Update 2104-01-31

The problem came back.  I tried switching out the power cable with the one I used in testing last time, and it was to no avail.  At this point, I am going to do more testing to determine if this is an FM-only problem and/or if this is a VHF-only problem.

Problems

(1) Scratchy receive on 2M FM. Haven’t tested other bands or modes. Scratchy-ness sometimes goes away in a sudden fashion (like flipping a switch). It’s very much like a bad connection.
(2) Low audio volume

Potential Solutions from Research

From http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ic706/conversations/topics/17676:
Tighten chassis screws

From http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ic706/conversations/topics/14813:
“there is a known problem where the power connector is very close to a component (part of the 2m bandpass RX filter) mounted on the board. So close, that it can be knocked off the board when the power cable is plugged in or removed.”

From http://amfone.net/Amforum/index.php?topic=25009.0:
“Make sure the faceplate contacts are clean. Mine goes dead a couple times a year in my truck from this.”

From AB8SH (local friend):
Check the power connection. The Molex connector used by Icom is frequently problematic.

From unnamed (and increasingly difficult to find) posts on the IC-706MKIIG Yahoo Group:
The power connector has been mentioned multiple times on the IC-706MKIIG Yahoo Group.  Additionally, the ground clips have been commonly mentioned.  Frequently, these are mentioned with the 17m oscillation problem.

Reality

First thing I checked was power and ground connections.  The ground clips (that should connect to the case) weren’t putting a lot of pressure on things.  I bent all of them up towards the the case for good measure, although I’m not sure that fixed anything.  I also ensured that all the internal screws on the PCBs were tight (all of them were).

The speaker looks aged (heck, you can see UV discoloration in the cone).  Otherwise it looks fine.

After putting the rig back together, I put it on the radio bench connected to a DIFFERENT power cord and it seemed fine.  A few days later, I mounted it in the truck.  After driving a few miles and getting stopped at a long traffic signal, I decided to tilt the rig up more (yes, I had an appropriate Philips head screwdriver with me) and while being stopped at the light I quickly unbolted the front two mounting screws and tilted it up.

The radio died.

I (still quickly) finished bolting in the radio and while stopped at other traffic signals attempted to jiggle the power connector in the back to no avail.  When I got to my destinations (another ham’s house), I found that the plug came out.  In subsequent testing, it seems everything is fine.

So What Was It?

I’m banking on a bad power connection.  That being said, any mobile setup should probably include proper securing of power connectors and ensuring that road vibration won’t cause things to come loose.

Edit: It is likely the power cord.  I noticed static since posting this, so I’m going to replace the power cord and check the pins on the current one.

Happy New Year!

I’m no different than about 99% of all other bloggers out there that I have at least one post on at least one of my blogs devoted to New Years Resolutions.  I decided to take a different approach this year.  The main reason behind this is that there’s a lot of other things going on, and a contest score or number of contacts is just a number – the larger goal is to have fun.

Last Year’s Recap

The goals from last year were:

• Learn CW well enough to casually contest.
• Work a VHF contest this year
• Participate in more contests this year
• Operate more!

I’ve learned CW a little bit, and enough that I tried to make a QSO with a fellow SKCC member.  I’ve been closer and closer, but I haven’t had the time to do anything like QRS nets (which IMO would really help hone my receiving skills).

I didn’t work a VHF contest this year, and I don’t think I did more contests, although I did a few that are new to me – the CQ WPX and CQ DX.  Both were fun, and that 10m opening to Europe during the CQ DX contest in October rocked.  I really wanted to play on the 10m contest in December, but a poorly timed vehicle breakdown screwed that up.

Operating more wasn’t as difficult as I made it.  After a while of working two jobs, I had no time to get into the shack unless I was using my scanner to scan portions of textbooks for PowerPoint slides.  During that time, I noticed that the “morning group” on the repeater was there, but there were several times I was driving home and nobody was out there, so I finally decided to put my IC-706 in my truck and started hitting DX on 10m during my afternoon drive (and also a few after doing morning traffic counts, which put me on the road to the office at 9:00 AM).  It’s amazing what a hamstick will do on 10.  I haven’t even tried 6 or 20 yet, and the 40m hamstick isn’t tuned.

There are a few things that never made it to the goal list last year.  One is that I started work on a mobile logging system, and the idea netted me a free ChipKit WF32 through Dangerous Prototypes.  I fixed my Ten Tec Omni base station rig (which was nice when that second job was on hiatus for longer than expected).  I presented about Arduino microcontrollers twice (to the Cincinnati FM Club and the Oh-Ky-In Amateur Radio Society).

I also learned a lot about electronics.  A lot more than I would have expected.  I never thought I’d be building with and using decade counters and DDS chips and the like.

This Year

I want to do some portable operating.  That generally means CW (generally… easily).  I have more trips for work this year than in years past, so having something better than an HT to go with me would be nice.  That being said, I need to finish my CW education and obtain a portable rig.

I want to do more ‘casual’ contacts.  By ‘casual’, I mean not-in-a-contest and not-in-a-net (which is fine, since I generally get on one net on 2m).  I want to do more QSOs while on my way home from the office.  This means two things:

• Finish the mobile logger.
• Figure out a better setup such that as soon as I’m on I-471, I’m either searching or calling CQ (maybe an expansion of the mobile logger?)

I want to play with more technology.  Every year, something new comes out, like the Raspberry Pi, then the Beaglebone Black, and now the Arduino Yun.  There’s been new Arduinos, like the Due and the Leonardo.  The Chipkit WF32 is awesome (wifi FTW!!!).  The Ten Tec Rebel was released.  The future there is exciting.

I want to integrate things together.  I want to be able to easily log from my desktop, laptop, or my Nexus 7.  Yes, I want LoTW support.  No, I’m not going to begin writing it… yet.

I want to build more things.  This past year was great – I built several small things.  There’s a few more things I have in mind that I want to get done and to the blog.

Speaking of the blog, last year I started (without a goal, mind you) doing posts on a weekly basis.  I want to continue to do that this year.  The other thing on the blog: new design.  The design I have is a free design.  It’s okay, but I did start on a new one and I should finish it sometime soon.

Non-Radio Goals

That part above about ‘a lot going on’ is truth.  The goal I can think of that isn’t radio related is that I want to complete my first half-marathon (that’s 13.1 miles) this year.  That goal’s pretty much low-hanging fruit since I’ve already registered for it and have been ahead of my training schedule.  The extension of that is I’m considering running a full marathon by the end of 2015.  I may hold off, but we’ll see.

There’s a few more non-radio things going on, but nothing too detailed…yet.

Well, I think that’s it.  I hope 2014 is a great one for all of us.

-73-

Merry Christmas to all of you. I hope the big man brought you something nice!

This is a mish-mosh of notes, which is what happens when you spend a weekend moving furniture and fixing cars instead of playing with radios.

A Christmas Story Movie Amateur Radio Connection

Jean Shepard, W9QWN and K2ORS, was the narrator and co-scripter of A Christmas Story.  He got his start at WSAI-AM in Cincinnati in 1948.  From 1951 to 1953, he went to KYW in Philadephia, after which he returned to Cincinnati at WLW.

Talk To Santa Nets

For the 8th consecutive year, the 3.916 Nets will be giving good boys and girls a chance to talk to Santa Claus via the magic of ham radio.   The ‘3916 Santa Nets’ will be held on 15 different evenings starting Friday, November 29 through Christmas Eve, December 24th.    The Santa Nets are open to all licensed amateur radio operators who wish to invite kids to their shack to talk to Santa.  Third party rules will apply. LINK.

Christmas Short Story

Larry Makoski wrote another installment of his Christmas story from last year.  This one is in five parts (so far, I admit that when I’m writing this the last two released parts are still queued in the Press App on my phone!).  I’d give it 5 stars.  Link to part 1.  Link to part 1 of last year’s story.

WATwitter Christmas Edition

I hope to be on the air during the holiday break.  Watch for me on twitter, and watch for others using the #WATwitter hashtag.

Additionally, I may get on for Straight Key Night.  If I do, I’ll turn the power down to limit the amount of people abused by my CW “skills” 😉

QST

I have several projects “incubating”.  The most prominent is the EasyLogger with the WF32.  I have another ‘on the brew’ that is more interesting and useful.  I also saw an interesting use of a PIC12 that I may extend to a PIC16 (since I have one that has no use… yet).  There are several radio projects coming as well.  2014 will be an interesting year on this blog.

-73-

After building my first PCB a while back and starting to attempt to use it, I decided that the smart thing to do would be to finish build #2, which is a Bus Pirate Demo Board.  This demo board has a handful of chips that can be used to test a Bus Pirate (or in my case, a Bus Pirate Shield): 5 EEPROMs, a temperature sensor, a digital-analog converter, and a real-time clock.

My biggest hold-ups were ordering parts… I certainly have a bit to learn about SMD sizes, as I ordered some that were a bit small:

Too small!!!

Finally, after a few extra parts orders, I finished it.  I’m getting better at soldering SMD devices, although I should probably invest in a soldering station with adjustable temperature control and a better assortment of tips.  My Radio Shack iron runs very hot.

The completed board.

This will make an appearance in a forthcoming blog post, particularly after I get more into using the Bus Pirate Arduino Shield.

-73-

If you look back into a few of my past pictures, like this:

The bottom of the board

You can see a bit of glare on the board.  Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it isn’t.  Most of the time, I see it and move the camera to NOT show really bad glare.  This is caused by the florescent lights above my workbench.  I needed to get a picture of another board, and the glare was worse than above.  Since my cell phone (which tends to be my primary camera) needs the light, I decided to deal with the issue.

The way to deal with this is to use a diffusing disc to diffuse the florescent light and eliminate the glare, like in the diagram below.

Diagram of arrangement you see in the image below.

And yes, you can hold this with one hand, take a picture with the other hand…

I think I spent $25+ on my diffusing disc at a specialty camera store.  However, I’m fairly sure it is no better than the $12 one at Amazon.  Additionally, I could use a clip light to put more light on the workbench and still eliminate the glare.  The point of the diffusing disc is to scatter the light.

Using this diffusing disc, the glare reduction is pretty obvious in this more recent image:

Look ma, no glare!

This is Thanksgiving week in the USA, so the family and I spent some time putting up the Christmas tree, since some of our Thanksgiving guests may not have a chance to come by during the Christmas season (or at least before we clean up the tree).

I decided years ago to move all our Christmas lights to LEDs for several reasons, the reduced current consumption is one of them.  The problem that created for us is that our LEDs are too large to fit into some of the ornaments that we have.  My wife brought one of those to my attention and I decided to fix the problem using a Stellaris Launchpad that was collecting dust in the basement.

I took a telephone cable and soldered an RGB LED to one end and a plug to the other end that would connect to the ground (through a 330 ohm resistor) and three of the analog pins on the Launchpad.

The code is below:

The final result is:

Nothing like using a very complex tool for something very simple!

-73-

Since I fixed my Ten Tec Omni, I’ve used it a little and I’ve had one major complaint: it doesn’t talk to the computer.  In fact, in the CQWW contest, I mistakenly logged my first contact on both the incorrect band and the incorrect mode (I was operating SSB on 10m, and it was logged as CW on 160m… never mind that I have never operated 160m CW!).

This is the radio.

When I first got it, I started looking at the different inputs and outputs on the back.  One is very curious: the VFO in-out, which is shorted together.

The VFO In and Out RCA jacks.

So I decided to look into what these jacks do.  Enter the oscilloscope to check the voltage coming out of there (so I don’t blow my antenna analyzer).

Yes, the Omni is on it’s side.

After checking to insure that there isn’t more than 2 volts peak-peak coming from this (there’s actually about 0.5 volts peak-peak.  Once I was sure that it was safe for the antenna analyzer, I took the oscilloscope probe and plugged it into the analyzer to see what frequency that jack used.

I was surprised a little to see that the VFO output for setting the radio at 10 MHz was 5.01 MHz.  Then, I started tuning around and seeing a little pattern, which can be seen in the image below:

My paper of VFO frequencies for all the bands.

So each of these tells me basically the offset (within 0.01 MHz)

In order to get the actual frequency to a computer, I need to do two things: build a frequency counter that I can plug into something that sends a serial string to a computer, and get the band that the radio is switched to, which would probably come from this jack:

The accessory jack.

Sometime in the future (whenever I get back into working on this), I’ll see if I have the connector for that accessory jack and set up something to read it.

-73-

The bus pirate Arduino shield is a discontinued item from Dangerous Prototypes. I picked up the PCB via a free PCB coupon a while back, built it a few months later, and then finally decided to use it because I think I have something to use it with. Note the key word – think. This is what happens when a traffic engineer plays with electronics.

The shield was not easy to get started with, mostly because I had to look (and look, and look) for source. I finally found it on Toby Jaffey’s Github Page. Once I loaded it, I found that connecting with Tera Term (and likely any terminal emulator) on that COM port using 19200 baud 8N1 no flow control worked and I was able to play around doing things like:

>led 1 (turns the mode LED on)

>led 3 (turns the mode LED to a fast blink)

led appears to be 0-6, with 0=off, 6=on, and 1-5 are blink rates, slow to fast.

help and version are pretty self-explanatory.

Stay tuned for more, but in the meantime, here’s a picture of the setup.

The Bus Pirate Arduino Shield is the shield sitting on top of the Arduino in the background. The item in front is the Bus Pirate Demo Board that I’m using to test the shield. There are a few joints that I missed soldering and there are a few missing capacitors.

There’s going to be a lot more to post as I start into this.  Incidentally, this is to assist with the Android App.

-73-

Last Saturday was the Georgetown Hamfest held by the Grant Amateur Radio Club.

I noticed that during the CQWW contest, I could only get a response from others if I yelled into the mic.  I’m sure my wife didn’t care too much for that, and it isn’t good for me, either.  So naturally, I went to the hamfest looking for a good mic.  I stumbled on a Heil Pro.  This is a very small mic, but since it will eventually be attached to an arm, that’s no big deal.

So now I have a mic with a 4-pin XLR connector and need to take it into a 1/4″ stereo jack.  I have to deal with impedances (possibly the problem with my current mic, so I may not have truly fixed anything by buying a new mic).  Fortunately, I have some known devices to get an idea from.  Expect that next week’s blog post will talk about this more in detail.

In the meantime, the mic smells like cigarrette smoke, so I’ve got it sitting in a container of baking soda and will do more later in the week.

First CW QSO… Almost

The big part of getting into the shack Sunday was to do my first CW QSO with another SKCC member that is hunting the prefix award. I couldn’t hear him at all, and he couldn’t hear me. After checking multiple times, I had my daughter hold down the key and I listened on my truck’s radio. I didn’t hear a tone (though I did hear a carrier) and I didn’t see my on the Reverse Beacon Network, so I feared the worst. I checked some of the voltages in the Omni, and finding nothing amiss (and after talking to a few on Twitter about it), I put things back together and looked at things via the Softrock SDR. I was greeted by the sound of a tone, so I guess things are working okay and there was probably another perfectly valid reason why my truck’s radio wasn’t making the tone.

Incidentally, one of the big things I WAS concerned about was that the sound of my rig on the air would be poor, mostly due to the fact that the sidetone generator on my rig is generating a sawtooth (see the video below) instead of a sine wave.  Looking at things in SDRSharp put that fear to rest.  Hopefully next weekend.