K5ATG Amateur Radio
My world, my blog
03 July 2024
03 July 2024 Ride
26 June 2024
Trike Ride 26 June 2024
I got the trike mostly back together and hit the trails for a ride. It was around 100 degrees and the Sun was just baking the trails. During the evening of 25 June 2024 we had a windstorm come through and tore a bunch of stuff up. Here is a power line pole on the trail that had snapped off at the base.
10 May 2024
New Desk
25 March 2024
POTA Activation Pine Creek Wildlife Management Area US-6369
This upcoming weekend (28 March 2024 - 01 April 2024) I will be spending the weekend at my brothers place at the Pine Creek Wildlife Management Area US-6369. This park in located in south-east Oklahoma in McCurtain and Pushmataha Counties. It has been activated a total of 4 times but only three of those reached the minimum of 10 QSO's. A total of 106 QSO's have been made from all of the activations. Two activators are tied at having 46 QSO's each. It's last activation was in October 2023, about 6 months ago.
My setup will be using a sBITX transceiver with a homebrew 40-10 meter EFHW. I will be mostly on FT8 and some SSB work. One of my goals is to contact by radio my friends that live in the Oklahoma City Area. I also wish to surpass the 46 QSO limit that seems to exist for this park. Because I will be completely rebuilding my shack it may be a little while before I upload my log to LOTW, eQSL, and POTA. I will upload to QRZ.com. Follow me on Twitter or X what ever it is called this week, my handle is Aaron@K5ATG and I will post there when I get on the air.
For this activation I will respond to all QSL cards, I will also try to make some QSL cards specific to this activation. They will not be of the highest quality because I will make and print them from home. My information is correct on QRZ.com. If you do see me on the air, I just please ask that you spot me. I would really like to get 50 QSO's for the weekend.
For more information please visit the following links:
Pine Creek Wildlife Management Area
Of course be kind to each other on the air and in life. For future updates please subscribe to this blog. Feel free to contact me at Aaron@K5ATG.com
'72
Aaron K5ATG
20 March 2024
New Shack Desk II
Got an update on my new shack desk.
Special thanks to my son Dakota, the finish and the poly has been applied. Now we just need to air it out for a few days to get rid of the fumes and then put it in the house. I'm getting excited for it. It will make life in the shack so much easier.
01 March 2024
Bob Heil K9EID SK
The amateur radio community is sad by the loss of amateur radio legend Bob Heil K9EID. He is the founder of Heil Sound, who makes audio equipment that is used by the best musical artist around the world and also the first manufacture to be admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was also on of the original hosts of Ham Nation. I could go on and write down all of his accomplishments but I would be typing here for a week.
I was very lucky to have met him in 2019 OzarkCon in Branson Missouri
We exchanged probably over 100 emails over the years with him giving me advice on radios and antennas and me entertaining him with jokes. I'm sure that he is in Heaven building coaxial resonant dipoles and hooking up a audio mixer and stage monitors to a HF radio.
Bob thank you for teaching us so much.
Aaron K5ATG
P.S. SK stands for Silent Key which in amateur radio lingo means that a amateur radio operator passed away.
31 January 2024
New Shack Desk
I have not been on the radio for the last few days. Here we are in the middle of winter and here in the 405 it has been very beautiful. We have been in the 60's and 70's all week. It is one thing nice about living in Oklahoma, we have winter where it is cold windy, snow and ice. Then every now and then we get a nice break from winter and have spring type weather. So me and my favorite buddy, Dakota, have been taking advantage of the weather nad have been doing a lot of work on my desk.
It is a corner desk just made out of yellow pine plywood. Once finished it will have a shelf that will go along the back edge. It isn't going to be the nicest to look at but it will be more efficient then the setup that I'm using now. Its slow going, I have been working on this since last June, so for about 7 months.
I will update more as it goes along.
22 January 2024
sBITX V3 Using a old laptop display as a larger display
One of the nice things about the sBITX is that it was designed to use a 7 inch Raspberry Pi touch screen. Since I got just the board version of the sBITX v3 and no enclosure I used what I had on hand, a stand alone 7 inch LCD display.
The picture above was my standard setup using the 7 inch LCD display. It worked really nice and it was a clean setup (because all of the messy crap is hidden behind the black foam board :D ) My issue with it was how small it was. I practically had to use a magnifying glass held up to the LCD display to see who was answering my FT8 CQ call. Frustration levels went through the roof.
Then I remembered that I have an old laptop tucked away in the corner of my shack. This thing was in worse shape than me. Half of the keys on the keyboard was missing, it ran off of Windblows 7, and it had a massive 250 gb hard drive. The Raspberry Pi 4 that is running my sBITX has more punch than this laptop. But the lap top had a 15.6 inch LCD display that WORKS! Heck Yeah! I can do something with this.
I tore the laptop apart and freed the display from its prison of plastic. The picture above shows the laptop display. I kept the hinges on because they are attached to the display pretty darn good and I don't want to risk breaking the display. If that happened then i would have to borrow the neighbors new laptop and go through all of the trouble of removing his display and replacing it with my broken display and then explain to the neighbor that the cat knocked the laptop off the ceiling fan and broke it. That is just a lot of work. I can use the hinges for now and if I need them gone later on down the road, I have a sawzall
With a laptop the controls for the display are incorporated into the circuit board of the laptop. Because of this you just can't hook the laptops LCD display up to the Raspberry Pi and get it to work. You need to get a control board. To do that you need to find the model number of the LCD display. Gently turn it over and on the back you shall see a label. Here is the label on the back of mine.
For mine the model number is LP156WH2. So I went to Amazon and searched for Control Board for LP156WH2 Laptop display and this is what I found.
MAKE SURE THAT THE CONTROL BOARD WORKS FOR YOUR LCD MODEL. If you get the wrong control board it isn't gonna work and it will make you madder than a midget in a NBA shower room. For this one it cost $23. So I just asked the wife for $25 to get her an early birthday present. I came off looking like a Romeo and she will forget about it by the time her birthday arrives. The control board comes with one of those cheap little remote controls that never work. I just use a sharpie and put one of my neighbors name on it and then tossed it in my other neighbors gutter. Not my problem anymore, let them figure it out. I'm not going to go into detail on how to hook the control board up to the laptop display. Plenty of videos about that lurking around. I got it hooked up and attached everything to a board. I used the hinges on the display to attach it to the board. This allows the display to be adjusted.
As you can see it makes a nice display for my sBITX. I still need to make a enclosure for the sBITX. The part that I have to figure out, should I use this large display and put everything into one large enclosure? It would be really nice but a bit hard to strap it down to my trike to take it to a city park and operate portable for a while. Or i could just dismiss the display on the sBITX and make a smaller enclosure for it and then for home use I can use the 15.6" display and I can still use the 7" display for portable use. Let me know in the comments section below.
As always you can reach me at Aaron@K5ATG.com
'72
Aaron K5ATG
27 December 2023
sBITX V3 Board Review
A few months back Ashhar Farhan VU2ESE, the father of the BITX series of QRP transceivers came out with the latest edition of that line the sBITX. Once I checked out the copious number of attributes of this little, I immediately realized that this is the HF Transceiver that I have been waiting for. It first came out as the sBITX D.E. (Developers Edition) this edition was to help iron out all of the little problems that come with launching a new product.
The sBITX DE may have been mainly for ironing out problematic issues, but it proved to be capable of paving the road for the sBITX series. The future and pretty much the present of HF transceivers is SDR- Software Defined Radio. An SDR is in layman's terms, where many functions of transceivers is performed by software instead of traditional electronic components. This allows the physical size of the transceiver to remain small and at the same time expanding its features. What Farhan did with the sBITX DE was genius. He took a relativity cheap (at the time) single board computer the Raspberry Pi 4 and incorporated it into a custom built 40-watt HF Transceiver. He then made the transceiver, and
Raspberry Pi OS open source and made everything freely available for anyone to download the software and hack it and change it in any way that they see fit.- sBITX V3 transceiver board only (I really need to figure out an enclosure for it before something gets shorted out.)
- Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB RAM)
- ATU-100 EXT Automatic Antenna Tuner, I really do not need this (see antenna below). I'm mainly using it as a power/ swr meter which again is not needed at when transmitting the sBITX displays the transmitting power and the SWR.
- 20 Meter homebrew Inverted V dipole broadside east-west. The feed point is 32' above the ground. I have it tuned to 1.0:1 - 1.1:1 SWR on the CW and Digital portions of the band (14.000-14.200 MHz).
25 December 2023
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas from the K5ATG Amateur Radio Station in Oklahoma City to each and every one of you through out the world. May the Lord bless all of you.
72Aaron K5ATG
03 July 2024 Ride
Went on a really short ride this morning. I intended on riding farther but my back started feeling wonky so I decided to come home while I...
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A few months back Ashhar Farhan VU2ESE, the father of the BITX series of QRP transceivers came out with the latest edition of that line the...
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Every once in a while a new product comes out that you just got to have. While you are drooling over the listed features you think to...
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One of the nice things about the sBITX is that it was designed to use a 7 inch Raspberry Pi touch screen. Since I got just the board versio...