FluxFocus

This video is just the process i was using to remove some j lead PLC chips off their driver PCBs and replace them using solder paste and a heat gun. Sorry about the audio quality in this video. I did this on my phone camera and the audio is a bit sketchy.

Here's a quick overview of a project I've been fiddling with and considering for a while. The idea is to have an oscillator I can use to align the tuning dial for some AM broadcast receiver projects I am workiong on and would like to work on.

Some of this experiment is about to migrate to a manufactured PCB. On the next version there will be three seperate oscillator circuits rather than switching components in and out of a single oscillator circuit.

So, I've been helping a friend out with his recalcitrant CNC machine. One of the axis was really playing up. And we discovered that one of the lines from the octal latch on the printer port receiver PCB was a bit dodgey. We suspect the octal latch, a 74HC244 to have gone cactus.

I started out to do a quick video about my "poor tech's method" of removing SOICs but decided to also show how I was going to replace the SOIC narrow IC with a SOIC wide IC.

Here in this video I'm voicing my frustrations about vendor provided mechanical dimension diagrams that don't transalte well to creating footprints in ECAD software like EagleCAD which is what I currently use.

So the TG-K4AT programming software for that family of radios has an option to change the frequency range. The interface asks for a password.

Under the Machine menu there is an option Machine Info. This brings up a dialog box titled Model Information.

A button here is titled Change Fre meaning Change Frequency Range. Clicking the button then prompts for a password. The password you need to enter here is: TGK42009   

I've been playing around with a lot of different toroid cores for the purposes of tuning coils, filters and transformers mostly for rf applications. I thought I'd do a little overview of a few cores, how they differ and why you might use one instead of another.

Its official now. I'm on the Australian amateur radio callsign register as VK2FLYZ.
The VK is for Australia
The 2 is for New South Wales, the state in which I live.
The F signifies that this licence is a Foundation licence. Kind of like a technician licence in ARRL terms.
The LYZ is my choice of the three remaining letters of the callsign.
The callsign is only a little goofy but it speaks/reads well phoentically i think - Foxtrot Lima Yankee Zulu.
I think it's a 1 year licence. Hopefully I'll have upgraded before that year is up.
The available frequencies for a foundation licence @ 10 watts max will be:

•  3.500 MHz–3.700 MHz
•  7.000 MHz–7.300 MHz
•  21.000 MHz–21.450 MHz
•  28.000 MHz–29.700 MHz
•  144.000 MHz–148.000 MHz
•  430.000 MHz–450.000 MHz

I've got a VHF and a UHF handy talky/ walkie talkie. Not sure if they would make it to any of the three or four repeaters that I can hear conversations on from home.

Those two radios I have are affordable Chinese brands Quansheng(UHF) and TYT(VHF).

I think HF is a little out of reach for the moment. For the moment I'll probably just try to get a boot(trunk) mounted UHF/VHF antenna for the car and maybe a little one for the house but my renting situation is a little up in the air at the moment so we'll see. There's plenty of back yard for antennas but don't want to go to any effort of antenna installation until I figure out what the owner wants to do with the house.

I'm not allowed, with this licence to use digital modes or build kits or my own radio gear other than antennas with this licence. I did ask one of the examiners if you were allowed to make you own antenna matcher to which he replied "I think so but I don't know why you would want to". Well, thats just me. I want to make it myself and through that process understand it as well as I can.

Eventually I'd like to move up to the advanced licence that does let me build and experiment with my own transmitters and related circuitry. Until then I'll continue to play around with receivers and related circuits.

JD

Well there's not too much to tell here. This was the first time I'd been to Wyong Field Day. No one promoting the day will tell you that it's more or less over by midday. I turned up just after 1pm and the Jaycar stand was already mostly packed up. I picked up some stuff from the trash and treasure stalls.

I wasn't up there looking at that for very long. When I returned to the under cover area, the homebrew group had already packed it in whuch was a pity becasue I wanted to check out their projects. I attended the final seminar which was a bout a couple of good days in January where Australian operators managed some trans-tasman and in some cases trans-pacific DX contacts on 6m and 2m bands which was interesting.

Wyong Field Day apparently shines bright and brief. I'll have to remember to be there at sparrow's next year. I was underwhelmed this time around to be honest but they tell me it's better in the morning. I haven't received my callsign yet so I didn't really feel very HAMmy anyway. I did get a good idea of how much money to bring next year.

Well, here's what I scored anyway. There's not much there really. And nothing really to prove I'd been to an amateur radio field day.

I dont know how good it is or how many watts the rheostat is but from time to time I find myself wanting one to test something so I'm glad I got that.

I got a lot of picofarad caps to fill out a gap in my stock here in my lab/workshop. At 50c a gab I could go past them. I also got a few different 5W resistors. Values from 0.2 Ohms to 5ohms.

The two bags of mixed electrolytics cost me $40. Not a huge bargain but I'd spend more than that collecting them elsewhere. And there's also a bag of 1n4004 diodes in there.

If I don't end up having my own store there next year, I'll be sure to buy some more radio oriented gear instead.

A few weeks before this post, I turned up to an amateur radio foundation licence exam held at a radio club without a passport photo. I had seen some mention of it but thought it was just fluff. Apparently not having it is a deal breaker. They wouldn't let me sit the exam without it.

So later the same day I emailed a local assessor to try to tee up doing the same test but discovered weeks later that my email never left my computer. I have a new ISP and had forgotten to change outgoing mail servers.

OK. So I tried this again with another mob and was a little less casual about the process this time. I made sure I had all the stuff I would absolutely positively need including the bloody passport photo. I also spoke to the guy who was holding the course on the phone some days beforehand to make sure they were expecting me on the day.

This was with the CCARC - Central Coast Amateur Radio Club. The central coast in the Sydney/NSW context is about a fourty five minute to an hours drive North of Sydney. Their club house is nicely situated atop a hill where their antennae can overlook the ocean and then back in the other directions over the hills. It's also next to what I think was a Rural Fire Service Building which makes so much sense espescially as fires are common in that area when we have hot summers. This has not been such a hot summer so I don't think they've seen much action.

Apparently they were putting the "education day" as a special thing for two or three of their members. Myself and another guy called in after seeing it on their website. The contact email was wrong but I figured out what it was through google searches and made contact. Chris, one of the organisers called me maybe 10 minutes after i had sent the email so having the quick confirmation was great. I actually got to the website while I was searching around to see if anyone was holding exams at the big Wyong Field Day which, at the time I did the exam, was being held the week after. CCARC are very involved in the Wyong field day as it is right in their back yard.

It was a very relaxed atmosphere which I really appreciated. We started maybe fourty five minutes to an hour late as we were waiting for the others to turn up. I didn't mind. We just sat around chatting and started to fill in forms and talk about some of the frequencies etc that the foundation licence allows you to use. The organiser even called them to see how long they would be. It only irked the organisers a little bit. I would have appreciated the same laid back attitudes if I had turned up really late. There's something about being by the coast away from the city that adds to this. The organisers dog even wandered around the classroom licking peoples knees and dangling hands while the class was on.

There's a manual that you can buy for the Foundation Licence. The slides that Tim, one of the other organisers took us through were basically a compression of each of the sections without any fluff and then some review of likely questions that might be seen in the exam and in some cases, the exact multiple choice question by random coincedence that would later be seen in the exam. The club had organised a barbeque lunch that could be purchased for a token amount. There were some other activities going on outside the classroom of the clubhouse invloving the other club members. There wasn't really any time to mingle since we'd lost a little time in the morning. We ate and went back to class. The girlfriend of a club member doing his stadard licence test that day had been in the foundation licence class but as she was pregnant and they baby was kicking like crazy, she dropped out.

By 3pm we'd finshed the slides and were completing paperwork. I should say at this point that other clubs normally do a two day course and then do the exam some other time! If you're not a complete doofus this is really unneccesary and I appreciate that the CCARC have seen the light in this regard. Tim had to go home and Chris, Mike and Bob took over. The time given for the exam is a half hour. The time taken to sort out paperwork and fill it in is about an hour and a half. I think I scribbled my signature 6 or so times throughout the day. After Chris and Mike realised they were handing out the Standard Licence exam paper, they replaced it with the Foundation Licence exam paper and we got to it.

I got two "wrong" out of the 25. There's no point in arguing the wording of a question or the lack of context if you pass. My only problem is that the same poor questions obviuosly get recycled for later exams. I hope the WIA (Wireless Institute of Australia) have some sort of committee that review the questions from time to time.

Next was the practical. It was easyish but It's also an uncomfortable situation. The guy at the other end of the radio is a stooge set up by the club to be there to talk to you for the test. By stooge I mean that they are a generous club volunteer but that the situation is a set up. Part of the test was to QSY (with some prompting) to another frequency. I think I missed the queue originally. I think theyd chosen a notoriously noisy frequency to begin with and then my contact suggested that he was of age with a hearing aid. I'm not sure if any of this is true or just a made up scenario to get you thinking about suggesting a frequency change along with phoenetically spelling out my handle. Although I've had little use for it, I had memorised the NATO phoenetic alphabet as a teenager when we talked to each other on CB which was our version IM before there was IM or SMS. I had photocopied the alphabet from a book on CB radio by Dick Smith, a luminary of business and hobby electronics in Australia, and stuck it on the wall of my room next to political cartoons, a Murphys Law poster and a poster of an Orangutang.

That was on HF, then we had a better contact on the 2m band where I was expected to juggle two contacts and invent some polite constipated conversation on the fly. Then we inspected the SWR metre and its response on a couple of different freqencies of AM and then SSB where there's no carrier.

Mike gave a quick demonstration of IRLP, logging into a repeater in Queensland and then Hawaii. We listened in to a conversation between a New Zealand operator and a Hawaiian operator and then said our goodbyes.

All the paperwork is express posted to WIA who then pass it on to the government authority ACMA. So I gues it will be a week to two weeks until I get the word on my callsign. Until then I'm not allowed to transmit.

So thats it. I'm a ham in limbo at the time of writing this. A word on the passport photo. It did in fact have to be a regulation passport sized photo. I hope they dont reject it because of my half smile. I already think that the passport photo is bureaucracy gone mad but the form also requsts eye colour, hair colour, height and any other distinguishing features e.g. tattoos. I was tempted to fill that bit in with "Rouguishly Handsome". But hat the hell ACMA? Other than the photo, I dont need to fill any of this shit out for my driver's licence or for my passport. Why the @$%# would I need to for an amateur radio licence? I think part of the problem here is that the same ACMA licence application form for the amateur radio licence is used for just about any other radio licence that might be issued in Australia. But even if you were a commercial broadcaster, why is your driver's licence or proof-of-age card (if you dont drive but need id) not good enough here? Maybe you'd also like our arms to be tattooed with a serial number (Godwins Law!) then we could have something to fill in that question with. Maybe the application form looked a little bare without an extra section to fill it out? I had to show my driver's licence to the assessor and he wrote my drivers licence number on the application form. If it's good enough for ID for the exam, it bloody well should be good enough ID for ACMA and their radio inspectors or whoever else cares.

JD
(ham-in-limbo)
 

There's been a couple of requests for this software. Just reiterating that it's not my software and technically I shouldn't be hosting any of Quansheng's files here, but below is a zip file containing the setup exe with the chinses characters removed. But just as a reminder, on http://www.qsfj.com in the support/downlaods section of the website, clicking on the download you want comes up with a little dialog box.

Highlight the chinese character text thats already in the box and delete it, replacing it with the word QUANSHENG  . I assume it's case sensitive. Press the blue button and the download should begin.

TG-K4AT, TG-K2AT, TG-K42AT, TG-K45AT Programming Software : TG-K4AT_42AT_45AT_46ATProg.zip