We have ticked off all the holidays and have survived the dumpster fire of 2020. Stay safe and stay well everyone. I will see you on the other side in 2021. May it be a whole lot better than this last year has been.
73’s
VK4HAT
I think i might have worked this one once on CW on my Fcall. I do not see anything in my current log and nothing in LOTW. Claiming this as 3 new ones in one day.
Well that confirms it.
2 new ones in one day WOOP
Its a Christmas miracle I worked a new DXCC entity LOL
Rather than play software and try and get quadrature working on the ESP32, i busted out the Arduino and jumpered it in with dupont wires.
I do not know why my scope channels are so off, swapping the probes about gets the same values in reverse, for some reason, channel 2 is measuring lower than channel 1. MEH
Oh and this is what I am working on. Voltages all work out, i just need to put some signals into it and see if i can get anything intelligible out of it. The phasing receiver is a mix and match of stuff by plenty of others. I did not know what to set the gain of the polyphase input amps, so i just winged it and went with 10X. I have seen everywhere from 1x to 50x so its anyones guess until i measure whats coming out of them. I probably have 5v p-p to play with in the opamps.
So it sort of works. Not very good, But i think i can make it better.
So i found out yesterday day that commenting was not working. Kind of wondered why I had not seen any comments, not even spam comments in a very long time. Turns out one of the addons i use changed things to make people login with fakebook or twitheads.
Anyway, i crushed the rebellion and now commenting should return back to normal and the spammers will be sending me links to medications to make my penis 2 inches longer, grow more hair or have longer lasting erections. Nothing like a bunch of dick jokes for early on christmas morning.
What seems like a long time ago now, back in April, I stopped using ATmega micro controllers and settled on using ESP32 for everything. SEE: https://robs-blog.net/2020/04/08/esp32-with-dual-vfos/ . Back then, i made note that some had been reporting issues with Jason Mildrum’s Etherkit library and ESP32. I did not have this problem, thankfully. Until, today that is and now everything is broken.
I think the reason why I never had any issues like the guys have reported here: https://github.com/etherkit/Si5351Arduino/issues/66 was because my ESP32 install was a rather old one, I think it was even from before espressif took over things. And then I switched over to using PlatformIO SEE https://robs-blog.net/2020/11/27/programming-with-platformio/ and a bunch of things got updated and my old very working implementation got screwed up.
I have tried to narrow down what the issue is, but its beyond my skills as a pretend programmer. So I started to try and rule things out. Its not an actual hardware issue, because other I2C things all work fine. and I can get the SI5351 to work using other libraries, like the one from Adafruit and the one I am now using above from Pavel Milanes SEE: https://github.com/pavelmc/Si5351mcu . So after losing days screwing about with this and chasing my tail, I now get to go and rewrite a whole bunch of code that no longer works. So the crap on my bench actually works again.
So tonight, i want to get the code working on the WSPR brick again so that tomorrow I can fix the PA i destroyed and then get it on the air over the Xmas/New Years break and ro also get the receiver thats part build on the protoboard working also. Cant make a receiver without a bloody signal source LOL. No family for Xmas this year because of covid. So tomorrow I will work on stuff in my office.
Go me, I got this one working in pretty quick time. I am actually rather happy now. One more to do for the VFO on the protoboard and
Summer in Australia, storms and rain are coming.
So today and tonight I have been playing with some modules i had made and the prototyping baseboard and already I am thinking about version 3.0 HAHA. One thing i need is some more convenient ground points for when i start stuffing probes up its clacker. So far i have the start of a 40m transceiver. Low pass filter, bandpass filter, rf preamp and switchable attenuators. Tomorrow I hope to get a direct conversion receiver happening, TX/RX switching, and if I get time, a simple CW transmitter.
Not sure about the audio amp either, even with no input its drawing a ton of current and it runs quite hot even with that quite substantial heat sink. It probably needs more heat sink, but it does out out like 10 watts and can drive a huge speaker. Will have to think more on this and see what I come up with.
