MTR version2

I was lucky enough to secure another MTR (Mountain Top'er) kit from Steven Weber, this from his second batch released at the end of March 2013. I had been keeping an eagle eye on the AT Sprint Yahoo group for news of the release of another 149 MTR kits. I was amazed when an email came through just as I was getting up for work early one morning announcing that orders were being taken for the new run of MTRs. I ordered straight away but I was worried that I might have missed my chance to own another MTR as I worked out that it had taken 40 minutes for the original email to come through to my phone. I need not have worried though as I later learned that only twelve kits had been spoken for by the time I ordered.

My order confirmation came through pretty quickly from Steve, I was over the moon to have secured another MTR, this time with a neat custom case. The package arrived around 2 weeks after ordering, Steve stated that he had bought the entire stock of shipping boxes from his local Post Office and did not have enough to send out all the orders! My kit had been held back a while whilst Steve sourced some more boxes.


The kit was neatly sealed in plastic and the components were grouped together to make finding them a bit easier. Thankfully all the components were there with none missing. I think Steve does a great job with his kitting, it must be a nightmare with so many tiny components to count out. There were 149 kits made available this time around and just as with the last run, each kit was given a unique serial number, my kit being #267. The numbers for the second run started at #151, as they followed on from the last number of the first run kits.

 The board went together well, although it was time consuming; there are more components than you realise and you have to build on both sides of the board. The processor and DDS chips were mounted first of all and I had learnt from my experience with my first MTR, so this time the chips went on pretty smoothly. I followed the assembly sequence suggested by Steven, KD1JV.

 The build instructions had a few small mistakes, mostly due to the fact that the manual had been modified from the one for the first run kits. It didn't take much thinking to work things out though, the provided schematic helped out here. The obligatory PCB trace error had crept into the design just for a bit of interest,  so a small wire jumper from Q2 (top left) was needed. The ground pad for the antenna connector also needed modifying, it had been flagged as a via by mistake so the solder resist had to be scraped off with a sharp knife.The smoke test went well and soon I was ready to fit the final inductor (L14) for the PA and perform the alignment. The alignment firstly consists of putting the rig into calibration mode by powering up the board whilst pressing two front panel buttons. The rig then sets up a 10MHz signal from the DDS, this signal is measured using a frequency counter at the provided test point. Using the up and down buttons, the signal is calibrated to exactly 10MHz.

Once the reference oscillator is set, the BFO needs to adjusted, this is simply a case of measuring the audio output with an oscillscope and peaking the internally generated audio tone for maximum amplitude using a single trimmer capacitor (CT1).

All that is needed to be done after calibration and setting of the BFO is the align the RX band trimmers. I used my FT817 (my only commercial HF rig) to provide a signal to tune my SOTA dipole using a manual ATU. I tuned for 1:1 VSWR  at the radio and then swapped the FT817 for the MTR and peaked the two trimmers for the first band for maximum response. I then repeated the whole operation again for the second band.

The board had already been tried into the case in order to cut the wires to the correct length for attaching to the external sockets. Putting the PCB into the case was just a matter of disconnecting the power and antenna jacks, as these pass through the case from the outside, and then resoldering them when in the final positions. The board is held in place by  four screws through the top of the case and into the stand offs soldered into the PCB at each corner - a neat solution. A strip of felt across the four push buttons gives a tidy appearance along with the red transparent plastic window for the display.

The rig is very pleasing to use, I built my second MTR for 20m and 30m, and I find 30m is great for weekend SOTA when there is also a big contest on the bands. I like the new case, but I probably prefer my original Altoids tin MTR, it's so much more compact and lighter too! My Altoids tin MTR weighs in at 80g, whilst my new MTR with it's pretty case weighs in at 170g! There are some minor circuit board changes to the second run kits and it might be all in the mind but i find I prefer the audio of my first run MTR.

KD1JV has produced a great little kit that works very well. I'm sure these MTR's will be sought after for years to come. There are apparently 299 MTRs out in the wild and it's unclear whether there will be any more produced, Steven was making noises about making a more complex rig next time including DSP.

1% of the world's population of MTRs!

73,
Colin

SW-20+ Keyer speed control

After all this time I finally got around to fitting a CW speed control to the front panel of my SW-20+
This rig has been a 'work in progress' for a long time. I intended to use the rig for SOTA as my main 20m rig but then I managed to secure one of the limited run of KD1JV's Mountain Toppers (aka 'MTR'). I did manage to work a few contacts with the SW-20+ during testing, including a QSO with Bill, NG2D, in Pleasant Valley, New York.

I tried the rig out on one SOTA activation from Rombalds Moor G/NP-028, and the rig seemed to do OK, but I found that it was a bit tedious to change the speed of the keyer chip that I had fitted to the rig. I had used the PicoKeyer chip from Dale, N0XAS, and built a little Manhattan style keyer circuit fixed the the rear of the SW-20+ case. I had omitted the speed control potentiometer for simplicity, the speed can be set through the menu accessed by pressing the front panel button. I found that I wished that I had fitted the speed control.


During building and testing of the rig, I decided to tweak the tuning range to cover a larger portion of 20m rather than the standard 30 to 40kHz. There is a capacitor that sets the tuning range, I had changed the value to give me band coverage from 13.999 MHz to around 14.070 MHz, I found that the tuning was a little on the difficult side, a slight touch of the tuning knob and you would QSY a number of kHz. Whilst I was inside the rig to fit the speed control, I swapped out the capacitor that sets the tuning range, I now get around 37kHz of swing from about 14.026 to 14.063MHz, this should make the tuning a little easier. I noticed that a lot of the SOTA ops in NA tend to operate above 14.060 MHz, usually 14.061 or 14.062MHz, I thought it was important to have these frequencies covered, whilst still allowing as much tuning below 14.060 as possible.


I ordered the 50k potentiometer from Ebay one afternoon and the very next morning it arrived in the mail, it almost seemed as though the vendor had posted it before I had ordered it! Fitting the potentiometer took quite a bit of work, I had to remove the FreqMite (PIC based frequency counter) from it's front panel bracket first. I left the FreqMite hanging from it's wires and as to be expected I suppose, some of the wires broke off. I then had to remove the fixing screws for the main PCB and move the entire PCB sideways out of the enclosure because I had broken one of the cover fixing brackets, doh! Luckily there is just enough gap between the cover fixing brackets to squeeze the PCB through - good design or pure luck? :-) I repaired the cover fixing bracket and then I removed the sticker on the front panel that said 'SW-20+', of course the sticker had to bring some of the silver front panel paint didn't it?!

Drilling the hole for the potentiometer actually went very well, I managed it without damaging any more of the silver paint. The potentiometer was finally wiggled in to its hole after a bit of persuasion; one of the IC's on the main PCB was just in the wrong place and was fouling. The next task was to rebuild the rig; the main PCB was pushed back into it's correct position and screwed into place. Then all the broken wires had to be fixed to and from the FreqMite. The FreqMite would no longer fit in the same place as before; I had to move the board away from the front panel a little bit and make a bracket extension to support it.

I wired up the new speed control pot to the PicoKeyer board and then it was time for a test - the usual law states that all potentiometers will be wired up 'backwards' i.e. the speed will go from fast to slow, rather than the expected slow to fast. Upon powering up the rig, I was greeted by the usual '73' from the PicoKeyer and the usual babble from the FreqMite asking it's questions, I tried the speed control and I had actually wired it up correctly! How I managed that, I will never know!

Whilst the cover was off the rig, I gave it a re-alignment just to make sure it was properly set up. I found that I could squeeze 2 watts on transmit from a 12v supply, so I think that's pretty good. I backed the power down to 1.5w and left it set at that.

So now the rig is just about finished I reckon, there is not much more room left in the case for further additions. I gave the top cover a quick polish up with some car polish, it's now super shiny! I could do with touching up the silver paint sometime and putting some lettering over the speed control knob, just to finish the rig off.

I am determined that I will do a proper SOTA activation with this rig, it's too nice to just have stored away in some cupboard.

Well, that's it for now folks, my next blog entry will probably be about building an MTR from the second batch of 149 kits - yes, I managed to secure another one! :-)

Not much to report!

Sorry for not posting a new blog entry for quite some time, life is busy at the moment, but that is good I guess - I'm never bored!

I have not been doing much in the way of constructing gear recently, most of my 'radio' time has been spent activating summits for SOTA (Summits On The Air). My MTR continues to perform very well, it is a brilliant rig for SOTA. I hope to be able to secure another MTR kit when KD1JV makes them available again.

There is scope for a little bit of radio construction in the not too distant future, so I hope to be able to update my blog with progress.

Hope 2013 is going well for folks so far.

73, Colin, M0CGH

MRM-30 goes QRO

 

One of my first Manhattan style construction projects was a RockMite 30 circuit. I had upgraded my RockMite 20 with a Hamgadgets memory keyer chip, this left me with a spare keyer chip. I thought a great way to use the spare chip was to build a RockMite 30. I had seen pictures of other home brew RockMites on the Internet and I thought it would be something I would be able to do.

 

I wanted to make an 'ultimate' RockMite, so I put in a VXO circuit and also the output PA transformer modification promoted on the Yahoo RockMite Group. I used a 2N3866 transistor for the PA. I was hoping for about 800mW of RF, but I was disappointed that the rig would only put out 520mW. I then upgraded the output filter, this promotes a super clean transmit signal from the rig, but it introduced another 20mW of loss, I was now only getting 500mW from 12 volts.

 

I was still pleased with my efforts though, it was the first home brew transceiver that I had attempted and it did work. My local radio club put on a camping and amateur radio weekend in July 2011 and I tried out the newly completed using an inverted vee dipole. I was pleased to work HB9UH with some very shaky QRS CW! It turns out that Hans, HB9UH, is a member of the Helvetia Telegraphy Club, a group dedicated to promoting the use and teaching of Morse Code.

 

The QSO with Hans remains my only contact with the rig. My CW has improved a bit since then, I have been using another Manhattan style RockMite 30 rig which I built to take part in LA1KHA's PP3 challenge and also an MTR by KD1JV for my SOTA activations this year. The MTR is my favourite rig, I rate it above everything else, so my other rigs have been gathering dust! I decided that I need to try to use my other home built radios.

 

I was always disappointed with the low power output from the home brew RockMite 30 - (MRM-30), I thought it would be more useful for SOTA if it could put out a bit more power. A couple of watts on 30m should be very useful.

 

I looked in to a design for a 5 Watt RockMite 80 on the Yahoo group, the design used a CB PA output transistor, a 2SC2166. I thought that I could use a similar scheme for my rig. I managed to locate an Eleflow 2SC2166 at a reasonable price on Ebay.

 

I replaced the 2N3866 output transistor on my rig with a 2N2222A and I used an adapted version of the 1.5W PA circuit from the Small Wonder Labs SW-30+. I knew that the circuit would be capable of a couple of watts at 10MHz. I built the circuit in to the RockMite this week and I was pleased to measure the output at around 2 watts, I'm well pleased with that! I could probably get a lot more out of the circuit, but I happy to stick at the 2 watt level. The signal still looks very clean, so I'm really happy.

 

I hope to try the rig from a SOTA summit soon, Winter Bonus is only a couple of weeks away!:-)

 

I haven't added any RX filtering yet, I'm going to see how bad it is without first!

 

New 2 watt output stage squeezed in (right hand, middle)

 



Buckden Pike - Remembrance Sunday

For this years Remembrance day, I decided to go to the Buckden Pike War Memorial to do the two minutes silence at 11am.

A Wellington bomber crashed on Buckden Pike in January 1942, killing all but one of it's crew. The survivor erected a memorial cross at the crash site to pay tribute to his fellow servicemen.

Buckden Pike, 2303ft, is classified as a 'Marilyn', so it is included in the SOTA scheme (G/NP-009), being worth 6 points. My plan was to operate my radio from near to the trig point and claim the SOTA points, before moving on to the War Memorial, something like 1km away.

I parked in the public car at Buckden and set off walking along the bridle path at about 0745utc. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the once boggy path had been properly surfaced and was now easy to walk on.

 

I gained the summit at just after 0900utc, it had taken around 80 minutes from the car park to the trig point, much faster than previous occasions.

 

 

I'd taken along my MTR (Mountain Topper), a little two band CW rig, built into an Altoids tin. Using a 1000mAh LiPo battery, I was on the air on 7.032MHz at about 0925utc with about 2.5W. I was amazed at the pile up that quickly developed! I found after about 20 minutes of operating, my brain got a bit fried and I started making a lot of mistakes. I took a 5 minute break from the pile up, but upon asking 'QRL?', I was greeted with another wall of chasers! I moved on to 14.058MHz, again I was met with a big pile up after only a few minutes. My time soon unfortunately run out, so after working Barry N1EU in Delmar, NY, at 1040utc, I had to leave the chasers and tear down the station. 34 QSO's were in the log, so the little MTR had done a great job, I'm sure I could have worked many more stations given a lot more time. I had actually operated a little too long really, it was 1050utc by the time I left for the memorial, and it was about 1km away!

 

 

Unfortunately, the route to the memorial is very boggy indeed! I simply didn't have the time to carefully pick my way through the bogs, I just had to run like mad! I reached the memorial at 1058utc, I'd just made it and I was quite soggy too! There was quite a mixed gathering of people at the memorial, and we all fell silent for two minutes at 11am. I was persuaded to pose for a group photograph, although I didn't know any of the other people there! For once, the photos should turn out OK, the weather was actually very nice, usually the visibility is very poor at that time of year, with thick fog being the normally expected conditions. My camera didn't record the memorial pictures properly, so I don't have any pictures of the people at the cross :-(

 

As you see, the weather was fantastic -

 

 

73 de Colin, M0CGH

 

 

Elecraft K1

I was delighted to be asked to build an Elecraft K1 on behalf of a fellow ham a few Month's ago.

The K1 kit had arrived within a few days of ordering direct from the USA. The kit came with a very comprehensive owners manual / builders guide. The K1 was ordered with a 2 band filter module (40/20), LCD back light kit and KAT1 auto ATU.

I was expecting a very high quality kit, and I wasn't disappointed!

First of all, the filter board was constructed. All went together fine, the instructions were very clear indeed.




Next came the front panel. The front panel is the main operations centre, it houses the main processor which controls of all the rig's functions. Components are fitted both to the front and back of the board. Again, the construction was very simple.

The instructions were really good. The front panel LCD backlight kit was also added at this time, it is much easier to do it this way than 'retro fitting' it I am reliably informed from multiple sources!

The main board is constructed last of all, this board contains the receive and transmit circuitry, the receive portion mostly towards the front of the board, whilst the transmit portion is mostly at the back. The RX and TX sections are built and tested in turn.

Left - the K1 main board with receive portion complete just after initial 'smoke test'. Luckily there was no smoke! The board fired up first time without problem and all the voltages checked out OK. The instruction book gives lots of testing opportunities, first of all you do resistance checks to make sure than there aren't any solder bridges etc.

Once you are happy with the resistance checks, you then go on to the voltage checks with power applied. Whilst in theory you could just build the whole K1 and do 'all up' testing, building and testing in small bits gives you confidence that you are doing everything right. It's a great feeling when all checks out OK.

The TX portion of the rig went together really well, the hardest part being the winding of the little transformers. I found it a bit tricky to get them to sit and look neat, but I got there in the end and I'm happy with the result.

The alignment of the rig is pretty simple, first you tweak the inductors on RX before completing the TX build, then after TX build you tweak them again on transmit.

I used the sound card on my laptop to set the BFO offset, although initially I had just done it by ear and the computer confirmed that I had got it pretty close. I found it quite amazing that I was using signals from the US to align the rig - 20m was very lively at the time, W1AW kindly confirmed calibration of the VFO readout on 14.0475 MHz :-)

 There are a few components fitted on the underneath side of the main PCB, I guess that Elecraft ran out of space to put them on the top. The rig uses all through-hole components, there are no SMDs used anywhere in the rig. The components all lie flat on the board too, this is not something I'm used to, the kits I've built recently have all used resistors and diodes in a vertical fashion, I use vertical mounting for my Manhattan rigs too, it just saves so much space.

I think Elecraft made a good decision spacing the board out the way they did, it makes construction easy, especially as all the footprints for the similar components are the same, this makes pre-forming the leads a piece of cake - well done Elecraft! (Note that some component locations are intentionally unused - I haven't missed them off by error!)

I think the assembled rig looks very nice, it certainly doesn't look as though somebody has put it together in an attic in Yorkshire! (yes, it was assembled in an attic in Yorkshire!)

There is a lot of work involved building a K1 - it has taken me a number of weeks to put this one together, but I have been doing a short session at a time, say 1 to 2 hours. There are no really hard bits to the construction, there is just a lot of it! The board solders extremely nicely, you can tell that it is a good quality board. I am very impressed by the overall quality of the kit, there is no wonder that Elecraft kits fetch good money second hand.

I'd definitely recommend the K1 kit and I haven't even tried it out on air yet! I would say that it's the best kit building experience I ever had, it's so nice when the instructions are so confidence inspiring and everything is explained in detail.

I have yet to add the KAT1 ATU board to the K1 - the board is fully populated, but I want to give the K1 a thorough try out first without the ATU to make sure everything is working as it should. I hope to try out the K1 this weekend. Once I'm happy everything is OK with the K1, I'll plumb in the ATU. I have never had the luxury of using an auto ATU, so it will be a new experience for me.

The K1 goes back to it's owner at the end of October - I'll be sad to see it go, but I'm very proud of my work. Hopefully I'll get to build somebody else' Elecraft kit in the not too distant future! Any offers? :-)

Hi Mite 17

Well, hasn't time flown by! I can't believe that we are already well in to October.

Back in August I started to build a HiMite 17, using my usual Manhattan style construction technique.

I got the circuit almost working but have since put the project on hold. I hope to get the project finished in the not too distant future.

I used crystals supplied by Graham G3MFJ at G-QRP club sales. Graham has just started stocking 18.086 MHz crystals, this now being the preferred frequency for QRP CW on 17m. I followed the schematic for the HiMite 17 devised by Dave Benson, K1SWL. Dave uses inductors in series with the VXO crystal to pull it down a bit as the crystals originally used were cut for 18.096MHz. I also used an inductor so my rig operates at slightly lower than 18.086MHz.

The frequency of the rig can be 'wiggled' by the use of 2 potentiometers to change the RX and TX frequency a little bit.

I seem to have lost my supply of violet LEDs, so I used a pink one instead - isn't it pretty? :-)

This rig is still a work in progress, I do hope to get it on the air soon!