Signal Report

 The Fuchs B25 manpack transceiver has an Antenna Tuning Unit (ATU) designed to match a short whip antenna, or feed a wire antenna. While I haven't measured the impedance tuning range of the ATU, it seems to be able to tune most loads I have connected to the transceiver. The ATU's utility is quite useful for my portable ham radio operations so I'd like to keep it in service.

Some newcomers are shocked when they learn about a zero ohm (0R) resistor. These curiosities do actually come in handy for practical electronics design. Here are five good examples.   Bridging over tracks In some electronics design cost is a major constraint to balance, along with circuit function. To reduce costs, reduced layer counts may be employed, e.g. two layer or even single layer PCBs. Take the single layer scenario. The layout of the components may be such that the resulting tracking is impossible. A 0R resistor 'cheats' the single layer constraint by bridging one track over another.   Component values to be determined Sometimes component values aren't known until the circuit has been built. A good example of this is an antenna matching network. It can be difficult to simulate the entire product (electronics and mechanicals) to gauge the feedpoint impedance of the antenna. Instead, a generic matching network is designed in, using 0R resistors as placeholders. For s...

Portable Activity Day happens on the 1st January in New Zealand. This is a pretty popular day because it's summer break and the country offers many summits, lakes, and parks to activate. Also it's quite convenient that UTC time rolls over at 1pm our time. At the time of writing, my setup consists of an ex-military Fuchs B25 driving an EFHW antenna . These and accompanying parts are packed into a backpack for lugging around. It's not by any means an optimized kit for lightweight SOTA activity, but I choose to have a portable HF kit out of pragmatism: get away from the urban noise floor. For Portable Activity Day 2023 I operated from a beach. It was very enjoyable with many contacts made with other people around the country.

One time during my classes at university, the professor teaching our electronics project course said "if your circuit exhibits the behavior of a time variant system , then something is horribly wrong". This has been true for pretty much all of my experiences - a consistent circuit behavior which is independent of time. However one day, this was not the case, and it seemed I had a "time variant" circuit.   Needed it Yesterday. At the time of this time variant circuit, I was working for a startup company. As you can imagine, time is of the essence. I could release a board design on a Friday and have a built prototype ready for a smoke test by the following Friday. Digi-Key orders on a Friday morning would leverage time zones and weekend shipping. The PCB was made locally on a 2 day spin (I miss you CircuitLabs). When boards and components arrived, I'd pick-and-place the parts by hand with tweezers. Manual and expensive, but fast. Not much was required for tools. F...