Yep, that's right folks... KX3 serial number 160 was placed on the porch last evening without so much as a signature. Glad it came before Salmoncon 2012 later this summer as I was hoping to have it on hand for that outing and hopefully a SOTA activation during that event.
Opening the box we find an accessories tray with power cord, USB cable, CW paddles, allen wrenches and so forth. Elecraft does a nice job packing things up for shipment. In one of the envelopes was a "Packed with care by Stephanie" slip. :) Thanks Stephanie!
Next layer down, we find the microphone and the KX3 itself.
Carefully wrapped in a plastic bag as well as bubble wrap, surrounded by cardboard spacers was the KX3.
As they say on the EEVBlog, "Don't turn it on! Take it apart!" Here we can see the soul of the machine and a pile of AA cells later, we fired 'er up! I love how it comes up on all the QRP CW frequencies out-of-box.
Spent a little time just tinkering with the receiver last evening. This is one sweet ride of a CW rig. Today hooked up the paddles and spent some time adjusting them and practicing with the sidetone only. Hope to put it up on the air sometime this evening or this weekend at the latest.
I am off today to Orlando for a quick visit to my son who is graduating college. Whoo hoo!
When I arrived back from Finland, I had a little package waiting for me that contained this:
This is a 60 KHz WWVB time receiver module and the associated loop antenna. I plan to play around with this as an alternative time source to a GPS receiver for syncing beacon signals such as is needed with WSPR. This was obtained from the good folks at PV Electronics in the UK. If anyone has any experience with these modules, I would appreciate any insights as I am going at it totally cold.
I arrived back in the US after a great trip to Finland. Next trip will include either the KX1 or the KX3 (if it ever comes...) :)
I got to do a bit of SWLing but had nothing with which to transmit. Probably ok given my 18 hour day work schedule.
I am off to Florida Thursday for my son's college graduation and then travel should slow down for a bit.
Jet lagged in Seattle...
I moved my base of operations today north to Tampere, Finland where I will be the rest of the week. I am having fun SWLing on the ham bands hearing all the call signs I drool over working from the states like they are next door... Because they are! Hanging out on the low end of 20 metres mostly, but I am hearing a lot of activity on 17 metres as well.
Not much antenna to work with (about 8-10 metres of wire) but having fun in OH-land. I will be sure to bring along a QRP rig next time I come to Europe and give those fun airport security folks something to quiz me about.
I arrived today in Finland where I will be working this week. I brought along a little Grundig G6 Aviator receiver (yeah, it's the "Buzz Aldrin Edition") as it is tiny, runs on batteries and also has a BFO so I can decode CW and SSB signals. I have a little wire antenna I clip on the whip and string it up in the window of my hotel. 20 metres is very busy tonight with a lot of CW, digital and SSB signals. It will be interesting to see how the band does as the sun goes down. Only problem is... I can barely keep my eyes open as I have been up for about 24 hours. We shall see how it goes.
This weekend, I will be traveling to Helsinki, Finland for a week. I have not had time to comply with the Finish Communications Regulatory Authority requirements to apply for a visitor amateur license, so I will not be on the air. I expect that I will be making future trips to Finland, so I will apply for a visitor license when I return. The Finnish Amateur Radio League can be found here.
I picked up a nice little lucite (I think) case for my propeller USB proto board. Parallax has them in four colours, clear, opaque red, transparent blue and opaque black. It is simple "tab and slot" construction and goes together easily. It supports the proto board, super carrier board and both the USB and Serial versions of the board of education. Very nicely done. Someone thought this out very well.
I decided this evening to put a little more work into the propeller keyer. I have added a keyboard interface to it. If your propeller board supports a PS/2 keyboard, you can set the keyer mode to keyerModeKBD and it will use the keyboard for input rather than the paddles. A typical keyboard interface would look like this:
The clock is wired to pin 27 and the data to pin 26, to allow the standard keyboard library to be used.
Realistically speaking, it is difficult to type blind on a keyboard, especially when you can type faster than the morse code is sending without visual feedback as to what you are typing. It would be more realistic to implement some sort of LCD display to show keyboard input, allow backspacing, while the keyer is sending the buffer. However, I have not yet implemented those components though I have all the necessary pieces.
I took the morse code tables from my QRSS beacon and added all the defined punctuation characters so as to have a complete implementation. I will be sharing a new version on github as soon as I have the code completed and tested sufficiently.
I have implemented the ability to change the morse code send speed from the keyboard. The up/down arrows change the speed by 1 WPM whilst the left/right arrows change the speed by 5 WPM range limited for 5 WPM to 60 WPM.
I plan to add memories for canned messages that can be sent with a function key press stored in EEPROM which will include serial/sequence number substitution for contest work.
One of those beautiful days in the Northwest that makes up for all the rainy, foggy, overcast days. Mid-60's and clear. Spent the day flying the cub and hanging out at airports. It is the kind of day that brings a lot of folks out to enjoy the weather.
Ran across this little gem today in the Dairy Queen parking lot. Pretty cool, huh?
