Sunday, July 20, 2008

The SWR meter (one of)



After making the SWR meter for the antenna tuner I am building I decided to finish another one that I never put to work due the low acuracy.
It was based on an design I saw on the net but works lousy for the low bands so i decided to use the box and some internal parts and build a new swr meter based on this design. My design isn't exactly the same except the main parts (torroids and basic schematic), my microamp meter connects directly to the REF/FWD switch and I also bypassed the choke coils.

Here is another view:

Monday, July 07, 2008

First APT weather satellite image!

I am waiting for an dedicated weather satellite receiver, meanwhile I decide to test the waters with the trusty TM-D700 and one of the home made vhf vertical antenna.
After installing the software (wxtoimg) in the dedicated to radio Linux computer (I only use Linux) and after updating the keppler elements the next satellite pass was in an hour, so nothing like wait for the transmission (I still remember the first time I listened to an amateur satellite).

Honestly I was expecting an worst image due to the antenna/radio setup.

Here is the antenna (you can call it any other thing) and the first image: