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I want to say right out front that I am really not very electronically inclined, I am just a beginner. I enjoy tinkering with various projects that include several aspects of the hobby. This page is more geared toward beginner enthusiasts and I hope that they will find its contents and resourses useful. I will describe the projects to the best of my ability and trust me, it is very limited but I will do the very best that I can do to be accurate. If anyone has any suggestions or comments about this page or any particular project, please feel free to post your comments or questions . I am fortunate to have a good friend and elmer Alex KR1ST help me with most of the complicated stuff and want to credit him for the success of most of my projects. In the future I will be posting some pictures of of my projects that I have either completed or am in the process of working on...stay tuned!

3/23/08 UPDATE...Here are some pics of various projects from the past that I dug up. I will be adding more descriptions of the projects and some resources as time allows. I hope that you will enjoy the page and find some of the material and or resources useful .Thanks for looking and please come back to visit!

Latest & Greatest blog Here are some descriptions of more projects that I have worked on where you can post your comments or questions.

 

 

Ham Radio Projects

 

 

                                           Homebrew RF Probe

                              

While attempting to get my newly aquired Yeasu FT 101E working which without the extreme patience and help of my bud KR1ST Alex, we found that I needed an RF probe. With that being said, Alex thought that this would be a great opportunity for me to get my feet wet in a beginner project. He instructed me to build this probe and showed me where to find the instructions in the ARRL Handbook. The schematic for the probe that I built can be found on 26.11 figure A in the 2001 handbook. This was an easy project to build, I found it harder to find a suitable enclosure than to actually build the project. I finally settled on an old permanent marker because I found that I could remove the ink pad and drill a hole in the bottom cap for the coax to go into. For the actual probe point, I had a piece of copper that I rounded down to a point with my bench grinder. The yellow stuff you see at the tip is heat shrink which actually helps hold the tip in place. The above picture is my finished project. This entire project cost me about three dollars and about an hour of my time to build! If you would like to learn more about RF probes and what they are useful for, then check out N5ESE Montys site. He has a really good page about on this subject plus some detailed schematics on how to build your own probe.

 

Antique Radio: One of my favorite aspects of the hobby is working on and collecting old broadcast and shortwave radios. 

Antique Radio Restoration  

Antique radio collecting and restoration is one of my favorite aspects about the hobby of radio. This page is dedicated to my collection and restorations that I have attempted to do on my own. I have no formal electronic experience, everything that I have learned has either been from books, tapes, ham radio,  friends,  and so on and so forth.  I have used the web quite extensivly to find out information on the sets that I aquire, none of which are priceless, but I enjoy them and find them to my liking. I concider myself to be a beginner novice when it comes to restoring these sets . As for collecting, I am a bottom feeder...In other words, I buy up the sets that no one else wants.  If you would like to see some of the antique radio sites that I get most of my information and schematics from, then click here.  Right now, this page is very limited and it will take me some time to post more of my collection and restorations so please check back from time to time.  In the future,  I will post more as time allows.

 The ultiment challange...what do you think..can it be fixed or shall we junk it?

 

                          

This poor Admiral belongs to a local Ham Bill WA4GTC. This used to be his grandmother's radio and at one time operated off of batteries from what he tells me. It had been stored in a very leaky barn for years and of course, this is the result of poor storage. Looks pretty bad, huh? He was considering pitching it but I told him that I would like to attempt to fix it so he let me take it home where it sat for quite some time before I figured out what to do with it.

This set proved to be quite the challenge and it took alot of time and patience. I spent months just trying to get the case back in shape and practically had to rebuild it completely. The wood was very thin, fragile and warped and the veneer was dry and chipped with several pieces missing or destroyed. To get the warps out,  I tried using water in a spray bottle to wet it down, then put the warped wood under glass with heavy weights on it. The result after a couple of days was a straight piece of wood. Unfortunately, wood has a memory and within a day or two, it was all warped up again. This became very time consuming and VERY frustrating as you can imagine.

 

                  
                                  View of the underside of chassis before recap

I decided in the end to use some new plywood pieces cut to size on the inside of the case for support. Seeing that the original case was all but destroyed, I straightened the warped pieces for the 15th time and immediately attached them to my plywood pieces with finishing nails and glue. Somehow, I managed to have a few pieces of veneer from the case left over so I used these to fill in the missing pieces on the front of the radio. It was not easy but I made a template of all the missing parts and carved them out of the leftover veneer with a razor knife. As you can see from the pictures below, it turned out really well. I found a stain to match the color, re stained it and then used shellac for the finish.

Chassis and Sears Silvertone battery eliminator

As for the chassis, I did not  repair the set to working order. The wiring was shot, all the tubes were bad and so were the caps. Bill said that he would take care of that  and that he would replace the tubes himself when I returned the radio to him.  I did however wind up recapping the set for him and restrung the dial cord which by the way was a real pain in behind to do. I also completely rewired everything . I took the chassis apart as much as I could and buffed off all the rust with steel wool. I have since returned the set to the owner as my part of the restoration was done. I am not sure if he ever got the new tubes or not, I will have to catch up with him one day and see if he got the set to play. Below are the finished results of my work.

                      

 

                      

 

                      

 

                     

 

                                Zenith 8-S-154

 

                                                     

Talk about a remarkable find! My wife and I found this set in a junk store called Nazam's located on Dorchester Road West of Leeds Avenue in North Charleston and believe me, it looked nothing like this when we bought it for 75.00!  Like an idiot, I was not thinking of course when I set out to restore this baby. For some stupid reason I did not take any pictures of the set before I started working on it. These pictures are after the cabinet was stripped and restained and work was being done to the chasis. The sad thing about this radio is the original color was Ivory which is a much sought after set by collectors. I heard through a newsgroup that one sold in North Carolina at an auction for a little over seven hundred dollars. Somewhere along the line some genious decided to paint this set with a enamal white paint, which of course, ruined the original finish. Let me tell you, I had a very hard time removing this horrid finish; whoever did it put several layers on it, and painted everything including the brass escutcheon.

I knew for sure that it was an original ivory set because you could see traces of the original color on the inside of the cabinet. I also learned from some guys in an antique radio newsgroup that I subscribe to about some numbers and details on the chasis that would help me confirm that this was indeed an original ivory set. Apparently, these sets were not in production for very long and to tell you the truth, I have not ever seen another one in all my travels. It took me roughly about a year to strip the cabinet and refinish it, of course they dont make that color anymore  (at least I could not find it anywhere) so I used a white pickling stain from Lowes which was as close to the original color as I could get. It took several coats to bring the set out, and in the end, I put a couple of layers of shellac on it which turned out really nice.

The chasis was in pretty good condition and it cleaned up well. I did find a couple of bad tubes so I decided to go ahead and completely re-tube the set. I also went ahead and replaced all the paper caps and electrolytics which did wonders for the radio. The only trouble that I had was the camdown resistor decided to crap out on me. This happened after the re-cap and re-tube plus allignment. Talk about being really stressed out! I did not have a clue how to fix this problem so once again, I turned to my faithful friend Alex KR1ST. He went through my junkbox and found all the correct value high voltage resistors and cobbed together a new camdown resistor. Well, it looked ugly but by golly it worked! Thank goodness it was under the chasis so you dont see it! Once it was installed and the old camdown removed, the set sprang to life and has been playing every since. It is one of my favorite sets and I enjoy it very much. They did make this set in the usual wood finishes of course, and if you need the schematic, click here. 

 

                                     

                           Original manual to the set found under the chasis!

Mobile Radio Installation

Recently, I bought a used 93 Infinity QX4 to replace  my 87 Nissan Pathfinder that was totaled in an accident about a year ago. Of course, one of my first priorities was to install a new 2 meter 70 cm rig with a new antenna. Durring the new install, I had two goals; no holes in the dash and no magmount antenna. I decided on a Yaesu FT-7800R for the rig and a Radio Shack glass mount Duel band antenna Cat.#19-324

I think that the hardest part of the installation was getting power from the battery to the inside of the truck. Naturally, it is not very easy to run wires through the firewall in this vehicle. After several hours of trying to find somewhere in the firewall to push the wires through, I finally gave up and drilled a 3/8" hole through the floorboard of the passenger side of the truck.    This took awhile because I needed to be CERTAIN that I would not drill through something like my heater coil or some other very expensive thing to fix. After finding my spot to drill I held my breath and made my hole! Luck must have been on my side because I did not ruin anything.    I then installed a 3/8 piece of water hose through the hole ( to protect the wire from being nicked) and ran my hot and ground leads through it to the battery. As you can see, I put fuseable links on each side of the battery for protection.

I found a nice little compartment in the back of the Infinity that the main part of the rig be tucked away in so I decided to take advantage of  it. I ran the hot and ground leads under the seats and carpets to this compartment. As you can see, there is not much room for me to get my big fat hands in to put the screws in! Guess its time to call the XYL......      As you can see, my wife Sarah, KG4NKG was more than willing to help with the new install!    She really was a huge help, she actually did most of the work seen here.

Here is the end result with all the wires and antenna hooked up. I ran all the wires through the compartment door by utilizing the vent holes. All you see when the compartment is closed is a couple of wires.   I mounted the control head to the dash with velcro because I did not want to ruin the dash. Unfortunetely, the velcro is doing a poor job. Every time the car gets hot from the sun, the glue melts on the velcro and causes the head to fall. I am currently looking for an alternate way of mounting the head. My wife suggested using suction cups which may have potential. More on that later..... 5/28/08: Well, after I made this page, I decided to try the wifes idea about the suction cups. When I got up this morning I searched around the house and came up with two 1" cups. I screwed them to the back of the separation kit and man, do they have some great suction! The real test will be to see if they can not only bear the intense heat of summer, but at the same time bear the weight of the remote head. Time will only tell.....    Here is a picture of the two meter portion of the glassmount antenna.      And this is the view of the 440 portion...really not much to this antenna. There is a little adjustment pot in the center of the control box to fine tune the antenna for best SWR. This was accomplished using my MFJ269 antenna analizer. If you do not have an analizer, a SWR meter will do the trick! For such a cheap antenna, I was able to obtain a 1.4 SWR on both bands and enjoy pretty good coverage of the area repeaters.

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Antenna Projects

 Lowes loop featured in the July 2006 edition of QST by Ben Lowe, K4QF

 

I really enjoy building my own antennas and when I saw this antenna project in QST, I knew that I just had to build it!  I like making copper antennas for VHF and UHF, so this was right up my ally. Below you will find the article about this antenna if you would like to build your own. After much concideration, I decided to build an array of four loops. It took me about a week working on it here and there to finish the antenna. I did encounter a couple of problems durring construction, but a few emails to Ben K4QF helped me get things straight. I have to say, Ben was very helpful and patient with my questions and I thank him for his kind replys to my emails.

 

                                                 

 

                                       This is my finished array of Lowes loops

 

 

 

                                            

 Here is a picture of the voltage divider described in the article. I had allot of trouble with this part of the antenna and in the end, elected not to use it at all. The main problem that I was having is that the cheap Radio Shack BNC connectors have plastic insulation on the inside so when I tried over and over again to solder them, all they did was melt. I made two trips to radio shack for replacements and kept having the same problem. After much frustration, I pitched the divider in the junk pile, straight wired and soldered the four loops I had I made together.  

To my delight, everything started to come together and the array was really easy to tune. I used this antenna here in Summerville strung up in a tree about twenty feet in the air and it worked well. Only problem was, there is very little activity on simplex or CW in this area. The only way I had to test it is to talk to my good friend Alex KR1ST who lives about 8 miles from me. I always got fairly good reports from him and we chatted on 440 on a weekly basis.

The real test for this antenna came when the wife and I decided to go on vacation in Gatlenburg, Tennessee. I took this antenna along and was fortunate to be vacationing in a condo an a mountain top in the Smokies! I set the antenna up on the balcony and ran about 5 watts into the antenna. After calling CQ, I met up with K4YRK Dave in Knoxville and K4RPA Tom in Lemoir City for a good QSO and 59 radio reports. These guys were at leat 30 miles away from me as the crow flies. I was very pleased with the results and really like the antenna.

 

                                                             

                                                               

Here are my loops looking out at Gatlenburg in the early morning hours....talk about a great view!

 

At the end of the day, I wound up with a really great antenna. There is nothing more satisfying to me than building my own antenna and to have them actually work! I see guys all the time spend so much money on big expensive antennas and I shake my head....I think my total investment for this antenna was about thirty dollars for parts-I'm sorry but you just can't beat that!  As much as I would like to post this artical for easy access, I cannot as I have learned recently that it infringes on copyright material. Unfortunetly, I have not even been able to find a link to direct you to either If you would like to take a stab at making your own 440 array, you will have to refer to the article in the July 2006 edition of QST or contact Ben Lowe, K4QF and perhaps he can provide you with the building instructions. Good luck and have fun!