I am finding that it is harder and harder to come up with a concept or scheme where I can make some prototyping surfaces and have on hand to use for experimenting. My solderless breadboards are nice, but sometimes I wonder if stray capacitance, inductance and Lord only knows what else will be present when going that route. Attaching pads to a chunk of old PCB scrap is OK till you you get in a hurry and the glue has not set long enough. I have an islander drill bit and that is fun, but it is a one time use method.

This is a repost so all VXO material is in one place to get at.Mon, 02/22/2010 - 09:57 - wb8icn

I want to get back into ham radio and I plan to start with QRP. Right now I have no equipment except a $10 analog shortwave superheterodyne receiver, an analog multimeter, and a soldering iron.

Here's my current plan for getting started with QRP. The plan is designed to get me experience in building rigs and to have a useful array of test equipment that will serve me later, as well as keeping costs down.

I haven't dug into this yet, but would it make any difference if I am using a 2N2222a or 2N4401 transistor for the oscillator circuit for my VXO???

Any comments????

72....Mikey, WB8ICN

I was playing with a Super VXO for 80 meters which worked out - had over 70 KHz swing down to 3.500 KHz which was what I was after. So then started working a 40 meter Super VXO. Got it to swing about 25 KHz which was encouraging. I decided to switch the osc circuit and use the one in the VRX-1 which is where I wanted to use this version of Super VXO. Well, the bandpass filter on my VRX-1 has never performed as well as I expected...so decided to pull the BPF and put in a RF Toolkit BPF from Parts & Kits.

I just discovered this web site and there seem to be knowledgeable Pixie builders here. I was wondering, can the Pixie be modded for 6 meters? I was wanting to try my luck with 6m because I could put up a half-wave dipole, which isn't possible for me on the lower-frequency bands.

These pages seems to indicate it can be modded for 6m:

http://www.indianapolis.net/QRPp-I/pixie2_WE6W-info.html

http://qrp.kd4ab.org/1999/990105/0026.html

http://forums.qrz.com/archive/index.php/t-33463.html

Just updated  my web page...

I doubt if there is a homebrew CW rig that couldn't be improved with some extra filtering.  If you have an extra opamp on your board - or room for one - here is a great notch filter that will improve your audio filtering.

Most of the interference that is noted in a CW receiver will show up on the high side of the rig's filter center frequency.  Adding this 1500 Hz notch will cause a faster roll-off of those interfering signals.

Schematic: 

I am a newbie to Amateur radio and although I am almost in my 6th decade on this great earth, I simply feel like a 'kid in the toy store' when I am playing radio. I got my first ticket in March, 2009 and upgraded to General in June. My hope of attaining Extra class status by the end of the year will not be realized, but I should attain that upgrade early in 2010. When I was much younger, I had a desire to try and get a novice license, but that blasted code was the 10 foot wall that I could never scale. Dropping the CW requirement has allowed the hobby to realize a rebirth in my opinion.