SJ2W Contest Station

Today I spent some time at work. I needed to mill a board for work, but mainly to test that the through hole plating system works properly, since the last time we used it some vias were broken. This time though it looks very promising, but we will see when I assemble and test the boards. I decided to add some own designs to fill the panel, so I did add a sound card interface I’ve designed with a Winkey 2 chip, audio isolators, FSK support via a FT2232 USB chip which creates two virtual COM-ports.

I also added the in-band QSX electronics to the panel, which will hopefully this summer make us able to work in-band QSOs for real. I also got a couple of transistors from a friend at work (from mini-circuits) that I will use to build a 25dB preamp to be used to compensate for the cable loss. We are going to put up a vertical about 400m from the house using RG-59 as coax as a start to test how well it works on 20-10m. We will later extend the system using a small loop with the NULL towards our TX antennas. More information on this when I am putting the system together.

I also built a couple of power splitters. Or actually one of them is for 160m and does not contain the option to power split, its a regular 2×1 switch but with an A/B output making it possible to route it to both 6×2 switches, which means to any of the four operating positions. The other box is for 10m to replace the one at SJ2W which has got some funny problem which I have not been able to find. So I will replace it and see if the problem goes away, if so I will fix that splitter and make a new UN-UN for it with 6 windings so its optimal for 80m. I use 4 windings on 10m. I put the 7/16″ connectors in the lathe to make them fit into the PCBs. The connectors were donated by SG3P, thanks Gunnar! He has probably donated 90% of all 7/16″ chassis female connectors at SJ2W. I did order a few from China, very cheap so we will see the quality if they are good enough to be used at the station.

I also removed some BNC-connectors from old research projects that I will use on the in-band QSX electronics.