New England QRP Club : The Excitement is Building....

Well, The Chelmsford High School Amateur Radio Club had its early kickoff today. We set up under an outdoor gazebo two stations. Both running Yaesu FT-897D's (One the schools and one ours) connected to computers and running ham radio deluxe for logging. One radio was connected to the dipole the other to the 6M beam and 2M vertical. We started around 12 PM and really started operating at about 1, after lunch which was a cookout...yes it was raining out but you can't extinguish that desire to operate! We made a few contacts on 20M voice and 6M voice, however both bands were dead...

We ended up building a 2M J-pole antenna for use at the high school this year for monitoring the ISS SSTV (Yeah its good enough for the ISS SSTV, though not circularly polarized). Many of the members got to help out and cut the copper pipe and solder it together. In the picture it is on a bench right in the center... its hard to see but its there! We came back operated a little and then played some CHSARC Football with my little brother HIHI, we were soaked by the end of it, but it was so fun!

Hey!
Just decided to start designing and building my own tranciever, QRP of course... Right now im building the DC reciever backwards. I've heard a few suggestions of building backwards (AF amp to Detector or RF amp) and it really seems to be quite convenient. I decided to build it dead bug style ( Yup! the IC's do look like dead bugs... It's cute and sick in one.. well twisted little way. HIHI) and I must say, this is one of the neatest projects I've built this way, just looks so clean! I also decided to go on the wisdom of VE7CA in hist article about his homebrew transciever "Why re-invent the wheel?" so if I like a circuit I am going to use it, like the audio amp is the suggested circuit in the spec sheets for the LM386 IC and the mixer is the double balanced version in my QRP Notebook by W1FB (1989 edition... Jeez that was the year I was born...).

Hey all, well just found the new website... mighty spiffy! enjoying searching all the new features! Well I think im going to start to try and operate more... Just been so busy! Well about to become a Senior at CHS and KB1NAY will be starting up again! I really hope we can manage to set up a nearly permanent station at CHS and install the tower and beams up there! Well more later!