Dear Jared Strider... I never thought this would happen to a poor boy from the city... (again)

Yesterday morning, I was starting to have the inklings of the severe sinus problems.

I had to go into the office for a Macintosh Laptop, so that I can start testing and developing my code for it.

Before I drove into the office, I used my Flonase. (Thanks for making it non-prescription assholes! It was cheaper for me because my insurance plan covered 99% of the cost.)

The air in the office is "OK", but it's heavily recirculated and extremely dry!

After an hour or two of being there, I began to have problems with my sinuses drying out and irritation.

When I got home, I thought I was going to be OK...

Well, it really wasn't.

Since I'm doing a narrative here, I'm going to carry on...

Ellie pulled out some salmon for dinner.

Well, I pulled out our little bbq plate/grill thingy and put the salmon on it, and put it into the bbq at the far end and then cooked the fish by smoking.

It turned out great!

We had some pasta salad & corn to go with it!

It was great!

Well, as things went on and got later, the sinus irritation got worse and worse.

Since we invested in a large bag of Epsom salt, and I read that soaking in a hot bath it supposed to help "cure what ails you", I hopped into the tub around midnight.

When I got out, the nausea started to hit me, so I sat on the crapper resting.

Then it really hit me and I sat on the bathroom floor trying to wait it out.

Finally it came out...

It was extremely thick and solid.

To put it in my best descriptiveness...

I was puking a turd!
No watery substance to it...
Just salmon, pasta and corn!

Seriously, it was the worse, strangest and nastiest cookie tossing I've ever done.

If you've ever seen how sausages are stuffed with those machines, that's exactly what it was like, except it was coming out of my mouth!

Now, who's hungry for pasta, fish and corn!?

Damn you old man!

He's not actually that much older than I am.

Maybe 5-10 years older than me.

This guy is another HAM radio operator that I actually work with, not just another guy I know with a HAM radio.

A while back we ordered some QRP tuners on Ebay.

I'm pretty aggressive about building projects and kits like this, so I built mine first.

It was pretty easy, after watching several YouTube videos.

My biggest complaints though, between the building instructions and videos are the lack of better details about the final touches.

For example it would've been a nice touch to find out the magnet wire's enamel was thick and needed be cleaned off with a planer, ground using an angle grinder and possibly burned off with a blow torch.

Of those, I actually used a knife, sand paper, and a butane torch.

Then I was able to solder the leads of the inductor to the switch.

That's when I found out that the switch was REALLY cheaply made.

The damn thing melted and got ruined.

I finished building and realized that it wasn't working through the inductor.

So, my buddy and I ordered better rotary switches.

They came in today, and he dropped it off this morning because he was on vacation.

I put it on my desk so that I wouldn't forget to finish up the tuner when I was done working.

About an hour later, I had the soldering tools out and started working on it.

There was work going on, since I was building a virtual network environment and installations & reboots take time.

One thing that I did while building, was to test out the inductor switch and found that I needed to connect the wires from the inductor differently.

A little component tester I bought last month helped me to figure out my initial inductor soldering was not working.

I might be wrong with the final wiring, but it seems to work just fine.

What I did was to only solder one end of the magnet wire of the inductor to one side of the tuner network, then left the other one disconnected.

In the center of the rotary switch is a pin.  This, I found, is what actually changes the inductance when rotating the switch.

So the magnet wire around the inductor is only connected on one end, and the side is left open.  The center pole of the switch is connected to the other half of the network.

I connected this inline with my new radio and started tuning it as the "instructions" suggest doing, and I'll be damn if it doesn't work!

Without the tuner, the signals I'm receiving are extremely weak or just not there.

Funny thing, is that the I am using the wrong length antenna for this frequency.

The antenna is .25 meters, when the frequency I was tuning is 40 meters.

Then I also switched up and tune it to 20 meters too.

I'm impressed that these little kits actually work!

Now even more excited to use the radio tonight...

Flip it over, it's not quite done!

So this little radio wasn't fully done yet.

Turns out the CW key jack got melted up a bit during construction.

I know the radio and it's parts are from China, and I accept that parts aren't always going to be 100% awesome...

Yet, it sucks to find out that the jack was messed up after having it all put together.

Since I will not give up on things, especially on a $150 radio.

It's a good thing that for years I kept various computer parts and components around.

I salvaged a stereo jack from the front panel board of a PC case.

This little jack fit the holes perfectly...

Too bad it was just about 2mm taller than the other one.

I had to unsolder and reposition the transistor, since it's mounting screw didn't match up after putting in the new stereo jack.

Testing it out, it recognizes a straight key and paddle correctly now.  It also doesn't stay keyed when I put the straight key plug all the way into the jack.

It's "up"... Too bad Viaga couldn't have made it easier...

The other day, I finally got my little radio kit.

Before I went through winding the inductors, soldering, etc....

I did an inventory of all the parts, and ensured that they all fit into the holes drilled on the PCB. (Printed Circuit Board)

There were three holes that I had to clean up.

Then I went through and wound the inductors and the one transformer.

Winding inductors & transformers is actually pretty easy and calming.  People often tie flies to relax, so this is similar to me...  Although, I won't display them, I'll install and use them.

This radio has a double-sided circuit board, which meant that I had several of the parts that needed to be installed on bottom while all the others were on top.

With the "complexity" of construction, this was actually very easy to work on and relaxing to do...

You'd think I was winding this all up to be easy and fun...

Then came installing and putting together the case/enclosure..

HA!

I suppose I should've tried to put the case together first of all!

The holes of the front/back plates didn't match the holes of the top/bottom/sides.

Let me step back...

I didn't know they didn't fit at first...

Using a phillips screw driver to put things together wasn't just going to cut it...

The screw heads were threatening to strip out.

Since I was a PC builder from way back, I had a small peanut butter jar of PC screws.

The smaller M3 screws are the same as the screws that came with the kit.

As noted, using a phillips screw driver was going to strip the heads, so I used a socket to twist the screws in...

That wasn't enough!

I also had to go and get my metric taps, so that I could get a good starter hole going so that I could use the PC screws & socket wrench.

Let me recap a bit here...

I had all the soldering done in about 2 hours.  This I expected.

Working on the case... well..

It took me more than 2 additional hours to finish the case, and that's even wolfing down my dinner and going with Ellie's blessing so that I could finish things.

With the radio finished, I hooked up a buddy's Antenna tuner, as he said it'd work as a signal generator...

I generated a lot of shit to hear on the headphones, but it did provide me with feedback the little radio was able to pick up some signals.

At last, I finally hooked up an antenna to the little radio.

First off...

Compared to a little Pixie 4.1 kit I bought and have used for the past 4-6 months, this was VERY quiet!

It also was able to dial right in on the frequency of a signal I picked up last night!

Playing with the RIT (Receiver incremental tuning), I was able to tune onto the frequency of the remote station for transmission, then flip back over and tune/adjust the signal to a tone that I could easily hear/listen to.

This is what I wanted this little box for!

Something more robust with features that will allow me to enjoy working with CW (Morse Code).

I'll post more info how my radio contacts with the new radio are going...

Last night, I was tired by the time I was done, and didn't have patience to play with it.

Freaking A!

On June 9th, I ordered a YouKits EK1A radio from Vibroplex.
(http://www.vibroplex.com/contents/en-us/d57.html)

I ordered it from them for several reasons:

1. On the YouKits website,  they indicate that Vibroplex is their USA retailer.
2. ARRL has indicated that they were the place to buy them.
3. I figured it would be faster to receive it from them.
4. Shipping was cheaper.

My order was placed on June 9th.

On the 17th, I sent a follow up asking for an ETA for shipping.

Turns out that they were out and would be shipping one out the week after.

On the 25th, I sent another follow up asking about the radio.

This time the reply indicated that their shipment was in California and that I should get it this week.

Today, I sent another email asking where it is at, and that it's been almost a month since I placed the original order.

I explained that I ordered from them expecting it to be here quicker and that their shipping was cheaper.

Then I asked if it would've been faster if I had ordered directly from YouKits in China...

In the message, I told them that I expected some delay as the ARRL published a good review of these radios in the June QST magazine.

There are approximately 150,000 members of the ARRL, and possibly 100+ individuals might've wanted this radios and placed orders around same time as mine.

I'm getting pretty pissed about the shipment of this freaking radio.

Maybe they should send me a fucking free Vibroplex key with the damn radio!

After all, they said their shipment was in California last week!

Vibroplex is in Knoxville, Tn.

This shipment should've been at their facility by now, if it was in CA last week!

Part of my anxiety about this, is that I'm tired of trying to make CW contacts with my little QRP Pixie 4.1 radio.

The Pixie radio works... but...

It's hard to tune it for me to both send and receive.

The tones that I can't hear well, fall into the range that is usually need to "Zero-beat" the CW frequency of a sending station.

Well, I'll just have to keep playing with the Pixie until they can get me my freaking radio...

It's just turning me off from wanting to do any further business with Vibroplex.

Even though they're a major CW key maker.

My attitude would probably be different if they'd have sent me emails or what not about the status of the delivery they told me about last week!

so...

Freaking A!