Ernest

Ernest

Simple signal tracer

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I found a really simple project for kids to attract them to homebrewing and hamradio. It is also very nice for people who want to learn soldering electronics. It’s a “signal tracer”, which means it detects all kinds of RF…

5/8 Wave vertical antennas for HF

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Lots of radio amateurs build their own verticals. Most of them tend to stick to vertical antennas with a 1/4 or 1/2 wave sizing. Just a happy few build a 5/8 wave vertical antenna. This is remarkable, since the 5/8…

Adapter for LC meter

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The dutch electronics shop Van Dijken Elektronica sells a nice kit to build your own LC meter. The kit includes a professional PCB, all components, building instructions, prepared case and leads. The kit takes an evening to assemble, the result…

Altoids L-tuner

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A while ago Tjeerd PA3GNZ donated me some Barkleys mint tins (identical to the famous Altoids tins), which are rather popular by QRP builders to house small homebrew stuff. Two weeks later I found a czech webshop, offering a kit…

70cm bicycle antenna

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During the summer season I sometimes travel to work by bike. It’s a 21 km trip through the countryside, passing cornfields, orchards, deer and spoonbills. The road includes dikes and bridges, and even a ferry to cross one of the…

PC6REC ATV station

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During the 2014 edition of the REC Fielddays I facilitated a live videofeed,  broadcasted throughout the Netherlands. Using three cameras and a bunch of (mostly) vintage hardware, the live stream was uplinked to the local ATV repeater PI6ATV. Viewers could…

Stereo to mono converter

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My TV camera generates stereo audio, like most cameras do. However, my local ATV repeater only supports mono audio. So to transmit a nice audio signal with my TV pictures, I needed a way to convert the stereo signal to…

PoRG v2

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A couple of years ago I built my first PoRG (abbreviation for “Power over RG-cable”), a simple phantom power supply to power some device over antenna cable (e.g. a preamp, active antenna, coax switch, etc). I recently built an active antenna…

Best dutch participant in AGCW contest

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The AGCW is a german club of morse code enthousiasts, maybe the best CW club in the world, with lots of foreign members as well. They organize all kinds of small activities, related to CW off course, one of them…

A very small active antenna

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Small active antennas like the “mini-whip” (by PA0RDT) are very popular at the moment. They provide good reception of signals from HF all the way down to the VLF band. Here in the Netherlands Van Dijken Elektronica sells a nice…

The “PoRG”

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The “PoRG” is a very simple but useful device in your ham shack. “PoRG” is an abbreviation for “Power over RG-cable” and allows you to put DC on your antenna cable. Some people call it a phantom power supply. With…

Summary of our 2014 PACC contest

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Another PACC contest for me and Adrian PA0RDA. This year we participated in the D1 multi-operator two-transmitter class for the first time. We did a very good job, we improved our own score, again, which is always our main goal…

CLog 0.9b released

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Today I released CLog version 0.9b, the command-line hamradio logbook. Although still beta, the software appears to be reliable now, even when used in multi-operator contests. These are the changes in CLog 0.9b:

HB9CV-in-a-box antenna for 23cm

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The HB9CV has been a popular antenna for decades, especially on the 2m band where it is commonly used for direction finding (foxhunt). Others create arrays of HB9CV antennas for DXing. Since I needed a simple antenna for 23cm (to…

ATV image generator using the Raspberry PI

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I’ve got a Raspberry PI for a while already, but it hasn’t been very useful until today. I recently started setting up my own ATV (Amateur TeleVision) station. I needed a simple solution to generate a test pattern, something to…