A few fun things

A little busy these days but managed to get some good shack time here and there and accomplished a lot.

First up is I finally got my xtal filter board working properly.  Turns out, and to make a really long story short, I had one of the transistors for the receive amplifier in backwards. Wouldn't you know that it was pretty much the last thing I checked.  Anyway, looking back at the bench once I fixed the problem and saw the mess the ensued, I had to post a picture.  Takes a lot to troubleshoot and repair a board sometimes. Everything you can see was used except the vtvm.  Missing in the picture are signal generators that were used as well.



Next up was a look at the microphone amplifier circuit and a mic to use.  I was going to use a mic from an old marine vhf radio I had that I'm junking. But I think I'll go with a Yaesu MH-48 that I have spare.  In fact I have one with a broken ppt button and a complete spare one as well.Might be able to jury rig something for the ppt button that will work.
The only mod needed to have a basic mic will be shorting out a resistor and diode in the ppt circuit. Circled in blue, middle right. And adding a 9v regulator to the amplifier board.  I think I'll add as well some spare traces and connections in case I decide in the future to utilize some of the buttons on the mic.  LSB/USB switch comes to mind for starters  Frequency up and down might be nice as well.   Going to be a little more complicated with this one though.  It appears that Yaesu uses different voltage levels on two lines to determine which function or button has been pressed.  I've messed around a little with the Arduino before in order to determine different voltage levels so it should not be too difficult.  I'll laugh now.

An finally, almost there as an operational ham.  Proof is in the picture.  Antenna coax is in the house. I'll be working on the grounding system in the next few days or so.  Great wx right now for sure.  The hole in the brick took all of about 1 minute. I rented a rotary drill and 1.5" core bit.  Worth every penny.  Or should I now say nickle.  Nothing like using the appropriate tool for the job. 
Lots of room for another coax or 2 and ground.  It is a 2" hole in the header but 1.5" in the brick.

The complete antenna system at ve3poa