Month: December 2020

CW QSOs

As my CW has improved I’ve started to schedule QSOs with a local friend, this has been great practice. At times despite being only a mile apart the signal has been very weak, but this has been great practice, in particular when we have had QRM, nothing beats on air experience, I can really see the improvements!

Colpitts Oscillator

Quite a while a go I undertook a small project to build the Colpitts oscillator found in the RSGB intermediate book (purchased as a kit from Jab Electronic Components), despite putting it together as per the schematic I couldn’t get it to work. With help over email and zoom from Jack G3JIR and some other club members and after eventually replacing pretty much all of the parts with spares (many posted from helpful club members) and reassembling on a breadboard, hurrah I got it working!

I think that in the end it was the transistor being incorrectly wired which was the issue, despite having checked and double checked…or so I thought, but it was a long and painful process to debug, quite a learning curve as a newbie in electronics.

Finally the illusive output from the oscillator!