WSPR in the park at lunchtime

Inspired by Wade (VK1MIC) and Andrew’s (VK1AD) blog posts, I have decided to revive my old VK1ZDJ blog here and start posting what I hope are interesting articles.   At the very worst, it allows me an environment where…

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An Enclosure for the QRP Labs QCX 5W CW Transceiver

I have recently obtained a neat little radio from the clever folk at QRP Labs – the QCX-40. https://qrp-labs.com/qcx.html It is a single board CW transceiver, designed to operate on a single band from 80m through to 17m…

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My First SOTA Activation – Tuggeranong Hill VK1/AC-038

Having attended the AGM for the local Canberra Region Amateur Radio Club, I discovered that a group of SOTA enthusiasts were planning on activating a number of hills in the Canberra region on 01Mar2018 at 0800UTC.  This seemed…

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An interesting portable NVIS antenna

I have been researching NVIS antennas and have encountered a few interesting military versions. The AS-2259 is one example which uses a 3m mast and set of two offset fed dipoles (7.56 m and 11.22 m)  The dipoles…

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SOTA Equipment

I’m relatively new to the whole SOTA hobby, so I am still learning as I go. My main portable gear is based on the following; FT817 – A beautiful 5W radio for HF, 15, 144 and 430 Mhz…

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A Universal RFID key

Prox Card

RFID projects have been pretty prominent recently, ranging from projects here in Instructables, to our local Silicon Chip magazine in Australia publishing a RFID door lock project in their November issue. Even I recently purchased a RFID door…

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Arduino ATMega326 Using the Oscillator pin

CRO display of new full swing waveform

I just figured out how to use the oscillator pin of the AtMega328 chip to drive an additional component. I am working on a project that requires a 16Mhz clock to drive other electronics, and figured that the…

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A Stylophone

I decided to make a Stylophone as a gift for my dad.  I also documented the build process. It is purely Analog (No micro included) – which is a rarity for me. Here is the link to the…

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An Ethernet connected watering system controller

I extended the relay controller design that I put up recently to do the task of being a watering system. Getting the code to fit into an AtMega328 was a bit tricky, I kept having stack overflow problems…

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An Ethernet Relay Controller

As a recent project, I designed a cool relay controller that uses a state machine to control a set of relay outputs based on a user defined program.  The initial task is to operate a set of Christmas…

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