I received my uBitX kit on the 19th of December but as I was finishing up work, I didn’t have much time to work on it. But it is now working, with a few little issues to work through, and a few mods done to it and a few more to do.
μBitX!
So, I have finally built my shack
I was sick of doing all my radio stuff on a fold-out table in the bedroom so… I took a look around the place to see what else I could do. At first I thought about putting up a shed, but the only place I could put one was too far from the house so I wouldn’t hear if anyone broke in. Then I looked under the house, measured the space at 4.2m x 2.2m and thought “I might be able to do something with this” Continue reading “So, I have finally built my shack”
Homebrew APRS – Arduino Uno KISS TNC
So, What’s all this about?
Last week I was looking on eBay at what rigs and equipment was around and found some transceivers with APRS and thought “I don’t have anything that can do APRS, That could be handy when I go out to the bush and there are no mobile phone towers in range, say if I got stuck. These prices are a bit high for something I wouldn’t use much though.”
So then I looked at APRSdroid and saw that it can be connected to a radio, either directly (but you have to use vox) or via a TNC. I looked at TNCs online and saw not only that they can be expensive but that there isn’t much to them and went looking for some ideas on building one. Continue reading “Homebrew APRS – Arduino Uno KISS TNC”
Icom IC-7300 Rig control for MMSSTV
You can either make whatever changes to these settings after copying and pasting the [RADIO] and [RadioMenu] sections over the originals in the Mmsstv.ini file, or just copy/paste and change the few settings needing a tweak from within the program itself.
IMPORTANT: Do not modify the file while MMSSTV is running, it will overwrite it when you exit, so exit first, modify, then re-start MMSSTV.
This section is near the middle of the Mmsstv.ini file:
(Note – Change PortName and BaudRate to suit your system!,
also Cmdxx=148 is the CI-V address, 148=94h – the default for IC-7300, check in your rig under MENU>SET>Connectors>CI-V>CI-V Address. If it has been changed from 94h, convert the hexadecimal number to decimal and change Cmdxx to suit)
My BitX/40 Project
I ordered the BitX/40 SSB 40 meter transceiver kit from HFsignals (Ashhar Farhan VU2ESE) and paid the extra for DHL shipping. I ordered on Sunday the 7th of May, and it arrived at my QTH in Australia from Hyderabad, India on Friday 12th of May.
So, I set to work on assembly and modifications. I have used a 20×4 lcd screen instead of the 16×2 one that came in the kit, installed a MUCH bigger heatsink on the IRF510 PA MOSFET, set up TX sense for readout on the screen, a 10-turn precision pot for better tuning, selectable LSB/USB (this was already in amunters code I modified for my purposes but wasn’t in VU2ESE’s original code) and built but haven’t connected yet ND6T’s forward and reflected power meter and adapted his code to work with amunters raduino code.
First Post
Welcome to VK3DAN.ninja, a site for anything I want to post about amateur radio, arduino and technology.