Amateur Radio News

Welcome to The Ladder Line. It's mostly a blog where I share things about amateur radio and occasionally other things.

Popular articles that you might be looking for are:

An Arduino based DDS-60 controller

QRP 40 meter CW transceiver

73 de KT1F

Ross

Antenna changes. We are now grounded!

Submitted by Ross on Sat, 11/19/2011 - 14:11

The doublet antenna with ladder line as described here has been working well but I always felt a little uncomfortable because I knew that there was a problem which I hadn't faced up to. It was kind of cool to have the ladder line coming into the attic where I had a balun and automatic tuner and then coax to the shack in the basement but it had no lightning protection and no practical way of protecting it. So... I have made some changes.

Doublets, ladder line and automatic remote tuners

Submitted by Ross on Sun, 08/07/2011 - 18:35

We're back in the old QTH of Wilton, New Hampshire.

Of course the first ham project here has been to get an HF antenna up. smiley I've put up the same multiband doublet I had at Mont Vernon. It's a classic doublet which is a half wavelength long on 80 meters fed in the center with ladder line.

Inexpensive AD9850 DDS boards on eBay

Submitted by Ross on Sat, 06/11/2011 - 08:58

Hi everyone.

No updates for a while. We're getting ready to move house so I've been busy with lots of things around that.

Thanks to those who have emailed me reporting that they've built the Arduino DDS-60 controller.

Callsign lookup tool

Submitted by Ross on Mon, 01/24/2011 - 22:01

I've been learning how to program with Microsoft Silverlight. I thought that a nice exercise would be to implement a callsign lookup application. Well... here it is smiley

New callsign - KT1F

Submitted by Ross on Mon, 11/15/2010 - 12:41

I decided that it was time to get a shorter callsign so it's goodbye to KB1KGA and hello to ...

KT1F

QRP 40 meter CW transceiver

Submitted by Ross on Sat, 10/30/2010 - 22:04

I finally got my act together and built a transceiver. smiley It's for 40 meters CW and has about 4 watts output. Some of the details may be of interest to other homebrew experimenters.

The good news about Drupal

Submitted by Ross on Sun, 07/25/2010 - 19:23

I have been playing with content management systems on and off for several years. I've had experience with and developed modules for DotNetNuke and have some part in the ongoing maintenance of a large Joomla site.

ARRL Field Day 2010

Submitted by Ross on Sun, 07/18/2010 - 21:53

A few weeks ago I took part in ARRL Field Day with my local club, the Granite State Amateur Radio Association which operates with the callsign N1QC. We also had a GOTA ("Get On The Air") station for new hams operating as KB1NH.

QRP 80 meter CW transmitter

Submitted by Ross on Sun, 04/11/2010 - 14:55

One of my motivations for building and Arduino controlled DDS-60 was to use it as the VFO for a QRP transmitter. I have had success with this by using the RF stages of the Universal QRP Transmitter Mk-II by Wes Hayward W7ZOI as described in QST April 2006. Click here to download the article for free from the ARRL.

Having fun with QRSS

Submitted by Ross on Sat, 04/10/2010 - 21:49

I've been having fun with QRSS over the last few weeks. My Arduino controlled DDS-60 has been transmitting "barefoot". i.e, connected directly to an antenna tuner which goes to a balun which feeds the ladder line out to my antenna. It's been running for long periods sending very slow CW using frequency shift keying with about 6 Hz shift.

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