Hello,

I am back from holiday, just put the Online shop back on. I will try to catch up with mails and work. Please drop me a mail again if i missed yours somehow.

Chris

Hello,

I will be away for some 10 days, so the Order page will not be functional. Although the buttons will be enabled, PayPal will list all items as out of stock.

The online ordering will be functioning till late afternoon today, and any last minute orders will be sent tomorrow.

Hopefully the Order page will be operation after 11th of August 2016. Sorry about any inconvenience caused. Please feel free to drop me a mail during this period, i will try my best to answer as fast as i can, i am not sure how often will i have access to the Net.

73, Chris

M0NKA

Hello,

I have been away from my usual radio and electronics activities for a while. Unfortunately i had to venture into the building industry again. Although our new house was finished two years ago, there were two flat roofs that didn’t pass the building inspector watchful eye. One of those was above my office/shack.

After quick quote from few local ‘Mega professional’ roofers it became apparent that i have to do it myself (with the help of the Wifi off course). Simply requirements were too high – installing an access hatch and doing it without scaffold, and most important – penetrating antenna mast. So the incredible price, even before i mentioned my requirements was major put off, and those guys use ancient felt system, where it would seem GRP (fiber glass) was more appropriate for the antenna mast idea.

The actual roof is quite simple – leave the old felt as is too fresh to remove effectively, cover with 80mm insulation, then OSB sheets and lots of 120mm screws to hold all in place, cover all joints with tape to prevent the resin leaking down/covering expansion gaps.

The biggest complication was the fact that those cemented ridge tiles were below the new flat roof level. It was hard or easy way, we went for the latter – dripping plates above the old ridge, and some glue to hold it all in place. After all this was done – time for the important stuff, hatch access.

I was lucky in a way, to have the space in the office for small, improvise staircase and clear space on the roof to allow for the hatch.

The other important design decision was finding correct place for the antenna mast, so it could be attached to the 100x100mm beams that hold my third floor, and be lucky enough that the  penetrating hole does not interfere with the hatch position and the cemented ridge. Again the antenna God was kind to me and i had the correct spot singled out.

I know what you think – why didn’t you use proper 110 mm drill extension. Simple reason, the underlying felt made all my drill bits covered in nasty black stuff, didn’t want to spoil brand new looking tool with that !

Anyway, it was simple job to have nice looking opening for the socket pipe

At the last minute i have decided to leave the external pipe above the old OSB, for better support and having small hole on the OSB sounded good in case any moisture got through.

I got perfect fit of the socket pipe and the actual mast.

And all fits together nicely, next – the actual job of laying the resin.

We have decided to do this in a two steps (days) operation. First we did all the ridge and dripping plates overlaps, together with the hatch and antenna socket. The second day we covered out the actual flat space.

Without boring you with any details, here the result. If you are interested how is done, just Google ‘GRP roof’, there are some nice videos on YouTube as well. So after the resin and top coat, i had something like this for my antenna mast socket:

Don’t mind the temporary 2m vertical, i really don’t have any use for it, but is good for wind testing on the new mast

Expensive EPDM rubber seal for the joint between the socket and the mast is used. It is very important that provides for waterproofing and mast movement/vibration the same time.

It is missing a hose clip, just don’t have the right size right now, but yes, there has to be one at the top as well. Here also some details of the mast support inside the house (under the roof).

After the mast penetrates the lower OSB sheet, it goes via main support truce, in a tight hole.

Then it lays down on a stud piece that prevents the mast sliding down. There is a variable diameter hole drilled into this piece, so the coax can still be routed out, thus no need to extra waterproofed holes.

In conclusion – it is not impossible to have penetrating mast on a flat roof. But requires planning, attention to details and probably doing it yourself. It is worth mentioning that i have used quite thin mast, as i don’t require large HF Yagi antennas. I am sure much more rigid construction could be achieved if needed.

Chris

Hello,

I have now most of the components back in stock and can send out full kits again. But due to my local Post Office closed for some 10 days for refurbishment, i will not be able to provide the speedy dispatch of the packages right now. Please allow 4-5 days from payment to postage as i need to use alternative place to post.

Sorry about that, the situation is just temporary.

Chris

Hello,

It has been some times since i have posted, also it would seems i have missed some of the toroid cores finishing, while waiting for more the full kits are out of stock, sorry.

I hope i can get some in 1-2 days time, will update quantity in PayPal accordingly when possible.

73

After being down with a nasty bug for few days nothing much has been done on the mcHF Pro front, except doing small CPU pin allocations daily.

To continue the minimalist tradition of the mcHF i decided to reserve the MCO1 and MCO2 pins for clocking out external HW. For those who don’t know, the internal CPU PLL can be routed to two GPIOs and get away without two extra oscillators. Final result is reduced cost and better frequency stability (lower drift), as it is easy to oven/stabilize one chip than three.

The mcHF used only one of those, so only the Codec was clocked from the CPU PLL. On the new design i can clock the Codec again and something else. Still no idea, need to carefully check the frequency range that could be used – but maybe the quadrature upconverter or the FPGA.

For those who would like a peek at the preliminary schematics and the FPGA code, i did setup the GitHub, here.

Hi,

It has been an year since my 4m WSPR screen grabber actually worked. Now after freeing my old SSL server machine and installing all needed proggies – WSJT-X, Dimension4, ShareX the sidebar imagine link actually works and is updated every 1 minute.

I was reluctant to use anything else, as this machine is fanless, the whole case is extruded aluminium and has SSD, so absolutely no noise.

I think have mentioned before that I have special service jig that allows me to test every single LCD before posting it with the kit. It is very useful idea, as it saves money and hassle in the long run.

The usual QC fail on every batch i get is in the range of 10-20 %. And the most common fault is the famous ‘White Screen’ problem. I haven’t done any detailed analysis, but i would say is either badly soldered flat cable/mode jumpers or simply faulty controller chip.

But testing my latest batch i got more than 55% failed LCDs. And the ‘fault’ was not the usual ‘White Screen’ but something i call ‘Broken TV’, something you would get on old school analogue TV without an antenna connected.

It was really concerning, so after speaking with the manufacturer, it would seem there are four different revisions of the ILI9325 controller chip, named by them as A,B,C and D. There is a differences between them, not a detailed list of those, but one important thing would be the maximum communication speed. It would appear that version A is the slowest (not being able to handle higher clocks) and D is the fastest.

So using the 0.219.26.4 version of the source code and latest driver source code for the controller from the manufacturer i was able to make those LCDs, that have the new revision controllers work.

You can find the updated firmware binary on my Downloads page, and source code fork is on my GitHub account.

Chris

The concept of Digital Down Conversion (DDC) is not new to me. I had been early adopter of the USRP1, and had it running OpenBTS for non ham related R&D projects. The magic of emulating GSM network is orders of magnitude more complex than sampling the full HF spectrum and then presenting a 192k stream to the PC for a software defined receiver program.

But my friend Bri(G0MJI) recently brought my attention to an interesting board called Red Pitaya.

There is nothing extraordinary about it, it is the usual ADC, connected to FPGA with some emulated logic to implement down conversion, with DDS/NCO etc. This one has ARM core cpu inside as well, so it can run Linux on chip, which is a money saver. What was amazing about is that a user called Pavel have managed to create multiband, parallel WSPR receiver – fully contained on board. You need only antenna, power and Ethernet connection!

It is a computing intensive task so active cooling is a must! And it actually happens that this board is quite amazing at WSRP. After maybe week of using it on air I was curious how good/worse is this DDC concept against traditional setup of HF transceiver and a PC.

Although looking at the WSRP spot database it would seems the board performs exceptionally, there is still doubt how sensitive and protected against overloading is an ADC input open to everything from 0 to 60 Mhz. Yes, the ADC on board seems to be clocked at 125 Mhz.

My test setup was the board itself, submitting to wsprnet.org, and old Sony Laptop running Ubuntu 14.04 and latest WSJT-X. So the decoder versions on the Red Pitaya and the laptop are compiled from the same source code – the latest K9AN C decoder. Also same antenna is used to feed the mcHF and the RP board, via mini-circuits signal spliter.

The board during day time actually samples and submit eight ham bands, but my setup did the comparison only on 40m as it was not practical to have 8 laptops and transceivers. Here the six consequential screenshots, where on the left you can see spots submitted from the Red Pitaya and on the right local decodes from the mcHF/WSJT-X combination.

screen 1(click to open high res)

screen 2(click to open high res)

screen 3(click to open high res)

screen 4(click to open high res)

screen 5(click to open high res)

screen 6(click to open high res)

So it would seems there is no visible performance problem compared to conventional setup. This could, off course, be attributed to the resilience of the WSPR protocol. But this board demonstrates very extreme case – fully open input of the ADC, directly connected to external antenna. Practical transceiver designs that use the DDC architecture (eg IC-7300, etc..) implement wide range of modules to prevent this – switchable BPFs, pre-amps, digitally controlled attenuators, etc.

So apart from ginormous power consumption, high speed clocks, difficult to route multi-layer PCBs and big chips – the DDC architecture is a clear winner!

It looks like the AD9957 needs four power supplies. So the digital and analog rails are split and there is a pair for 3.3V and pair for 1.8V.

Usual solution is to use single dual regulator with bunch of T filters. Like this guy who made a DAB radio transmitter using this same chip. But it would seem the current requirement is bit weird so this power scheme is not very good option

So after spending some time i think i will start with 150 mA dual regulator (tested in old design) with only one T filter, and use extra 700 mA regulator for the demanding 1.8V DVDD.

Anyway, both could be switched off via Inhibit pin, so the quadrature upconveter could be off if not needed in RX mode and save more than 800 mA. There is also a need to complete the signal part of the module, to follow…