40m complete
Today I finished building the small 40m amateur band transmitter kit from Vectronics that I picked up at a ham convention about a month ago. It cost all of $30. I powered it up with a 2 watt resistor as a dummy load, keyed it up, and sure enough, I could hear the signal at 7040 KHz on my ICOM receiver. The next step is to take the board into work to check it out on the spectrum analyzer and to do a good power measurement. The board is rated at between 1 and 2 watts. That doesn't sound like much, but you can do amazing things in the HF band with ridiculously low power. Hopefully it will be enough to at least get one QSO on my technician license before I go for the general class license.
Now it's time to put up an antenna. I'll probably put up a horizontal half-wave dipole, since my backyard is about 20m wide. The rigging of the antenna and the feedline is going to be the hardest part of the project.
Jim on 09.23.06 @ 03:05 PM ET [link]