Today I spent some time welding together the pieces I cut yesterday to a casing on wheels. I got it pretty much perfectly straight which I am very happy about but it was some work to get there. Now I will need to remove the paint so I can repaint it so it looks pretty. When I have grinded down the welds I will put the sheets on it and drill the holes. I also need to add some support inside for the transformer etc.
SM0W, SA0AZT and SM0SHG came up to spend the weekend at the lab at work building antenna switches and I finished up the openASC-boxes for SK0UX. It was a lot of fun and we got lots of stuff done. They still have quite a bit of work to do but they got with them the openASC boxes as well, so now there are three stations in Sweden using the openASC system, SK0UX, SJ2W and SK3W.
It also seems like I am claimed #1 Europe on 20m SSB in WPX SSB which is a lot of fun!
I also did some tests to test if the theoretic Q-value of the PI-filters we use in amplifiers correspond to measurements done with the VNA. It did not match at all, I got the values 4 times higher when having Q-value of 12 on the VNA compared to the theories. However I need to do more thinking and testing on this to figure out why. Maybe somebody can explain? I used the -3dB bandwidth to calculate the Q-value.
I also spent time cutting metal for the power supply for the amplifier project. I’ve collected some material at work which would have been thrown out and used it for the amp. I also bought some wheels that will be mounted to the amp which limits the weight of it to 400kg, but I should have quite some margin 🙂
LA6FJA made this recording of me during the WPX SSB when he was operating from DZ1B. However I was beaming USA with the big stack, not sure if I did use the 5el mono towards east.
TNX Rag!