I’ve built a phase box for the new 4-SQ. It’s built on a PCB I designed a couple of years ago for SK3W and I added a nice little text to it, just for fun 🙂 The cores are two pcs of T300A-2 and the capacitors are Russian doorknob, about 200pF in each capacitor bank. I’ve measured a bit on the oscilloscope and it looks like it performs as it should, so hopefully soon we’ll get to test it on the 40m 4-SQ. I haven’t decided yet if I am gonna make a box for it. It will be installed in a cabinet so weatherproofing is done, I might add some metal around it just for shielding.

I also spent some time in the lathe to make the tubes fit for the WARC duobander I’ve designed. It’s an Hy-gain LJ-203BA which I shorten the elements so that it operates on 17m and I added four elements for 12m to it as well. To avoid needing to calculate the effect of those strange Hy-gain element clamps I will replace them with my own and isolate the elements from the plates.

Rumors this weekend is that SM3JLA will show up and I hope we will go and spend a few hours in Skellefteå at their flea market that the local club SK2AU arranges. I am going down to SJ2W on Thursday evening and will start shoveling gravel to fit the posts for the 40m 4-SQ.

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I received some PCBs I had ordered from China today and decided to make a box out of aluminum so that I could do some measurements and see its performance. I had done a 6×1 design before but I did not have any easy way to compensate for the stray capacitance in the box, making the insertion loss a bit too high for my taste on higher frequencies. Now the new improved design will hopefully be a lot better and I will measure it hopefully tomorrow in the network analyzer at work.

I will put this box inside the amplifier room at SJ2W so that I can easily route non-contest antennas (6m, WARC etc) to the radios without needing to put long coaxes out to the switch room in the barn. We are planning on putting up a tower for WARC and maybe some fixed contest antenna as well and that will be located quite close to the house, making the cabling quite easy to get into the amplifier room. I have an old Hy-gain 3el yagi for 20m that I will rebuild for 17m and add 4 elements for 12m on the boom as well. Plus I have designed a 2el for 30m designed to survive 40 m/s winds which will be put above the duo-bander.

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I’ve done some more work on the amp. Fixed a bit with the fan and feed through capacitors for different voltages. Also added the 12v step down converter.

I also milled a box which will be used to turn on/off the remote, amps etc. This box will just be a switch box which will routed through a control card, making it possible to also control it remotely. That way we can turn on/off stuff easily from the shack and remotely.

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