I have been working on building the chassis for the QBL amplifier. I tried to find some 19″ rack unit but unfortunately I could not get hold of anyone big enough, so I decided to build one myself out of 20x20x3mm L-iron. After cutting them with my new RAGE 2 saw I used a drill press to thread 120 pcs of holes for the aluminum sides, which I will need to cut later. I need to borrow some equipment to cut those so that they look good.

I built the box quite large, but I rather have it too big than too small.

I have also milled a few boards that will be used for the amplifier project, one is a rectifier board and the other is a couple of zener diode boards.

Power saws are perhaps the most power tools with rotating blade and useful machine in any metalworking and woodworking shop. If you are a DIY enthusiast, you know how often we need to cut a pipe or a piece of metal or wood. When you have to do a lot of cutting, using a hand tool such as hacksaw will get you exhausted pretty soon. Power saws are great since they not only reduce out workload but also enable us to cut things more accurately.

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It has been slow with updates lately. I have been spending some time designing electronics for my new amplifier project with a QBL 5/3500 which was donated by SM3BDZ. The tube isn’t in perfect shape (90%) but it’s good enough to start building on. I will start posting pictures as soon as I start building something for it. Currently I am waiting for the RAGE 2 saw that I ordered from England to help me cut the L-iron needed to build the chassies for the amplifier.

Meanwhile today when I was milling boards for work I did some work on the inband electronics, the never ending project which I am very tired of working on. But now today I got most of the hardware done. Now I will need to finish the programming and also make some cases for the manouver boxes. Hopefully it will be ready for the first real try in WPX CW, since the broken coax to the vertical 500m from the QTH should be possible to fix by then since most of the snow should be gone.

I have talked with the neighbour about getting to put up a tower on his land and he said it was no problem. I guess we will need to write some kind of paper on it later and my plan for this is to run 400-500m of hardline over there and put up a 18-24m tower with some beams on 10-40m and some kind of antenna for 80m as well. That way we should not have more than maximum 3dB loss and we could use that for the inband instead of needing to share the main antenna system. This will however probably not be done this summer, but it’s a future plan. SM2RIX got hold of a drum of 1 1/4″ hardline (220m long) for us, that is a good start for that. Hopefully somebody else will donate or sell cheap the rest that we need.

I also spent a bit time last week at the local radio club here at the work QTH talking a bit about SJ2W. It was fun, more than expected amount of people showed up and I got to know a few more people, which is always fun.

Here are some pictures,

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I have helped Microbit 2.0 AB, the maker of the remoterig system to develop the RF part of their new 10×1 antenna switch that they will be selling soon. It is an IP-based antenna switch which can be directly controlled over the internet making remote antenna switching as easy as possible. It can also be powered with the ethernet cable with the Power Over Ethernet standard. It is also possible to configure the RRC-1258MkII to switch the 10×1 automatically depending on the frequency of the radio.

The RF performance of the switch is excellent and it will hopefully be available to be bought soon.

Here is a link to the product page,
http://www.remoterig.com/wp/?page_id=1793