Good Conditions and More Projects

The bands were wide open over the weekend and I managed to take advantage and get some good qso’s, the highlight being on 28 MHz with Carlos in Sau Paulo who gave me a 579 not bad for a distance of 5816 miles. Admittedly I was using 250 watts but for me 28 Mhz is not brilliant on the old Cobweb.

When I had the Moxon up I could contact stations with ease on 10 meters but for some reason the Cobweb doesn’t like it too much. I constantly check the swr which is good at 1:2:1 but it just seems foggy if you know what I mean.

I’m still awaiting the arrival of the 30 meter RockMite which hopefully will turn up sometime this week. I now have all the extras I require, the 2N3053 transistor, the reduced value R18 and I have wound the toroid choke so it's all ready for the kit. Also I 've ordered a small audio filter kit from Ham Shop CZ which should be arriving any day. Together with the RM 30 the PCBs should both fit snugly in to a nice metal enclosure I've bought from the local Maplins store.

In the meantime I’ve decided to redesign my audio amplifier project, before it was literally an LM 386 with a 5v regulator with no resistors or capacitors, hard to believe I know, but I did some more research and have found some better schematics which I am going to have a play with because I'm sure I can do a lot better.

I’ve bought various capacitors and resistors as well as a 10k potentiometer, also some stripboard but after examining it I suddenly realised how on earth do you use it?

Normally with all kits the circuit board is printed, I have no experience of how you solder components on to a stripboard, so I went back to the net and had a read on how to place components and use a track board cutter.

It looks like fun but I can see it isn’t going to be easy to start, but there are plenty of examples of audio amps with schematics and stripboards designs. So as soon as I get the chance I will have some experimentation.