Portable Ham Antenna Uses SMD Capacitors

From Al Williams on Hackaday:

Portable Ham Antenna Uses SMD Capacitors

[K6ARK] likes to operate portable, so he puts together very lightweight antennas. One of his latest uses tiny toroids and SMD capacitors to form trap elements. You can see  the construction of it in the video below.

You usually think of toroid winding as something you do when building transmitters or receivers, especially small ones like these. We presume the antenna is best for QRP (low power) operation since the tiny core would saturate pretty quickly at higher power. Exactly how much power you should pass through an FT50-43 core depends on the exact application, but we’ve seen numbers around 5 watts.

Portable Ham Antenna Uses SMD Capacitors

Tiny CW Capacitive Touch Paddle

Edgar implemented capacitive touch sensing using an ATTiny4 to create a touch paddle for Morse code:

Tiny CW Capacitive Touch Paddle

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Like many no-code operators, after being on the air for a while, I developed an interest and appreciation for Morse Code [..] I purchased a cheap paddle, but I found the clicking noise a little bit annoying.

 

The goal of this project was to create a single PCB with an ATTiny4 AVR, a battery, transistors and a 3.5mm connector jack. The paddle is designed to have exposed conductive material in order to read the capacitive touch.

The under 1kB binary code worked well and without error. This made me wonder how small I could make this code. After optimizing the code, I managed to shrink it to under 512 bytes.

Tiny CW Capacitive Touch Paddle

Put That Amateur Radio License to Use on 915 MHz

Amateur radio enthusiasts in the US will be interested in Faraday, an open-source digital radio that runs on 915 MHz, which amateur radio enthusiasts may know better as the 33 cm band. You can transmit on 915 MHz without a license (in the US), taking advantage of the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) exemption.

via Put That Amateur Radio License to Use on 915 MHz — Hackaday

Put That Amateur Radio License to Use on 915 MHz