[HBQRP] Items for future meetings - and a few interesting web pages.

[Arnie Grubbs]

Hi Group,

I am glad to see that we are getting things lined up for the upcoming months.
It helps to have some direction to the meetings so that things start to come together!

I would again like to say that I would like to see our "Lark in the Park" take place at
the June meeting.  My thoughts are that it would be good to get out, set up and operate
from the field, before its time to go for field day. 
Generally this would be a "practice day" for Field day.  Minus the operating over night
and setting up tents/campers and a big cookout! 

  This is would be a way to insure your field kit has everything you need, so you have not lost of left at home something that you would need to run on Field Day.  Whats the group think?

Also,  from the list of things that we were talking about for other meetings, I have been looking
at some Arduino pages and also some DDS signal generators.  

Heres a very good web page from a ham doing interesting things with an eye for "ham" or builder.

http://http://www.ad7c.com/projects/ad9850-dds-vfo/


There's a lot of pictures on this page, and the replies to his blog are very interesting with
some links to some code and schematics for making a VFO or signal source for the home lab..

The cost of the DDS modules from china is about $5 shipped, and if you were to get one of
the clone Arduino "micro" boards, for about $3 to $7, for the controller and throw in 
an LCD and a few switches or encoder for a few bucks more, you would have quite a system.

A system you could for a bench signal generator, a VFO for a rig you are thinking about building
or without the DDS, and add a motor driver board, a magnetic loop tuner...
With other hardware, things like SWR meters, DTMF decoders that could be used to control things, even 
a simple repeater controler could be built.

It all looks very exciting to me...   so I ordered off a couple of the DDS boards from china
along with a few "micro" boards.

Heres a link to one of the micros on Ebay -

 http://http://www.ebay.com/itm/Leonardo-Pro-Micro-ATmega32U4-Arduino-IDE-1-0-3-Bootloader-replace-Pro-Mini-/310634777706?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4853468c6a

I am even thinking about using one to replace the controller 

Heres a link to some vids on things people are doing with these little computers..

http://youtu.be/W_dlocgMEpI

A cool NE602 - RX with DDS VFO... 

http://youtu.be/UTdNYhvF_dw

Heres a vid of a guy talking about starting with the Arduino and in his
later vids goes on to talk about programming the board, dealing with
program structure, variables, hardware libraries, ect.

http://youtu.be/kLd_JyvKV4Y

if you look around, there are a lot of other vids of interest to an experimenter.
A lot of these are done by hams!

I hope that this might get a few more people interested in doing some stuff with 
controllers like this.  

Anyhow.. I hope that this helps give some ideas on things that might be 
of interest to some of the group.  I also home that we can keep some 
dialog going on this reflector between meetings..


73 - Arnie KA0NCR