Category: Hacks

Prototyping with Corrugated Plastic and Hot Glue

While taking a look at the latest Solder Smoke Blog posts, I ran into This Post where Bill mentions how much he loves using a wood board- so much so that he might not even put the radio in a case! This got me thinking: What do I have around my shack that I could …

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BITX40 Rebuild Part 3: Back On The Air!

In the July 2020 update, I made mention that my BITX40 BITX’d the dust, so to speak. Receive worked, but transmit failed. In Part 1 of the BITX40 Rebuild series I talked about the history of my radio, some of the modifications I’ve made, and how badly I messed it up when troubleshooting the problem! …

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BITX40 Rebuild Part 2: It Has Begun!

As I wrote in Part 1 of the BITX40 Rebuild Part 1, my own love affair with the BITX40 goes back to December 2016 when a gift from my wife arrived from India in the form of a BITX40v3 from HF Signals, Ashhar Farhan’s company that at the time produced just the BITX40v3. Also mentioned …

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BITX40 Rebuild Part 1: Mistakes, Planning and Teardown

Things have been pretty busy around MiscDotGeek, and we’ve barely had time for Radio Related things. As I mentioned in the July 2020 update, my BITX40 quit transmitting while sitting stationary on my desk, dutifully doing its job as a JS8 radio, it quit transmitting. I put the uSDX in its place, only to have …

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Come Join the QRP-Tech Group!

I recently joined a group at groups.io called “qrp-tech”. It started in 2005 on Yahoo Groups, and eventually ended up over at groups.io. I was thrilled to find such a treasure trove of information and a thriving QRP community. Imagine my sorrow when just days later the group admin decided he was ready to move …

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The W7RLF BITX40: Finished at last!

Last year I thought the BITX40 was “done”. It successfully worked on 80, 40, 30, and 20m. It was truly multi-band! The trick to doing that was to make the Band Pass and Low Pass filters pluggable using QRP Labs filters. One only needed to open the radio, change the filters, and retune the VFO. …

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KI7MNW’s Homebrew QRP Transceiver

Cameron Tribe, KI7MNW recently posted his homebrew QRP transceiver on the Amateur QRP Radio group on Facebook. It’s completely scratch built and borrows design elements from several sources including the BITX40. Follow all the way to the bottom for a picture gallery, schematics, and source articles. Tonight I finished my homebrew 40m QRP transceiver. I’ve …

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Replacing Relays in the BITX Radios

In this post, we’re going to show you how you can replace the relays in a BITX40 radio. You can use the same method to replace the relays in your uBITX too. Use caution and common sense when doing this. Here’s a link to the relays I used: If you’re using the Axiom relays for …

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HF Antenna 80-10m, no tuner needed.

One of the amazing things about Amateur Radio is that you can turn the hobby into whatever you want it to be. You canĀ  spend thousands of dollars on all the latest gear with a 130 foot tower with giant beams atop it. OR…. you can spend as little as possible and have at least …

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Misc Dot Welder Part 1

I posted last about a giant recumbent bicycle build. In that post I mentioned that I built a welder. Well, I’m ramping up to build another recumbent. So that means we need another welder. And at first I was going to build another welder, but then I discovered Offerup.com. Offerup is how I got some …

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