Sauerkraut
This is the last food joke, I swear.
…For now.
I’m up way past my bedtime right now, woodshedding Randy Rhoads licks on my guitar. My arms are sore and I can’t feel my left hand. I haven’t had this much fun in a while. 🙂
Amp Stuff: I got a ton of soldering done this weekend. I’m coming to realize that I’ve made a bit of a mistake in deciding to do this amp in point-to-point style. It is a pretty complex circuit, actually, with two vacuum tube op-amps and switchable gain stages. As it is coming together, the wiring is looking pretty messy. It should be fine in the end, but next time I’ll fab a proper circuit board to keep things cleaner and easier. Anyway, if all goes well, hopefully I’ll have this thing powered-on and (maybe) making noise in the next week! There will be sound samples when I do.
See you Thursday!
You are going to cause a very unpleasant gastric evacuation at this rate!
Yep, point-to-point wiring can start to look like (shall I say it?) a pile of sauerkraut! Back in school, I created a couple of circuit boards, using something like a photo processing method. They never seem to come out looking professional. Oh well! However, you’ve inspired me to revisit a project I started in 2009 – a home-built CW code transmitter. I’m building it in a gutted Hallicrafters S-38C receiver chassis and, when finished, will work along side a working S-38C. Yep, a matching transmitter-receiver pair. The receiver is 1947 vintage, so I’m building the transmitter with all vintage parts from that time. It’ll have a 5U4 rectifier, an 0D3 regulator and a 6L6 final, transmitting at 7 MHz on the 40 meter HAM band. So far, the power supply and regulator are working, as of today. Next is the crystal oscillator. Now, if only I could get that Morse Code down!
THAT is super cool. Is that FM or AM (or some other weird encoding I don’t know)? I built a simple FM transmitter/receiver pair back in school, and it was very hard to get working right. Granted, we were using IR instead of radio. But MAN it was cool to actually put something like that together. What kind of transmission range do you get with a 6L6 power section (and a good antenna)?
This transmitter is not AM, FM, or any other kind of M. It is CW, which means continuous wave. I plug a Morse Code key in, which turns the transmitter’s wave on and off. That would be the dots and dashes you would hear. Since there is no modulation, a special receiver is needed, one with a BFO, or Beat frequency Oscillator, which mixes my received wave with another wave to create a tone you can hear. And distances? If the world was flat, a modest rig (like mine) could cover it. So, distance is limited by the earths curvature. But it gets better! At 7 MHz, which I’ll be using, certain common weather conditions allow me to bounce my signal all around the world! I have a friend, here on Long Island, New York (low altitude) who sent messages back and forth with King Hussein of Jordan! Now if only I could get that Morse Code down!
I should add, that another reason I would be able to transmit so far is that I’m not sending my voice, which quickly becomes unintelligible over far distances due to noise. But even in high noise conditions, you can hear a very weak signal as soon as you turn on the BFO.
Ah, I understand. That sounds pretty fun actually. Now I’m thinking of ways to plug a microcontroller in to automatically translate in/out morse code from basic text. hmm.
hmmmmmm…
Man, your head is into vacuum tubes. This is the 21st century! You buy a voice-to-text converter, and a text-to-code converter, and “BINGO”, you’re coding! What is really sick, is that they are probably inexpensive computer programs!! Maybe I don’t have to learn that code at all!
Oops, you said “microcontroller” not “microphone”. Maybe you’re brainier than I thought!
That’s what I mean! Write a translation program to run on a microcontroller. You could even hook it up to a computer over RS232 serial and run it from a terminal emulator … man this sounds like a fun project.
“man this sounds like a fun project” Is a phrase I need to be a little more stingy with. I’ve got a lot of projects 🙂
Edit: you beat me to the comment. Well done.
I believe that you’ve got this part figured out better than I do. I haven’t written a program or plugged in an RS232 cable in ages! Well, finish your amp first, and good night!