Posts by: AP

We first met — I think — in the summer of 2015 during the Hamfest in Friedrichshafen. At that time I had a mobile Kenwood transceiver TM-D710 which was quite nice by its own. However, after several months using the TM-D710 I got increasingly annoyed by some of its shortcomings, most of them purely subjective (but I …

Winter is finally here and the weather is suddenly much colder. I bought two styrofoam boxes, the types used for carrying fish, and I made two shelters for the stray cats. Hope will be warm and cosy. It just struck me that this is the 100 post I published on this blog. Nice. I have …

My new iPhone X is beautiful, a bit too expensive for what it offers but… what the heck. It’s a nice toy. Fancy one. Yet, something annoys me each time I sync my phone with the iTunes. I do this mostly for syncing music from my library. Each time I press the sync button, a …

Over the past seven years (the age of this blog) I started writing several articles that I never  finished. It’s time to trash them completely or just add them to a list for future afterthoughts. Who knows ? So, from older to newer: “Weller WD 1000 M Review – Part III – Software”, January 18, 2013 — …

This is a beacon project started by my friend YO5VAE. He faced some issues while programming of the Si4463-based module and I thought I might give a hand. I resoldered the entire project on an empty Arduino shield to allow expansion of the project with some additional modules. Below are some pics, but probably the …

I twenty dollars for this superb cassette deck. The playback and recording heads were in excellent shape and I used this deck for some years, playing and recording on NOS (new old stock) tapes, mostly chrome type II and metal – type IV, that I purchased on eBay. However, one day the entire head block …

There is nothing better than marrying several hobbies and have fun from it. I have had the intention to be part of this expedition at least since I heard about this contest for the first time. My good friends from Năsăud planned this thoroughly. All our equipment was carried by three 4×4, manned by a …

This old reel-to-reel was the joy of my teenager days, Back in eighties I was listening to VOA and Radio Kuweit and I was recording mostly on east-german OR-WO tapes (that were quite decent) because the BASF and Agfa were in shortage. Western music reached the black market usually by pilots that were operating civil …

I ordered some ferrite beads for a RF circulator project I currently work on but these might also be very handy for the SWR bridge project. These are extremely efficient for RF supression, or at least this is what they say.

For low frequency projects, a fast way to prototype is using a bare PCB and scratch some dividers that allow “manhattan” style prototyping. I am especially very fond of this prototyping technique and I believe that PCB design should be avoided in the early stages of prototyping. Jim Williams was an artist in such designs. …