper by a swing of the hammer. And such hammer swinging inevitably leads to a smashed finger or a bruise on the leg. From the aforementioned not-quite-synched up manual dexterity.
     
I walk into the room and see that most of the people are folks who work with the hard-core hardware of the university. Safety officers, physical plant supervisors, job detailers, folks like that.
     Now the original call was "I can't switch from the PC to the Mac and I can't get the picture on the screen."
     The computer monitor is blinking from nothing to the Mac screen. Blink. Blink.
     "How's that happening?" I ask.
     "I kept pushing on this button and it started flashing."
     The button is the one that toggles between Mac and PC.
     "Ok. You want to use the PC, right?"
     "Yes"
     "Ok, well you have to turn the PC on." I turn on the PC.
     "How'd you do that?"
     "I pushed the power button . . . right here."
     "Well ok, but it's not on the screen."
     I can see from where I'm standing that the video projector is in standby. The red "lamp" indicator is blinking and the green "power" indicator is out.
     "Ok. Well, we have to reset the power." I push the "off" button on the keypad on the desk.
     "Well, it's not up there. It was. Then I couldn't switch to the PC, so I pressed this button . . . "
     I hear the click of the circuit breaker going off.
     The PC screen goes dead.
     She has succeeded in turning the PC off again.
     "See, it went off. I want it on."
     "Well, ma'am, you have to leave this on . . . " I push the circuit breaker back on and push the power button on the PC. The PC starts up . . . again.
     So the PC starts up again & the projector, which has a cool down cycle as part of the power down/power up function, eventually comes back to "ready." I can tell 'cause the red and green indicators are both on and not flashing.
     In the meantime the "instructor" (for want of a better term) has connected to the campus network and is accessing her files on a system drive. She turns and looks at the screen.
     The screen is washed with a blue background and the slowly brightening symbol of the manufacturer and a countdown indicator. When it gets to zero the screen blinks and shows that the projector is taking a signal on input 3.
     "Well, now how do I get the PC on there?"
     "Push the PC button," I suggest calmly.
     "I did that and it didn't work."
     I push the button. She sees me push the button. The PC screen comes up on the projected image.
     "Oh."
     "That should set you up. Anything else?"
     "No, thanks."
     I leave the room.

Five minutes later she calls back and says she can't get any volume. One of my co-workers responded to that call. When he got back he told me that she had the volume controls all the way up: on the computer and on the control panel on top of the desk. She was trying to play a video that had been recorded with almost no audio level.

Seven times zero is still zero.

On my way back from the room and before Yvan took off to answer the next problem, I thought about something we'd been discussing earlier. It was one of those short-frame conversations where both of us already know we're in agreement but it's worth passing the symbols around.
     We had been talking about how religious groups and political groups always end up looking more like a bunch of monkeys throwing shit at each other. No matter how high-minded or highly-evolved the philosophical background or the rhetorical schema of the situation might be, it's all just monkeys throwing shit.
     That it's supposed to look high minded or more egalitarian or humane or divested of any pecuniary or egocentric power, all the words in all the books and all the speeches and promises and treaties and treatises, it's just monkeys throwing shit at each other in some attempt to wrest control or power or whatever magic is supposed to lie beneath the piles of words and pleasant turns of phrase.
     The same old shit.
     But it occurred to me that it's way more simple than even that. It's not that some folks just don't have the technical skill or the knowledge or the science or the deep understanding of how things work inside.
     Everything that I had done to get the presentation back on the screen so the person at the front of the room wouldn't look like a monkey was basic logic. Very basic logic.
     Everything I did to get the show back on the road did not require for one instance any math skills or knowledge of how resistors and capacitors work in parallel or in series. I didn't have to divine the bias voltage of a beam power pentode vacuum tube. I didn't have to finagle the inductance of a transmitter output network or even do the math for a quarter-wavelength dipole antenna at one wavelength above ground.
     I simply saw what was on and what was off and, instead of mashing on one button until something else, something completely unexpected happened, I went through the process of bringing each component of the system back to its operating settings.
     And I waited for the projector to go through the lamp warm up cycle.
     And how many times I've had to explain that?
     
Nope, we's all still monkeys here on this rock. Makes no never mind if the rock is a bench in a lab at some university or a tuft of grass growin' up between the cracks of ancient limestone on a ridge in Africa. We's all jis' monkeys here, boss. In fact, from this experience I would like to propose a metaphor: the metaphor of the lab monkey and the banana.
     Here's the set-up:
     A monkey is in a room looking through a glass window. On the other side of the window from the monkey there is a room with a table. On the table there is a banana. The two rooms face each other through the glass and what happens in one room can be seen from the other room through the window.
     And the two rooms are joined by an open passageway between them.
     In other words, if the monkey wanted the banana, all it would have to do is get down off the bench it's sitting on and go through the doorway into the other room to pick the banana up off the table.
     But that's not what the monkey does.
     The monkey stares at the banana. It glowers at the banana. It heaves great sighs of desire at the banana on the other side of the glass. Eventually the banana is just too much to take, staring back as it does at the monkey staring at it.
     Because everyone knows bananas stare back.
     So now the monkey gets all upset 'cause the banana is staring back at the monkey, challenging the monkey to get the banana and eat it. And this makes the monkey even more hungry for the banana.
     The monkey starts hooting at the banana on the other side of the glass.
     The monkey stars slapping the glass with its own palms.
     The banana lays there on the table like an insult.
     The monkey starts pounding on the window and jumping up and down.
     The banana just stares.
     The monkey shits itself and urinates on the bench and howls at the banana.
     Eventually the monkey's pounding breaks the glass and sharp slivers cut the monkey's hands and arms. Blood is pouring out everywhere and the monkey is even madder now.
     That goddamn banana just lays there and stares at the bleeding monkey as the monkey's shouts turn to whimpers and it bleeds to death. And just before it dies, the monkey falls on its side and sees the doorway connecting the room it's in to the room the banana's in.

And that's you and me, monkey. That's you and me.
 

QSL 100%

Back a few weeks a friend of mine got his ham license. He's been on the air mostly with the 2m gang from down in Cincinnati and a couple times on HF. I think it's the outright vagaries of the ionosphere that slows him down there, but he's at least getting on the air and having fun chattin' with people.
     I have yet to get him interested in contests. We'll see.
     I have to get myself interested in contests most of the time any more too. In the long back, I'd get on the air on weekends and, depending on the contests, I'd work a couple hours here and there and be done with it. Sometimes I'd have a couple pages of the log book filled up and sometimes I'd have a page on a good day. Either way there were contacts in the log.
     Also long back I got into the habit of QSLing all DX contacts. First there was the kick of actually talking on my own radio to somebody in a country that I'd either never thought about or, in the case of the Mediterranean & Canada, places I'd been. And back when I first got into ham radio – and even when I was just a SWLer – my father had printed up QSLs for me on his huge Chandler & Price press.
     Hand set type; hand fed press. Beautiful work done by a true artist. The shame is I really took that kindness & interest in my life for granted.
     If I could live this live over again . . .
     After Dad died I ended up with most of his print shop in my garage. I remembered some of the stuff he'd taught me but I had to go looking through the libraries to find a book that did the art of letterpress printing justice. That book was The Practice of Printing by the Polk brothers. Published most recently in the 1950s, I think. By hook and crook and scouring of used book stores I found a copy. Then I found another. And then I started adding printing books to the burgeoning collection of text material that will confound the witless when I'm gone.
     So I learned what I didn't know and relearned what Dad had taught me.
     And I started printing my own QSLs.

Now the art of a QSL is pretty precise. The most important part is the text block area where the contact with another ham via radio is verified with a strangely vague minutiæ for which hams are famous. It all comes down to time, date, frequency, signal report & who the hell was listening or talking. Five or six lines of ten point type on ten pica slug will do the job.
     Then there's the callsign, station location and operator's name &c.
     Easy: you wrap that around the call sign with the call sign set in as large a size as you can cram onto a 3.5x5.5 card.
     Now all of this goes onto the card one way or the other. Many of the cards that I've received over the past nearly 38 years of ham radio have had the QSL info on the back of the card. Thus the front only has the call sign, the operator's name and address and maybe some graphic doodad. That and a club affiliation symbol or two.
     Get all that done and it comes down to colors of ink, type of card stock & how much money you wanna spend. That, of course, comes out of who's doing the printing, how it's getting done & whether or not the printery is dedicated to QSLs only or is a job shop that does everything from wrestling & bull fight posters to business cards for the local drug pushers.
     The big shops with a wide client base do some beautiful work. Some have pretty quick turn arounds on orders. But the simple fact that your job is just one of however many come in on a daily basis does make a difference. And big shops have many different ways of producing the same product. The deal can get very sticky.
     Small job shops that do QSL cards and maybe rubber stamps – such as Ebbert Graphics & Stamps, now no longer in the QSL business – turn out some very nice work in reasonable amounts of time for reasonable money.
     Either way it all comes down to trial and error and the good luck that you picked a good printer with a solid reputation for quality work from in front. If you bought cards from Ebbert, you got quality stuff. If you bought 'em from the guy's got an old offset press in the garage and a home-brew plate burner, you took your chances.

I knew what my callsign was before I got the ticket. I knew that 'cause one of the first letters I got after I took the test was from Rusprint QSL printers in Missouri. I also got one from The Little Printshop, another place that may no longer be in business. (There are two places listed on the web under Little Print Shop. Ain't sure if any of them's the one I'm remembering.)
     Both of those firms printed their QSLs via letterpress. I was impressed with the stuff they showed but I knew that my father was all set to crunch out a batch of cards for me the minute my license arrived. The fact that I was in Puerto Rico and my folks were back home in Ohio meant little.
     Being the sort of neurotic letter writer that I am, I sent each of the aforementioned firms a letter explaining that, although I appreciated their samples & mailing, I already had a deal made on QSLs. One of the folks sent me a nice note back thanking me for taking the time to write and expressing appreciation for my father's endeavors.

Nowadays I just walk out to the garage, set some type in a composing stick from the late 1800s, lock the form up in a chase & put some ink on the 1923-vintage 10x15 C&P NS that's holding the corner of the garage down. Then I stand there for however long it takes to print however many of whatever I'm working on and, from time to time, put piles of printed stock on the drying flats that I built under a bench that holds a 1911 C&P Pilot sidelever press. When that color's done, I clean the press & go back in the house.
     The next day I print the next color and so it goes until I have the entire stack of whatever printed up and ready to use, mail, fold, hand out, stare at or toss away.
     It's a time consuming process and by today's standards, I'd be just as well off buying a big box of photo print paper and running it all through the photo printer that Cindy has tied to her Sony Vaio. It would probably take a third as much time, even if I did have to take the entire pile of printed material out to the garage to cut down to size on the 23 inch C&P paper cutter that's holding the rest of the garage floor down.
     But it wouldn't be the same.
     At which point we can get back to my friend and his QSL cards, among other distractions.

A while back I came across a QSL card design that I really like. The QSL info is on the left side of the card, separated by a border design of some sort or the other. To the right of that is the call sign in another color and then the geographic & operator information goes above and below the callsign.
     It works out to three press runs. First for the black ink, which is the QSL info & all that. Then the callsign, centered between the operator info. And then the color decoration separating the two blocks of black ink text.
     For my own cards I use blue anchors as the separator. The call sign goes in gold or metal-flake red or orange or whatever I feel like mixing up. It's a nice open design and I am lucky to have enough of the entire Cooper Old Style face (1920s-vintage Barnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry in Missouri) to print all the card in it.
     For my friend's card I put the call sign in red and a blue design out of an old type case for the separator. The cards came out looking really sweet. Only thing I did different with my friend's cards was omitting the "A W8IJN QSL" that I have in the lower right corner of my cards. And I didn't put the press name as a separator between the address area and a hand written note on the back, like in the days of old fashioned post cards.
     You do remember post cards, don't you?

So out of this experience I found myself recently looking at eHam.net's product & service reviews for QSL printers. And there's a ton of 'em still out there in this day of desk top publishing (most of which needs a serious slap on the wrists from the keepers of the typographic graces). There's sixty-four of 'em, in fact. Most are companies in North America but there are also QSL printers doing international business from Italy, South America and, most amazingly to me, Russia and Eastern Europe.
     Yeah, the places where you had to get a license to have a typewriter are now home to free-market QSL card printers who do extremely nice work, despite what the reviews might say.
     Rusprint is still in business.
     Ebbert ain't listed 'cause I think he went out of the QSL business before the web found out about reviews of QSL printers. Too bad, too, 'cause Tom Ebbert has almost as much type & cast iron as I do.
     Neither of us has enough of the really stupid gene to consider going into the business of QSL card printing with the equipment and technology that we have.
     Letterpress printing can be very beautiful. It's the only form of printing left that lets you actually touch the type that's going to carry the ink and, unless you're running a Heidelberg "windmill," it's the only way left to print that kind of work by hand. As in hand-set type and hand-fed press. And that requires patience, nimble fingers and a lot of standing in front of rumbling machinery.
     For all that, Tom & I are very happy to let Wayne (QSLs by W4MPY) wear himself out. Back in the day we would all gather at the Dayton Hamvention to complain about how much work it was having to work as a pressman but none of us ever had the good sense to stop before we got really tired of it.
     Which is a nice way of saying that, while I do enjoy printing cards for friends and for myself, it's too much like real work for me to be doing it for free – or for money.
     Modern technology has made everything about printing that my father knew – or that I ever knew or learned as a graphic arts person – just another mouse button click and a thumb drive stuck in a slot. The hard core printing, the heavy metal printing, takes a lot of time and it's not exactly outside of the world of the physical.
     Put a 40x60 pica form in a 10x15 chase and load that into a press if you want to know how physical it can be.
     Still, it's fun and once we get past the feasting season I'll have a chance to hand all 1013 QSL cards to my friend. I hope he doesn't use 'em up real quick. But then he could scan one into his computer, take the file to a photo printer and have 'em crank out as many as he needs. My only involvement then will be in chomping all that paper down to the size of a post card.

Hope he realizes that he can print eight at a time on a 11x17 sheet.