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Monday, November 06, 2023

I wish I could build stuff like this

My friend Bob, W3BBO has been working on a Progressive Receiver for the past months and finally got it to the point of his satisfaction. There are two parts to it - the receiver itself and them the Converter Box which contains the outboard speaker and the modules which let him choose between 80, 40 and 30 Meters.






He sent me some audio last night of some CW he was copying on 80 and 40 Meters. I wish I could post it here. It appears that Blogger only supports picture files and video files - or I'm just too stupid to figure out how to attach an audio file- which is a real possibility.

In any case, Bob is way too modest, but his craftmanship is light years beyond anything I could produce. I've homebrewed some pretty basic things like UNUNs and even a memory keyer that was just parts and a schematic which I had to figure out how to put it altogether.

If I were to tackle a project like this my receiver would end up looking like one of those limp clocks from a Salvador Dali painting.  Bob's receiver is sweet to listen to and it's definitely not bad on the eyes, either!

I worked a few POTA stations Sunday morning and the bands seemed to be in good shape, then a geomagnetic storm came out of left field, causing the K index to go above 5 and unsettling conditions. Checking into the St. Max Net last night, signals were way down. The past couple weeks have been beautiful as I was hearing just about all the check ins. Last night I was having trouble hearing Lloyd K3QNT at times, the NCS for the net. He's always the loudest signal I hear and when his signal goes down, that generally means I'm not going to hear everyone and that proved to be the case.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!

3 comments:

  1. Hello Larry, Bob's receiver indeed is looking beautiful. I wonder why it is called progressive receiver? There has to be something very special in the design I guess. I see a lot of sophisticated measuring devices in the background, I suspect he does know more as the average radio enthousiast. Well Larry blogger does not support audio files. But you can make an account at soundcloud, upload your audio and publish it in your post. See/hear for an example one of my latest posts: https://pe4bas.blogspot.com/2023/11/capturing-magic-of-radio.html.

    73, Bas

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, Bas! Actually, you've given me an idea. We'll see how it plays out. 73 de W2LJ

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  2. Oh my gosh that is beautiful work!! Very nice. Nothing I ever built came close to that.

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