

What’s most ‘accessible’ is to just buy the latest pre-built Japanese transceiver with a 200 page instruction manual for $10,000 and plug it in to power and coax.
PSST LOOK OVER HERE HOW TO
Would you call yourself a painter if you didn’t know what the stick with the little wad of hair on the end of it was for? Would you want to learn how to cook without ever heating up a skillet? Come on, folks, if you want to do electronics, learn some of the physical skills. I saw a comment on a YouTube video about the Raspberry Pi Pico board, where the person was saying he wished the board came with headers already installed. This was over twenty years ago, and it’s just gotten worse since then. At this point, one of the other guys in my class – this was a fourth-year electronics class, so he was just a few months from going on the job market as an electronics engineer – said, “what’s that you’re doing? Are you welding that?” I had to make a change to this part of the project, so I checked out a soldering iron and made the modification. As you do, if you don’t have time to order a PCB. In one of the labs, my project was too complex to fit on a breadboard, so I had wired up a portion of it in deadbug fashion, with the chips pins up on a piece of copper-clad board, with interconnecting wires soldered directly to the pins. Here was the situation: having been a technician for over thirty years, I had decided to get a degree so I would have Engineer credentials. I didn’t mean to make fun of people whose first language isn’t English. I look forward to Hackaday carrying project from you that demonstrates the use of “cool technology” and that is more accessible. Getting on for 100 people have picked up his design for a Direct Conversion receiver from last year, some of them engaging in amateur radio for the first time. You could actually reproduce it by driving tacks into a breadboard – oh wait, that old technology …įar from being “superficial” Pete has been a very prolific designer and has made his work open and available for anyone to pick up and build themselves. The same circuits can very easily be adapted to being reproduced on perfboard, or simply by drilling plain pcb. The construction style is easily reproducible using MeSquares, a scriber, a Dremel, a CNC, or just by cutting up off -cuts into pads, so it’s cheap, flexible and accessible to many. The joy of Pete’s designs is that a) he’s spent a lot of time making sure that it does work, b) designs in simple easily understood, built, and tested modules, c) his designs make it easy to use them as a platform to experiment, and d) he is usually accessible to help people who build it and find that they don’t understand something.

Because Pete has taken the time to engineer it, its simplicity belies it being really quite sophisticated in terms of only using what is necessary, and no more, the mark of a good competent engineer. Its a good sound basic design built in a way that’s very easy to reproduce, fault on and modify using easily obtained components. Posted in Radio Hacks Tagged 2n2219a, 2n2222a, amateur radio, ham radio, IRF510, QRP, QRP operation Post navigationīerb, I’d be intrigued to know how you think it isn’t accessible. We appreciate this contribution to the homebrew ham radio community, and we’re sure this will provide many nights of solder smoking enjoyment for radio amateurs around the world.
PSST LOOK OVER HERE CODE
has painstakingly documented the entire project on his website, and the code for the VFO is available by request via email. Be sure to check out the demonstration below the break! On the other hand, the PSSST was modeled stage-by-stage in LTSpice, ensuring great transmit audio and nice receiver performance. Many simple transceivers are designed to demonstrate a minimum viable radio, with performance not really a goal. The VFO and IF frequencies are both provided by the venerable si5351a with an Arduino at the helm.

The best part is that all of the transistors can be had for under $10 USD! shows where radio components such as the RF mixers and the crystal filter can be purchased, saving a new constructor a lot of headaches. On transmit, an extra three components step in to amplify the microphone input and build output power, which is 2.5-4 Watts, depending on the final output transistor used. The same circuit using four 2N2222A’s is used on both transmit and receive. What makes the PSSST so simple is not only its construction, but the low component count. He forged ahead, building a novel design that he calls Pete’s Simple Seven SSB Transceiver, or PSSST for short. When sat down to design a sideband transceiver for the 20 Meter (14 MHz) ham radio band, he eschewed the popular circuits that make up so many designs.
