iShartRadio quality:
[Booby Trap commercial]
“This is a test of the Emergency Alert System.”
[Tootsie’s Cabaret commercial]
Heard on WBGG-FM about 1:18 AM. No data bursts were sent. Not even a period of silence.
Let’s not even think too deeply here about what a sin it is to put spots for two rival businesses of the same type in the same stop set. It’s very disrespectful to your advertisers. Then again if they had any respect they wouldn’t be cutting spots in a studio where the equipment has a distinctly audible whining hiss.
This is an unofficial listing and you may want to confirm with the club before going for a testing session!
For any amateur radio exam session, please be sure to bring photo ID, the exam fee (unless you’re going to a Laurel VEC session which has none) and a calculator. Calculator apps on a smartphone don’t cut it here. What kind of silly borks do you take us volunteer examiners for? Ha!
Second Monday of the month, starting 7:00 PM at the Miami-Dade County Emergency Operations Center / Fire Rescue headquarters, 9300 N.W. 41 Street, Doral FL.
Upon arriving, drive up to the front of the building and go left to the gate. If this is closed, ring the intercom and tell the guard you’re there for the Dade Radio Club meeting.
Are you around Palm Beach and want to take the exam to become an amateur radio operator or upgrade to a higher license class? See below.
Still need to study or take a practice exam to see if you’re ready? Check out HamStudy.org.
Bring photo ID and a calculator to the exam session. Since this is a Laurel VEC session, don’t bring the exam fee, as there is none. 😉
Dear Amateur,
This Sunday the Palms West Amateur Radio Club Laurel VEC team will be giving exams for all classes of Amateur Radio licenses.
Come and test with us on Sunday, January 8 at 10:00 AM at Fire Station #28, 1040 Royal Palm Beach Blvd, Royal Palm Beach 1 block south of Okeechobee Blvd. There is no charge, and you do not have to register.
If you are coming to upgrade, please bring a copy of your license and a photo ID card, like your driver’s license. There is no charge for testing!
If you know of someone who has been studying to become a ham, bring them along, even if they feel they need to do more studying.
And if you are a VE, please let me know if you can come and help.
This is from the schematic to a Tytera MD-380 radio.
Shown here is the mic preamp. I was curious to see what this looked like as transit audio quality and level are said to vary a lot from one radio to the next.
Unless I’m missing something – there’s no way for DC voltage to get in there and let those transistors do their job.
Annotated to show where capacitors block DC:
Looks like Miami traffic at rush hour--- it ain't getting in or out.
I’m considering buying one to play with but. .. uh… only somewhere with a good return/exchange policy.
Previously I posted about the Dielectric dehydrator. Here’s another common model, the Andrew / CommScope …. Newer models are controlled by this honking weird motherboard.
This thing's some engineer's iron clad job security
Basic parts:
Upper left: black top hat is the air inlet filter that Andrew claims is accessible from the front panel (big fat lie), twist cover and pull off to open. Felt element is easily cleaned. Do not oil, use dry.
Pump: A field rebuildable diaphragm pump.
Center left: vent valve.
Bottom left: Spaghetti Junction.
Center bottom: output pressure regulator.
Bottom right: Coalescing filter bowls. Accessible at front panel.
Right: Molecular sieve unit and air tank.
Top center: Humidity sensor, pressure alarm switch, power input, air output.
Just so you know I didn’t simply open this for fun, here’s what happened on this unit.
Sliiiiiiimeeeeeee!!!!! The vent valve was blocked and the unit couldn’t drain, so it threw a humidity alarm.
Water was building up in the coalescing bowls and not being purged. That line at the bottom leads to the vent valve.
How it works: The spaghetti board starts the pump. Air passes left to right through these filter bowls, actually going through them backwards best I can tell. That is to say it enters the inner part of the fiber filters. Believe it or not there is a good reason for this. It then flows through the molecular sieve unit which absorbs moisture, passes through a check valve (where?), and enters the storage tank. From there the regulator allows enough air to pass and pressurize the line. Usually it’s set to like 3 psi.
The tank pressure is gradually increased up to 40 psi at which point the controller stops the pump and opens the vent valve.
When this happens, the pressure in the molecular sieve drops rapidly with outflow to the input side. This causes water droplets to form and be ejected. The water blows back into these two bowls and is vented along with the air via the drain.
Since this is taking place backwards, the bowls are backwards so the droplets will hit the filters on the proper side and fall downwards.
There’s method to the madness, see?
To return the unit to service, I backwashed the vent valve with the air coming from the pump and a snot rocket launched out and went….. Well, it’s never been seen since. Who knows.
It works now, that’s the important part.
And now some hot electronics porn. Here’s a Harris Broadcast ATSC receiver….
Hardcore model.
Top left: RF and IF board. Right: 8VSB demodulator. Bottom: big mama power supply.
The 8VSB demodulator.
Video stream decoder and video output
Pin count anyone?
This. Unit. Was. Not. Cheap. To. Build. Daaaaaaayuuuummmnnnn
Can I borrow a big ass shortwave rig for a moment? I’d like to see how many milliseconds this lasts before becoming a plasmoid cloud of hissing metallic gas.
The only thing that prevented my coworker from winding up with memory channels named after colorful air-entrained car wash products is that I really didn’t like that touchscreen user interface. A+ for cleverness though. I’ve heard the Yaesu System Fusion digital mode on these radios works very well and sounds great.
I never liked how Pandora sounds. Their audio compression is pretty lossy; some quality was sacrificed to ensure smooth streaming on lousy mobile data connections.
The ad insertions aren’t coordinated with the programming either, but this isn’t such a big deal as most of them are just dry reads; it’s not like booming tones and overprocessed voice comes yelling out of there. It’s just a little odd to have everything come to a sudden pause of just some lady reading a spot over silence in between power metal ballads. Granted this also means your classical stream won’t launch you through the roof when a spot plays…
But yeah, terrestrial radio is dead and burned thanks to the new Neilsen PPM encoding systems that cause audio defects to the point of stripping guitar chords out of some songs, eight minute stop sets of ads that come across with great… Mountains of acoustic fnords… before you are returned to a six song music library that you can’t hear properly anyway.
Not that I’m bitter. Just a little bit. Okay, I am.
This isn’t a comprehensive guide by far but these are the resources I like to guide people to if they’re interested in taking the licensing exams for amateur radio in the US.
Sorry, I had to drop this silly dad joke on you. I just had to.
KB6NU’s No Nonsense Study Guides – Free downloads available of PDF versions, ebook versions also available for Amazon Kindle, epub, etc…
HamStudy.org – an interactive study system based around generating practice exams
Some exam sessions are walk-in, others may require advance reservations.
What to bring to the exam session:
Photo ID
A calculator (ideally not a graphing calculator)
Your FRN number, if you have one already. This can make the filing process with the FCC faster and easier. You can apply for an FRN number ahead of time. It is not necessary to have an FRN number ahead of time, it just makes things easier.
The exam fee ($14 at the time I wrote this – not needed if you’re at a Laurel VEC session)
Once you successfully pass the exam, if this is your first license, you will need to wait for your call letters to be assigned before you go on the air. If you have an FRN number, go here and search by your FRN number each business day. Continue until it comes up. Celebrate. 😀
