As I had not made any mention of this group except to a single person, I've been a bit surprised at the number of subscribers.

I'd like to ask that members make their first post to this thread. How much you say is up to you. The main purpose is so someone replying to a post of yours can have some idea of the appropriate level with which to respond.

This is not a "mine's bigger than yours" contest. It's intended to preclude PhD level responses which are incomprehensible to the OP as well as the reverse. I ask that members be aware of the knowledge level of the person to whom they are responding and adjust their reply to suit the intended reader.

My Dad used to say if you can't explain it to a 12 year old you don't really know what you're talking about.

Have Fun!
Reg

I am a retired oil industry reflection seismologist. My BA is in English lit, my MS is in igneous petrology (behavior of light to the Nth degree) and I'm an ABD in geophysics. I have no formal training in electronics, but a life long interest, a very large technical library and a set of mid 90's lab gear which had an MSRP of around $500K. Thank you ebay!

My strong suite is DSP and numerical simulations of the elastic wave equation. I've been humiliated by RF enough to have a very healthy respect for the complexities it creates. My goal between now and when I disappear into the black hole that awaits us all is to reach the same level of skill in RF as I possess in reflection seismology.

Have Fun!
Reg

I've been a ham since about 1967, mostly interested in designing and building.? While my formal education was in physics, including experimental elementary particles, my heart has generally been in electronics, software and music, mostly saxophone, but now piano.? I worked for HP / Agilent for 25 years in R&D (spectrum analyzers, high-speed fiber optic modulators and detectors) and metrology (NIST-traceable calibration of RF power sensors and fiber optic detectors using laser heterodyne techniques), with some work on network analyzer calibration.? Antennas have always been my weak link...? The nanoVNAs are an amazing new tool!
David? WA8YWQ

Peter Bunge.
I design and build things and make things work. I repair HP test equipment.
History: Canadian Airforce Radar Tech, Atomic Energy of Canada research tech working on Neutron dosimetry, Accelerators, and the Superconducting Cyclotron RF system. Retired.
An ongoing project is an underwater ROV on a 300ft tether with camera, lights, etc. Working but constantly being improved. I can send details to anyone interested.
Present projects are a robotic arm and scanning sonar for the ROV.

Nice to see the group getting going.

I'm currently a general class ham (KI5CBG), and I'm an enthusiastic RF hobbyist. My primary interest is microwave/mm wave and radar, so my lab is starting to be geared more towards those things, in terms of my selection of test equipment (by and large from Hewlett-Packard). I am also a hopeless collector of Tektronix scopes and associated equipment. Case in point, I brought home a 577D1 curve tracer and a 519 nuclear bomb scope this weekend.

My educational background is BSc in computer science and BSc in mathematics, with MSc in CS (but the focus was really more EE than CS). I work in cybersecurity professionally. I strive to do more EE stuff for fun.

Sean

Hi, thanks for the add. I've been a ham since 1973, but I am rarely found on the air, my main interest is in designing and trying electronics stuff, particularly RF stages and analog electronics. Some of my jobs included TV, communications and CATV industries, and my experiences there and some new I have dumped them in my page ?(in Spanish). I aim to designs that can be easily reproduced with components that are commonly used for entertainment electronics, or salvaged from scavenged TVs or computers. My country is having a hard time with economics, imports are severely restricted, it's not a matter or ordering a fancy part from ebay or aliexpress, so, use what you have!
Daniel Perez LW1ECP

Hello Reg

I was first licensed in 1964 at age 15.? Ham radio was the source of my career.? Graduated as a EE in 1970 and have worked in radio related jobs for much of the last 50 years.? I'm still working but at a much more reduced schedule.? The current project is a 100 MHz to 20 GHz synthesizer.? I am teamed up with another consultant.? He is doing the RF portion and I did the digital design and software.? The MCU is a STM32F407 and the code is written in C.? Some hams are more interested in operating and some, like me, more interested in designing and building.? My current ham project is a single band (40m) Mag Loop antenna.? The antenna structure is done and working but is manually tuned.? I am working on the remote control portion that uses a wireless link and a stepper motor.

For my next project I am interested in building a general coverage radio that uses DSP to do most of the work.? Back in the early 90's I was the engineering director of a small defense company that built DF systems.? Our best product had a receiver that covered 2-2000 MHz and used a then state-of-the-art DSP to do fine tuning and demodulation.? The input to the DSP was at a 2 MHz IF so lots of superhet style conversions before the DSP.? I'd like to update that approach to only have a single mixer in front of the DSP.

I'm looking forward to some interesting technical topics being discussed in this group.

Fred

开云体育

This is Dave Daniel, KC0WJN.

I am a subscriber to QEX and have been involved in radio one way or another since I was in high school.

I am a retired embedded systems engineer with about forty years of experience with various design jobs, working for Storage Technology/Sun/Oracle for most of that time. Most of my experience is with digital hardware and embedded code, about 2:1 hardware to code with a lot of Verilog thrown in. For the first eleven years of my time with StorageTek, my manager asked me to solve various problems for which he had no other engineers to assign, so I have worked on everything from large motor-generators to raster image processors. I've designed things for IBM-compatible printers, disk drives, tape drives, tape automation and finally virtual tape systems until I was laid off along with a bunch of other engineers by Oracle in 2017.

I've since moved back to central Florida and have almost finished setting up my home lab, which consists of a lot of vintage Heath gear as well as a lot of vintage HP and Tektronix instruments. I also have a significant engineering, math and physics library.

I have some schooling in EE and physics (I was a double major and attended classes while I was working) but had to drop out of college after I was transferred out to Colorado by StorageTek in 1991, got married and was assigned to work on a high-pressure product development effort,so I have no degrees.

I have limited experience with RF and am working to correct that deficiency in my retirement years, hence my subscription to QEX and to this list, as well as other lists.

I was originally licensed in 1968 while in college as WN0SMV and WA0SMV.? Yes, dual licenses during that peculiar period when you could hold the novice and technician licenses at the same time.? I retired from AT&T a few short years ago and am now wanting to get back into working on a few technical projects.? QTH is in rural central Georgia.

I've had an interest in electricity and electronics since about age 4, when I stuck a bobby pin into my grandparent’s outlet to see if I could get some juice out. That cost my grandfather a trip to the hardware store for a new fuse. I thought the sparks were pretty cool, but not the paddling I got as a result.

After a few attempts at getting a college education in partying with a side in electrical engineering, I found myself in Columbus OH actually knuckling down, and completed my BS in 2-1/2 years. My commutes were from Columbus OH to New Providence NJ (525mi) only took 6 hours in my Porsche powered VW, but that's another story...

So after getting my BS, along came work, marriage, kids, house, more kids, moving, more kids, moving again,

I first got exposed to ham radio by K2RHR SK in about 1963 when I was in 6th grade, and thought it was pretty cool so I rushed out and got my ticket 44 years later in 2007 as KC2RPJ, and became AC2GL in 2009 because the code requirement was dropped, and I could only send an SOS on CW, I just didn't get around to studying CW, but I can still send SOS.

Hi,
I'm a retired EE, having worked most of my career in software development (Mainframe Operating System - Unisys) but the last 10 years before I retired in hardware - circuit design and microprocessors -? mainly in medical devices.?
Originally licensed in 1964 at age 14 but had a 20 year gap before returning in 1995.? I've been working with PIC microprocessors and making PIC-controlled VFO kits for others to build and use since about 2000 (see May, 2006 QEX) .? For the last 10 years or so I've switched to using the Si570 programmable PLL in the kits. A 2011 QEX article described this project. All of my PIC programming for these projects is in Assembler - just because like to to it that way at home. I've used "C" in work projects.
Now I'm out of the kit business and just building what I want to build.? As such, I'm now designing / testing an all-homebrew transceiver with 3 PIC processors in it.? Features 5 boards that plug into a base board which contains the interconnections. Signal Generator (Si570), Receiver, Transmitter, Transmit / Receive switch, and Filter boards.? It's coming along nicely.??
In the coming days I'm very interested in exploring the use of a STM32F4 microprocessor in an SDR rig with DSP and few analog components.? Looking forward to diving in.?
73,
-Craig, AA0ZZ

Steve J. Noll, WA6EJO. Mostly retired optoelectronics test engineer. Active HF through microwaves. Also ATV, machining, optics, test equipment, VHF and above contesting.

I'm mostly a lurker on several test equipment groups, enjoy the learning and the insights from the "old heads" who designed the great test equipment in the early days of electronics when it was mostly magic (ALL magic, to me!). I earned a Novice license (N8EKC) around 1968 at the urging of my dad. Never had much success with it. When I was in college (USAF Academy) the new thing with repeaters and phone patch appealed to me so I found a professor who was a VE and got my Technician. I put on the form that my permanent address was Ohio, so please give me an '8' call sign, but my current mailing address was Colorado. So of course they gave me WB0YJU and mailed it to Ohio.

After my time as a USAF flight instructor and instructor-instructor, I left the USAF, got married, started a family, and went to work in a couple of software engineering jobs, continuing to market my HexDos operating system for Ohio Scientific computers on the side (I hitched to the wrong horse....) Later struck out on my own, making Hx Engineering, LLC my full-time occupation, corporate world headquarters in my basement. But that let me beat the work-from-home thing by 28 years, and I got to be much more involved with my kids than would have otherwise been possible - 3 by birth, 2 by adoption, and 36 foster babies. The only real product of my own these days is KISS-488, an IEEE-488/GPIB/HPIB to Ethernet adapter that I'm still selling on eBay and at my own .

When one of my sons wanted to get his ham license as a result of earning Radio Merit Badge with me as his counselor, I went along and took the Extra class exam, so now I'm W8HXS and he's KC8UQX. Another son is just now getting interested Kids are mostly grown now, but I'm still involved with Scouting, mostly as a merit badge counselor, and I'm also a volunteer CASA/GAL advocating for foster kids in court. On the side, I'm a part time senior flight instructor for single-engine, multi-engine, and instruments, and also a sideline beekeeper with up to 30 hives producing about 1200# of honey each of the past few years. So you could say I'm busy as a one-armed paperhanger with the hives - both kinds!

Steve Hendrix, PE, CFII
Hx Engineering, LLC
W8HXS

Hi all

I'm a current grad student Mechanical Engineering at USU. I got my Technician's license back in high school and have started getting into radio experimentation in the last couple years. I don't do much transmitting, mostly due to the fact that my only radio is a QRP Labs QCX and my morse skills are severely lacking. But we'll get there!

Looking forward to learning from the group!

Cory Goates
KG7BBV

I'm a retired HP engineer and college professor who finally has time for radio projects.? Current investigations focus on POTA/SOTA equipment and digital modes.? My wife and I live on a small farm in northern Idaho.
--
JimC (KQ7B)

Welcome. I'm afraid this list hasn't had much traffic though I'd like to see that change.

I started the list as a venue for discussing articles in QEX, but then there weren't any that really interested me.

What would you like to discuss? I'm very intensely focused on crystal filters.

At the moment it happens that the main discussion of crystal parameter measurement is on the HPAK repair list. And the "Not a NorCal" project on qrptech.

Have Fun!
Reg

I'm a retired EE and a lifelong ham (WA3UQV). I was first licensed as a Conditional Technician in 1972, and sat for my Technician, General and Advanced class licenses, a year later, down at the old FCC headquarters on 1919 M street in DC. I almost failed my 13WPM sending, as I had never had a CW contact.

I have a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. When I graduated with my BS, fresh out engineers were making a little less than union grocery store clerks and Metrobus drivers, so I stayed in school, taught an undergraduate electronics lab, and pursued my MS degree.

My MS thesis project was to automate a manual HP8410A VNA system, into something along the lines of the HP8410S. Because I was sponsored by the FDA and NMRI, I did extensive software to simplify dielectric measurements of DNA in saline. Microwave resonances in DNA were the hot ticket item back then.

My thesis adviser went on sabbatical before my research was halfway done, so I was left on my own, to do research, support his PhD graduate students, and mentor his undergraduate apprenticeship students. In my spare time, I worked on my thesis.

The most useful class I ever took in high school was typing, and yet, I still make a steady stream of errors. I didn't have the patience to type and retype my thesis on a manual typewriter, so, I bought a surplus Interdata 8/32C minicomputer system, with Carousel printer, and wrote my own word processor (in Fortran) to use for my thesis. I have often wondered if anyone else ever did something as drastic as that?

At the tail end of my MS, I accidented into consulting work. Soon, it kept happening, and it became clear that being a self employed consultant was going to be my life's work. With consulting, I found that I rarely did the same thing twice, so I learned to quickly become proficient in dozens of different related fields. In support of my business, I created a well equipped electronics lab, and machine shop.

Towards the end of my career, I was mostly designing and prototyping equipment and systems for the US Army.

Along the way, I bought a farm, built a house, got married to a wife who designed VLSI parts for space probes, and had a great kid who is now a much published nuclear physics post-doc.

I subscribed to QEX for a couple of years at its inception, but found its design errors to be quite tedious, and let it lapse...

How best to handle me? Anyway you want to! If I have learned anything over my life, it is that treating people kindly often pays dividends.

-Chuck Harris