Month: February 2010

Designing and building a Manned Beacon or MEPT, part 1 of many

I came acros the site of IK0VVE with a wonderfull description of a MEPT.
MEPT stands for Manned Experimental Propagation Transmitter and is usually very low power. He uses a crystal oscilator but I find them pretty expensive. So I Looked around the net for programmable oscillators. Those are even more expensive and in the most cases you need a microcontroller to programm them. The oscillators uses I²C for setting the frequency by setting the divider and table lookups, …..

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I’m still alive and kicking sometimes

Hello World,
my last entry was from february last year (exact one year ago) and then everything went quiet. What has happened since?

We sold our appartment and bought a house with a small garden. Early March we were alerted by friends that there was a house for sale in their street. We know about 5 families in that street, all our children attend the same school and and have approximately the same age. After a long weekend calculating and visiting bank sites to learn about loans we mailed our price to the real estate company. Monday morning we were phoned that our bid was accepted. Everything went fast from that moment on. We sold our appartment to my parents in law. In May we signed all papers and we are now the owners of a house. In June and July we moved.

For the hobby it was a bit giving and taking. I now have a separate shack, Measuring only 1,5 by 2,4 meter. I saw the  appartment building as one big antenna mast, that is gone now 🙁 But I found the remains of a tv arial on the roof of our house. That should be a good anchorpoint to mount my X200 and a wire antenna for HF.
The garden is about 6 by 30m, just big enough to fit a FD4 antenna. The FD4 is almost ready, but the weather hasn’t cooperating lately.

Other projects I would like to to :