News: September 2011
Time available for radio is presently restricted due to my business interests with Squirrelhouse Consulting and Finance Assured Ltd being very active and family health issues.
Mk2 Remote Aerial Selector Relay Unit is operational and so far has survived the summer's heavy rain! Mk 1 had considerable water damage and was written off in Autumn 2010 which caused much frustration over the winter as the only HF band available was 160m.
My homebrew Sutton DSB HF transceiver (see right) now has 20w output after providing a higher voltage supply to the linear applifier.
The next construction project is likely to be the Minster SSB transceiver from Walford Electronics - Tim Walford is still tweeking the design but it will be a multiband, 5w SSB rig.
I have a neck RSI condition, hence my creating Computer Posture UK in 2010. I rely on a bluetooth headset for most of my phone calls and came across this article by K7SFN where a bluetooth headset was connected wirelessly to his transceiver so he could move around and rely on the transceiver's VOX control to switch transmit/receive. He used a Jabra A210 device which was developed as an adapter to provide bluetooth flexibility to non-bluetooth mobile phones.
K7SFN's article puts it very well and mine was a very straight forward project. The device has a 2.5mm stereo socket for mic in on the tip and phones out on the ring with sleeve to ground. As 2.5mm is a faff to solder, I used a 2.5mm-3.5mm adapter and then a 3.5mm to RCA Phone lead to give me two leads. I put a Yaesu mic connector on one lead and a ¼ inch jack plug on the other lead and amazingly it worked well first time as I tried to contact a station in Cyprus, another in Iceland and a nice audio report from a special event station in Portugal! That's fine using my FT-990 but my micro-shack has a FT-747 with no VOX so the next step was to build a VOX circuit!
