Longmont Amateur Radio Club-LARC

Serving the Longmont Colorado Community!

“The mission of the Longmont Amateur Radio Club is to promote, support, and lead amateur radio activities in a manner that honors and exemplifies the radio amateur’s code, builds camaraderie within our membership, and serves our community’s needs.”

Solder Sniffers Activities

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Solder Sniffer Activities

As a reminder, our normal meeting times for this group are the 2nd and 4th Saturday of each month at 1:00 PM at the Clover Building (our normal meeting spot).

See you there………………Jerry

Click HERE for some recent Solder Sniffer Photos

Some of the suggestions for projects for this group include the following:

  • Resurrecting the Direction Finding equipment that the club owns(the club owns three doppler RDF units
  • Ray Warren has volunteered to sponsor a few sessions of microprocessor programing on the MSP430 development chip
  • Some club members have asked for some instruction and guidance on PSK 31 since building the SC1-6 kit a few months back
  • Jim has been looking into some build projects in support of ARES District 10 repeater activities
  • Jerry has been looking for simple amplification circuits to use to boost the volume on PC based audio when he finds an audio source too weak to power even AC powered external PC amp/speakers
  • Jerry also has the Club’s National NC-173 Receiver that could use some tuning up and tube checking to make it a desirable  unit for sale or other club use
  • Ray Rayburn has suggested a tutorial on Power
  • Jerry is aware that BCARES is planning to become more serious in its use of portable APRS units for emergency response. This could generate some build projects.  
  • Jerry is planning to build a couple fox hunting antennas of the tape measure variety for using in simple within the grounds fox hunting for future cub Scout Day Camp Activity stations.
  • Jerry has purchased a simple short range fox kit, also for future Cub Scout Day Camp activities
  • Jerry plans to build a simple RF Meter, also for future Cub Scout Day Camp activities
  • Jerry is also looking for ideas to safely demonstrate the Jacob ‘s ladder donated by Sebastian, also for potential Scouting events.
  • Jerry has built a small project called KD1JV Deluxe Tenna Dipper – simple device to determine whan an antenna is exactly 50 ohms for a particular frequency
  • Jerry has an interest in learning how to read schematics and Leonard has some ideas about free circuit modeling programs
  • Jerry has purchased a Raspberry PI computer and plans to play with it soon
  • At the LARCFest Paul Washa sold out all of his Aguino books – not sure what this is all about
  • Doug mentioned a desire to build a 20 meter loop for field day
  • A recent QST had a kit for building a keyer for use on VHF/UHF (code practice on a 2m meter net anyone?)
  • HF Digital Voice with FreeDV QST-April 2013
  • $60 Kit – Da Pimp – Battery Tester / desulfator / charger  (found a you tube video using this device to resurrect old Gel Cells)
  • How about the club building/purchasing an ATV transmitter to use for public service events   Jim Andrews site
  • How about the club building a 3-D Printer – I’ll bet we can design an object or two for the ham shack and sell them on the web site
  • Please feel free to add to add your comments, to this page, with additional ideas for projects ………………………..

Notes:

The club owns two DF setups purchased a few years ago from Dave Sharp (KI0HG) and the club recently acquired an additional setup that was constructed by Sebastian (NS0W)

Recently the club was introduced to, and several members purchased, a MSP430 Launchpad Development Tool. This is an experimenter board that provides a USB-based development and experimenting tool that provides everything needed to launch your own MSP430 (TM) Value Line applications. This kit is still available for $4.30 from this website.  http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/MSP430_LaunchPad_(MSP-EXP430G2)  So, if you are interested in learning about micro processor programming, these sessions might be for you.

 

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