31 December, 2022
QDX with voltage regulator
20 November, 2022
W8BH clock with EU option
I cloned the software and modified it in two simple ways:
1. EU option
This is a backwards compatible version which can be Europeanized with formats for date and units. It also has possibility for removing the display of the battery icon, when running from a USB supply.
New boolean variables to set:
- US_UNITS - if false: m, kmh, Little-endian date with '.', if true: feet, mph, Middle-Endian date with '/'
- BATTERY_DISPLAY - true: as original code, false: no display of battery icon and status
03 November, 2022
Planet positions for the Multi Face GPS Clock
- Azimuth and elevation for inner and outer planets relative to your present location. The inner planet screen shows Venus and Mercury and alternates also every 10 seconds between showing the position of the sun and the moon. The % illumination is also shown along with an estimate of apparent magnitude
- The combined local time and UTC display now has an option to show ISO week number, defined to start on Mondays. (It is my understanding that the week number in the US is different, as Sunday is the first day of the week)
- A new calendar screen now shows Gregorian (western), Julian (eastern) as well as Islamic and Jewish dates. The calculation of the Jewish calendar is tough for the Arduino Mega and takes some 5-6 seconds
- A screen showing GPS Info has also been included. This screen shows the number of satellites in view (line 0), the number of satellites in use for position fix and their average signal to noise ratio (line 1), the mode and status indicators (line 2), and the Horizontal Dilution of Precision, Hdop, and its characterization in plain text (line 3).
26 August, 2022
QDX on 17 and 15 m: Receiver
The latest firmware, version 1_04, has a new "Band Configuration" screen where one may configure the list of supported bands. It is the intention that higher bands will eventually be supported.
I am not so interested in 80 m, so I wanted to see if I already now could get the receiver to work on 17 m and 15 m. With reference to the schematics, I modified the input filter's inductor, L12.
07 August, 2022
French, Spanish, German, Icelandic, Swedish, ...
The multi-face Arduino GPS clock is inspired by the Clock Kit from QRPLabs. It is an open source project on GitHub, and it now has support for many more languages in the newly released versjon 1.4.0. As a language nerd myself, I love fiddling with multiple languages and character sets.
The local language option is for display of day name in case local time is shown. The default is English for local time. No matter the choice for local time, English is always used for UTC day name. Here are examples:
French:
23 June, 2022
Reversing the inductor in the Chinese QRP antenna tuner makes all the difference
That was even after I had replaced the two polyvaricon capacitors. The two screws for mounting each of the variable capacitors were too long. The result was that they interfered with the moving plates of the capacitor and I ruined both of them. There was no warning of this in the manual, so beware anyone who buys this kit.
Despite fixing this, it didn't really tune anything. I later learned that it probably works for low bands like 80 m as it is, but I didn't notice that. I thought maybe the toroid core of the inductor was of inferior quality, but never really investigated it, so it sat unused on the shelf for 7-8 years.
14 June, 2022
SV8/LA3ZA part 2
03 June, 2022
SV8/LA3ZA
The polymath Pythagoras was born on Samos and his birthplace village is now called Pythagorio. |
The antenna is a quarter-wave vertical for 30 m which also tunes several other bands. It’s on the balcony with a 7 m Sotabeam glass fiber mast, on the left-hand side of the street in the image below.
05 April, 2022
Even more functions for the Arduino GPS Clock
- Demo mode, where all screens are cycled through, with 10-15 seconds per screen
- Astronomical clock
- Wordclock display
- Roman numbers
- Morse code clock
12 March, 2022
Presentation at Hammeeting 2022
Main links for documentation
- Github: Multi Face GPS Clock
- Documentation on this blog: Arduino clock
08 March, 2022
Ham meeting 2022
The Norwegian Ham meeting 2022 will take place 11-13 March near Oslo Airport Gardermoen. Norwegian and some Swedish radio amateurs will meet and the program is here (Norwegian). It will be nice finally to meet again!
I will give a presentation on Saturday morning: "An easy-to-build GPS clock for the shack".
06 February, 2022
More functions for the Arduino GPS Clock
09 January, 2022
Magical speaker cables - part 2
Cable with large distance between the conductors (Schnerzinger) |
The first example had a large distance between the conductors and was placed on its own stand to get distance from the floor. It was designed to minimize capacitance between conductors. Another design criterion was to minimize the impact of vibrations created by the speakers themselves.
Twisted multi-conductor cable |
There is no shortage of science-based claims for how cables affect sound. There are so many of them that this blog post, where my ambition is to say something about all of them, gets to be a little longer than I would have liked it to be. If you are impatient, you may go to the end and just see the conclusion. For the curious, I will consider the claims one by one.
02 January, 2022
Magical speaker cables - part 1
Pear Anjou speaker cable |
A climax in the cable dispute may have been reached in 2007 when the skeptic James Randi offered a reward of 1 million dollars if anyone could prove that speaker cables costing $2750 for a pair of 1 meter long cables provided any improvements. He was provoked by the claims of the Pear Anjou cables shown in the image.