Admitted: Now I have enough RF power meters! 
But occasionally you strike luck and have to make a quick decision, which is why my Vintage 432A now has new friends 
The probe for the Rohde@Schwarz NRVS covers to 6GHz and I scored an inline probe as well, which has a ceiling at 3 GHz. Neat!
The other two reaches 18GHz.
So who do you like more?
BTW. Does anyone know how to enable display light on the NRVS? Can’t find a manual 
We arrived in Tokyo on time. Problem, a suitcase is missing, as well as the ski bag with the LZ-Beam. By now we know that these were not reloaded in Helsinki. Reason, the cyber attack on the BER.
#v6d #hamr #dxp #dxped #dxpedition
Tomorrow (Sun 9/21) is the MIT swap meet/Ham fest/flea market. Starts at 9 AM at the Albany garage in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Print a flyer from the website to get a dollar off the entry fee of six dollars. https://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit/ #cambridgema #mit #hamr #maker
I needed an accurate attenuator for a work experiment I wanted to do at home (recovering from a dental surgery — I’m fine ) and a friend had this beauty taking up space (I have good friends).
Clearly hand built (sorry for the shaky video), made to sit in a test rack, remote controlled by the vintage Z80x CPU board. It’s quite flat in its frequency response (I had troubles with the VNA calibration, so you’re seeing cable and connector loss) and I made a couple spot checks at 3 and 6GHz, 1.5 and 2.5dB loss respectively.
Attenuation accuracy is within +/- 1dB.
This is quality vintage stuff, dated about 2003 from the onboard chips. Don’t you just love the Teledyne RF relays? 
Oh, and it works way below the stated 2GHz, I tested it down to 10MHz and it was just fine 
Occasionally it can be a good idea to add an in-line diode to protect a power supply used to charge a battery.
You want the resulting voltage drop as low as possible which calls for a high-power Schottky diode. The STM STPS5L60 is a 60V diode, rated at maximum 5A continuously. As I’ll be charging at maximum 3A, I decided to test the voltage drop and resulting case temperature at that load.
I measured a 0.38V drop, resulting in about 1.15W dissipated - not bad 
The outer case temperature rose to about 57C which is fully acceptable and way below the diodes limits. And it’s touchable as well, which is nice.
So, charging a LiFePO4 battery for my #hamradio #SOTA and #POTA operations, I’ll set the supply to 15V, limit the current to 3A, and the battery’s built in BMS controller will handle the rest, easy! 
For the record, I always keep an eye on it when charging and I usually reduce the current by the end of the charge cycle 
Did a #sota activation in Colorado. It was getting cloudy on the way up, but I probably should've stopped when I started hearing lightning on 20m a few minutes into radio time.
LHS Episode #592: Arch Enemies
Hello and welcome to Episode 592 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short topics episode, the hosts discuss the decommissioning of the POES satellite constellation, the Lab599 TX500MP portable field radio, the release of Debian 13, a new version of Sparky Linux and much more. Thanks for listening and have a great week.
73 de The LHS Crew
Yesterday, I participated as a supervisor at a local youth organization's children's festival and organized the draussenfuchs.de fox hunt. A total of almost 300 children attended the festival, and about 90 fox hunts took place. It was a lot of fun. But in the evening, I fell straight into bed.
So there's a chance I'll get time to do my first ever #POTA activation tomorrow morning, weather permitting. My goal is to do an all #CW activation. The complication: my wife says she'll join me. Of course I don't want her to get bored--which means searching the bands and hunting P2P's might take too long. 
maybe I'll finally call CQ for the first time.
Go easy on me! 
Does anyone have a Yaesu FT5DE (EU, Type B2) ?
Can you confirm there's a horrendous sproggie at 156.0 MHz ?
Not sure if my new handheld is faulty. RX doesn't seem quite as good as the old FT-60 that I have...
So is there anywhere I can find the construction details on the ‘Bluey’ portable 10GHz transverter? There are YouTube videos, but so far I haven’t been able to find a block diagram, schematics, etc.. 
Maybe it’s just a Kühne unit in a nice box..
#hamradio #hamr #rfengineer #SOTA
So many have tried and tested this little box, with all kinds of varying results, I thought I’d have a go myself ..
It’s really not too bad on the noise side and I won’t be using it at high loads for sensitive circuits anyway. PSU noise measurements have a lot of pitfalls, I’ve seen people being disturbed by their overhead (LED) bench light strips, wondering what was going on
Correct probe attachment and measurement bandwidth (most new scopes have a 20MHz option) is essential for tests like these.
A nice little addition to the lab, much more portable and quick-to-use than my bulky, linear, GW bench supply
#electronics #electronicsengineering #hamradio #hamr #testandmeasurement
Took a nice hike around the Middlesex fells reservation today with my HT. Printed out a list of the closest repeaters and did a test from near the reservoir to see what I could get into. I used the repeater map from https://www.nerepeaters.com and also the off-line repeater book app on my phone to make the list and get the distances. #hamr #hamradio
New Release of #wavelog with many many new translations (tnx to all translators out there), a bunch of new features and a hint to update WLGate asap: https://github.com/wavelog/wavelog/releases/tag/2.1
Looks like Icom just announced a successor to the Icom 7300:
the "Icom 7300 MK2"
The Ohio QSO Party is coming up on Saturday, August 23rd.
It will be from 1200 EDT (1600Z) to 0000 EDT (0400Z)!
G2RON - Ronny Jerke 
(Gridsquare: JN99fs / distance: 4061.4 mi) on 15m using CW 
Dan 
(Gridsquare: KO09 / distance: 6966.3 km) on 15m using FT8