I am really enjoying this book. I have many of the ARRL books on antennas (and there are many) but I have found this book to be indispensable in understanding how antennas work and why. It starts with basic, simple antennas and builds from there. I was especially pleased to read one of the sections by Tom Schiller, N6BT. Mr. Schiller works for Force 12 and is an antenna guru. But more importantly, he is the father of Traci Schiller, one of my good friends from high school. The Schiller’s backyard backed up to Foothill Expressway in Los Altos, CA and you could always see Mr. Schiller’s massive tower. I wish I had been involved in the hobby back then and gotten a tour of Mr. Schiller’s shack. His article in this book is about how every antenna will work, but some work better than others. He does a great job of differentiating between great antennas and antennas that get you on the air. He also shows the rate of diminishing returns you receive at a certain point. I am enjoying Simple and Fun Antennas for Hams and recommend it if you don’t have a firm understanding the basics of antennas and would like to experiment, build your own, and attempt to master the mysteries of the aerial.
Category: history
Happy Thanksgiving!
High-tech culture of Silicon Valley originally formed around radio
Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007
They weren’t out to make history, the eight young engineers who met secretly with investor Arthur Rock 50 years ago to form Silicon Valley’s ancestral chip company, Fairchild Semiconductor.
The men, among them future Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, mainly wanted to escape their brilliant but batty boss, William Shockley, who had just shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in the invention of the transistor.
Shockley, who had started a company in Mountain View in 1955 to commercialize this breakthrough, had bullied and browbeaten his young engineering staff, whose numbers included future venture capitalist Eugene Kleiner, at 32 the oldest of the bunch; the rest of the renegade group were younger than 30.
So when the Traitorous Eight, as they’re sometimes called, held their hush-hush meeting in San Francisco, they had reason to fear discovery – but no way to know that by quitting safe jobs for a risky startup, they would earn a place among what Stanford University historian Leslie Berlin calls the “Founding Fathers of Silicon Valley.”
But wait. The National Register of Historic Places recognizes the garage in Palo Alto where David Packard and William Hewlett started their company. Isn’t that the birthplace of Silicon Valley?
And here’s a hitch. Not until 1971 was “Silicon Valley” used to describe the concentration of chip-making firms in the South Bay.
So what is Silicon Valley? How and when did it arise? And most important, perhaps, what is the future of this region that has become a synonym for innovation?
“There is this myth that Silicon Valley was all orchards when the chip companies arrived, but it’s not true. It had been building, building for a long time,” said Christophe Lécuyer, a Stanford-trained historian who turned his dissertation into a book, “Making Silicon Valley.”
Lécuyer, now an economic analyst with the University of California system, said the region’s technological awakening began almost a century ago when, not long after the great quake of 1906, the Bay Area – and particularly the Peninsula – began innovating with the then-hot technology of radio.
“The San Francisco Bay Area was a natural place for interest in radio because it was a seagoing region,” said Timothy Sturgeon, an industrial researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who described this radio period in a paper, “How Silicon Valley Came to Be.”
Lécuyer and Sturgeon argue that, roughly 30 years before Hewlett and Packard started work in their garage, and almost 50 years before the Traitorous Eight created Fairchild, the basic culture of Silicon Valley was forming around radio: engineers who hung out in hobby clubs, brainstormed and borrowed equipment, spun new companies out of old ones, and established a meritocracy ruled by those who made electronic products cheaper, faster and better.
As Sturgeon notes, as early as 1909, Stanford graduate Cyril Elwell was acquiring patents for new radio technologies and persuading university officials, including then-President David Starr Jordan, “to finance a new company” in Palo Alto that would be called Federal Telegraph Co.
That same year in San Jose, Charles Herrold started a school for radio engineers and began broadcasting to radio hobbyists and later to a small local audience to become what a 1994 PBS documentary called “Broadcasting’s Forgotten Father.” Back then, the region had none of its present cachet relative to other clusters of radio activity like New York, New Jersey and Boston.
But in this rivalry with the industrial powers of the East, the future Silicon Valley would find a powerful customer with deep pockets – the U.S. military.
Sturgeon said U.S. naval officials, impressed by Federal Telegraph’s technology, gave the Palo Alto firm huge contracts during World War I – the first but not the last time war would fuel the region’s tech firms.
In another hint of the future, Sturgeon writes that around 1910, Peter Jensen and Edwin Pridham quit Federal Telegraph “to start a research and development firm in a garage in Napa” to improve loudspeakers. In 1917, they formed Magnavox, which built public address systems for destroyers and battleships in World War I.
The war’s end took the wind out of Silicon Valley’s sails. The Eastern radio powers, notably RCA, dominated the field during the 1920s and 1930s. The region’s entrepreneurial fire cooled but, as history would show, didn’t die.
Creation story
The next chapter in the Silicon Valley story involves the familiar tale of how Hewlett and Packard hatched the region’s first technology giant in a Palo Alto garage.
Sophisticated versions of this creation epic also credit their mentor, Stanford engineering Professor Frederick Terman.
Terman, who began teaching at Stanford in the late 1920s, would spend the rest of his career formalizing the university-industry collaboration that would come to typify Silicon Valley.
But in the hardscrabble ’30s, it was all Terman could do to hold together the ecosystem of tinkerers and researchers who were trying to survive the Depression.
He had help from tech pioneers such as Charles Litton Sr., who in 1932 established a machine shop that made better vacuum tube manufacturing tools. Tubes were the workhorse of electronics before transistors and – according to Lécuyer – Litton’s tools allowed San Bruno vacuum-tube-maker Eitel-McCullough to build superior components – and a reputation.
Another seminal event was the 1939 invention of the klystron tube by Stanford research associates and brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian, who would later start Varian Associates. The klystron tube led to more powerful radars, helping the United States and its allies gain an advantage in World War II.
In his 1995 memoir, “The HP Way,” Packard himself provides a glimpse of this ecosystem in action, telling how Terman arranged for him to work evenings at Litton’s shop.
“Charlie Litton had started with the Federal Telegraph Company in Palo Alto,” Packard wrote, adding, “My relationship with Charlie developed into a long and enduring friendship.”
Garage-era Silicon Valley also adopted the business model of the radio age – supplying the U.S. armed forces.
“Military funding was critical for the rise of Silicon Valley from the very late 1930s to the early 1960s,” Lécuyer said. For instance, he said, Eitel-McCullough had about 15 people making vacuum tubes before the war. That swelled to 4,000 employees in 1943, then contracted to 200 in 1945, when peace crippled demand for tubes.
So, by the time the Traitorous Eight started Fairchild, the recipe for Silicon Valley largely had been written. Still, the notion that they founded the valley is justified by what financier Rock brought to the party – the money to bankroll bold engineers.
“The venture capital sector really arises along with the semiconductor industry,” Lécuyer said. “Once the venture capital is in place, it makes all the other things possible.”
From Fairchild forward
Investment that rewards risk became the final catalyst for the Silicon Valley we know, where ideas, nourished by money, spawn startups, products, even whole industries, like biotechnology.
The first big wave of startups created by venture investment were the dozens of Fairchildren – chip companies like National Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel – started by engineers who traced their ancestry to the Traitorous Eight.
Intel became the largest of these Fairchildren, and Moore the best known of the eight. But the gang leader was his charismatic colleague Robert Noyce. A technical innovator – in this meritocracy he had to be – in 1961, Noyce designed the first chip that enabled two transistors to work together on a single slice of silicon. Called the “integrated circuit,” it is the ancestor of today’s billion-transistor chips.
In 1971, when trade press reporter Don Hoefler used “Silicon Valley” to describe the concentration of chip-making firms on the Peninsula, the name stuck. But almost from the start, it stood for more than chip-making.
“Silicon Valley created an environment that allowed ideas and money and people to combine more easily,” said AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley and an expert on the region.
The early chip industry, like the two waves of innovation before, initially depended on military expenditures, Paul Ceruzzi, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, writes in his book “A History of Modern Computing.”
Only this time, it was the Cold War that opened the government’s checkbook.
The Soviet launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, prodded the United States to modernize its missile and space program. The newfangled silicon chips were considered vital – albeit costly – components, and Ceruzzi writes that NASA and the Defense Department bought so many “that the price dropped from $1,000 a chip to between $20 and $30.”
Falling chip prices fueled development of new electronics for corporate customers and eventually individual consumers. Reliance on military purchases lessened, though defense dollars remained important in spurring research. Thus, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin later dreamed up Google, a defense research grant helped support their work. And when Stanford computer scientists won a robotic car race in 2005, the prize came from the Defense Department.
By the 1970s, therefore, Silicon Valley was poised to capitalize on new civilian technologies like PCs, as exemplified by Apple Computer.
In the 1980s, excitement shifted to scientific workstations and networking devices from firms like Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems, and to software like the version of UNIX perfected at UC Berkeley.
In the 1990s, the point-and-click browser popularized by Netscape ignited the dot-com boom and, after a painful bust and slow recovery, the recent rise of Google and social networking sites such as Facebook signal another wave of entrepreneurship.
Back to the future
Today, Silicon Valley is showing signs of age. Traffic is bad. Housing is worse. And it’s competing with every metropolitan region in the nation – indeed, the world.
Saxenian, the Berkeley dean, is optimistic. Her most recent book, “The New Argonauts,” posits that Silicon Valley will remain a design and innovation center by partnering with lower-cost manufacturing centers overseas.
“Viewed from outside the United States, Silicon Valley is an amazing place,” she said. “I’d put my bets on innovation coming out of the valley for the next 20 years.”
But jobs are a concern. Tech employment hasn’t yet recovered from the dot-com bust. The American Electronics Association says California had 1.2 million tech jobs in 2000. Its most recent snapshot found 280,000 fewer Californians collecting high-tech paychecks.
Is it outsourcing? Is it globalism? Is it a problem? Maybe the answer depends on whether you’re looking for work or looking to hire.
And more to the point, after all this time, do we know what Silicon Valley is, or better yet, how to keep it vital?
“My biggest hope for the valley is that we continue to have the focus, creativity and capital to reinvent our future and the future of technology,” said Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel Corp., the most prosperous of the Fairchildren.
“My biggest fear is that we will get complacent and allow it to happen elsewhere.”
The Review, Part 1: The World of Ham Radio, 1901-1950: A Social History
This is a modern telling of Clinton DeSoto’s 1936 classic 200 Meters and Down story through meticulous research of the author, Richard Bartlett, and the amateur radio experiences of the his brother Forrest, W6OWP. Tracing the start of radio from Marconi through the emergence of a thriving hobby in the post WWI years, Bartlett does a wonderful job of taking the reader on a journey through the history of ham radio. It is a more vibrant story than 200 Meters, aided by hindsight and a wealth of primary sources the author pulls from. When he describes the early boy-ham experimenter, I immediately drew a parallel with the boy-“hackers” of the 1980s and 90s. Teenage boys, curious and prone to mischief with knowledge of a new technology unfamiliar to most. Ignorance easily creates fear, and these early boy-hams were often looked at as a danger and a threat.
There is good coverage of the early organizations supporting ham radio to include The Royal Order of the Wouff Hong. I’d always heard about the Wouff Hong and it was fascinating to read about it’s humorous origins.
Bartlett covers many of the highlights of ham radios initial contributions: demonstrating the ability to relay messages across the country, providing a means of communications in support of disaster areas, and sending messages across the globe. It is amazing that amateur radio survived the post-WWI years – threatened by both the military and commercial broadcast interests. The hobby also created a commercial industry of amateur radio equipment suppliers – Bartlett describes the elaborate displays these businesses put on at the Chicago’s 1933-34 World’s Fair that helped capture the imagination of the public.
The best part of the book so far is Bartlett’s coverage of ham radio’s support to exploration in the 1920s and 30s (Chapter 7, Amateurs as Experimenters and Adventurers). Harry Wells, W3ZD, accompanied a 1929 scientific expedition to Borneo and sent reports back to hams in the states. Bertram Sandham, W6EQF supported an automobile expedition to open up an International Pacific Highway from Fairbanks, AK to Buenos Aires. The descriptions of both these portable and mobile operations are exciting and inspiring.
I’m still working through the book, so more to come.
… part 2 of the review is here
QSL Cards… what makes a winner?
My dad has recently upgraded to General and has been getting on the air making contacts. This isn’t the first time he’s been on HF or exchanged QSL cards. Back in his younger days, he held the call KN6ILL (I Love Lucy) and operated an HT-20 transmitter and a National NC-57 for a receiver with an 80 meter dipole. His license lapsed but now he is back in the game with an IC-718. He is making regular contacts using PSK-31 and has started to receive QSL cards. But he hasn’t made up his own cards yet. I figured I’d try an help with a rough draft – something to get the creative juices flowing.
Wikipedia defines a QSL card as a written confirmation of either a two-way radiocommunication between two amateur radio stations or a one-way reception of a signal from an AM radio, FM radio, or television station. A typical QSL card is the same size and made from the same material as a typical postcard, and many are sent through the mail as a standard postcard. QSL cards derived their name from the Q code “QSL”, which means “I acknowledge receipt.”
I really enjoy QSL cards, both receiving them in the mail from other hams verifying our QSOs and designing my own to send out as an acknowledgment of the contact on my end.
The appearance of your QSL card can be important for many. It gives the recipient a snapshot of you… and I find it difficult to do that on the small area provided by a 3.5″ by 5.5″ card.
The general agreed upon minimum elements of a QSL card are the following:
– Your callsign
– Basic information concerning the QSO
+ the other party’s callsign
+ time/date of contact in UTC/GMT/Zulu
+ band or frequency of the QSO
+ mode (SSB/CW/digital mode)
+ signal report (RST)
– Your name and mailing address
Additionally most hams include the following information which is useful for a number of different awards:
– County (for the county hunters)
– Grid (for the grid hunters)
– ITU and CQ zones
After that the door is wide open on what is found on a QSL card. Many include membership numbers which go towards earning awards (FISTS, SKCC, 10-10, etc.). Some also include one or more logos of clubs and organizations they belong to (ARRL, ARES, MARS, SKYWARN, contest club, local club, etc.).
Many hams like to individualize their QSL cards with a picture showing their hamshack, antenna farm, QRP rig, mobile setup. Others put a picture of a some notable location or landmark near where they live (National Park, major league stadium, civil war battlefield, etc.). And a few portray an additional hobby they are active in beyond (or complimenting) ham radio. This is where you can really set your card apart from others, make it stand out in a crowd.
I think some sound advise is to keep the card relatively clean and simple – don’t try to do too much in such a small space. Have fun and make your card something you are proud to share with others.
Here are some other sites with more information on QSL cards:
– eham.net: QSL Cards
– WA7S: QSL Cards – How to Make Your Own
– QSL Factory
– The QSL Man
HELLO
10 REM THIS IS A PROGRAM
20 PRINT “HELLO”
30 END
Great post from Richard on his 30th anniversary of working with computers. Looking at the code above brought back many memories.
My first computer was an Apple ][. I started out with a cassette tape player to load programs. Soon I got one, then two disk drives. The 300 baud acoustic cup modem. The 1200 baud Hayes modem. RAM upgrade to 48k(?).
I really enjoyed exploring BBSs. Growing up in the 408 area code (the home of Silicon Valley) allowed me to connect mostly to local boards. However, their was one in Santa Cruz (called Moria?) that I used to call regularly until the phone bill arrived and was told to restrict my modem exploration to local calls only. I remember with the 300 baud modem I could read the text as fast as it came across the screen. The jump to 1200 baud seemed incredible. This was still before file uploads/downloads. Software was exchanged, but it was via 5.25″ floppy disks. We used a hole punch to clip a hole on the left side of the floppy to enable the reverse side to be usable. I went to one of the early Apple conventions at the Moscony Center in San Francisco. I learned how to do simple programs in BASIC. For that I have to thank Ms. Watanabe – she was a teacher at Wilson Elementary in Cupertino and taught a weekly course that I attended. There was a game I used to love to play… kind of a Dungeons and Dragons type game where there was a 2-dimensional maze that you explored. The goal (if I remember) was to find the treasure before the dragon got you.
When I get a chance to go back to Sunnyvale to visit family, two places I always have to go are the Ham Radio Outlet store and Fry’s Electronics. On display at Fry’s, amongst the aisles of stuff, is an old Apple ][. I enjoy the memories that the sight of the beige box brings.
W6PO – Rememberance
http://sutherland.blogs.com/w6po/
This site was put together by Janice, KB6FNS, for her father, Bob Sutherland, W6PO, SK. I really enjoyed reading the entries about Bob’s amazing ham activities. The mix of childhood recollections, remembrances from fellow hams, and pictures are wonderful.
“As a kid, one task would be to turn on the ‘shop’ for my dad before he got home, so all the tubes would be warmed up. (Probably the ham shack too) There is a big breaker box inside the door with a bunch of switches that turn everything on.
During moonbounce activity, we were not supposed to answer the phone until it rang more than once. The ‘one ringer’ signal was from another ham who was verifying that the pre-arranged schedule was on and he was ready.”
Electric Radio – Celebrating a Bygone Era
I recently put in an order to AES for a few items I really didn’t need. Fortunately AES ships to APO addresses… while HRO does not. When stateside I prefer to order from HRO, having had great overall past experience with them. Quick delivery, no fuss, no muss. If I have a problem, I can call the store directly. I’ve also used HRO to give gifts (Father’s Day, Christmas, Birthday) to my dad, KD6EUG, and that has worked very smoothly. When I’m back visiting the folks in Sunnyvale, CA – I always try to stop by the HRO store there. It is near Fry’s Electronics – not far from Moffett Field. HRO also helped field the US Army Amateur Radio Society and the Baghdad Amateur Radio Society a complete radio setup, to include IC-7000, power supply, CW key, etc. HRO’s good people. However… they don’t ship to APO addresses, so I ordered from AES. Now AES will allow you to use a stateside billing address, but will send your order to the APO address. But here is the kicker – AES sends an invoice to your billing address… so the XYL gets it and finds out you have been ordering a bunch of stuff you don’t really need instead of saving money for our upcoming trip to Europe. But I digress. One of the items I ordered was the August 2007 issue of the periodical Electric Radio. What a wonderful little magazine! I’ve talked about other radio magazines in the past and lately I’ve taken a real shine to World Radio.
Electric Radio is a real jewel. Inside the front cover, the magazine states it’s intent upfront: Electric Radio is all about restoration, maintenance, and continued use of vintage radio equipment. So what does this have to do with me? I don’t restore or use vintage equipment. I wouldn’t know the difference between Collins, Drake, National, or anything other type of old, dusty metal cabineted stuff. Despite this, the magazine is still a joy to read. Page 2 talks about Electric Radio’s “Honor Your Elmer Contest” – how great of an idea is that?! Page 39 has an amazing article about the life of George Mouridian, W1GAC, SK. The magazine itself is the size of a church pamphlet with a nice sturdy color cover. The pictures inside are black and white – but what better captures the essence of classic radio than black and white photos. The gear is wonderful to see… massive tubes, huge dials, looks like some of the rigs could have easily of come from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. I probably won’t subscribe and you may not either – but I do recommend you pick up at least one copy to have a look for yourself.
The Evolution of the Elecraft KX1 Transceiver
ANYWHERE, ANYTIME HF: The Evolution of the Elecraft KX1 Transceiver
By Wayne Burdick, N6KR
Special to the ARS Sojourner
If there is a place, and you can get to it, you must operate from there.
—Ade Weiss, WØRSP, Joy of QRP
Some years ago at the Dayton Hamvention I did a presentation entitled Ergonomics and Amateur Radio. It was not lost on either me or the audience that the title was an oxymoron. I spent an hour suggesting ways to improve the situation.
While discussing field operation, I alluded to something called a “trail friendly radio” (TFR), and speculated on what form it might take. Ergonomically, it’s an interesting assignment. Suppose you have no table? No chair? No room to string up a dipole? Suppose like Ade Weiss, you wanted to operate from anywhere?
Though the need for a trail-friendly radio has been evident for years, we can thank Richard Fisher, KI6SN, for giving the genre a name. He and Russ Carpenter, AA7QU, popularized it here on the ARS web site in the form of the TFR Challenge, and many interesting designs have resulted. Cam Hartford, N6GA, and I talked about it at length at the Zuni Loop field day site one year, when Cam showed me his own beautifully-designed TFR.
I’ve always wanted to explore TFRs myself, with the goal of optimizing them for small size, ease of use and maximum integration. But the idea had to simmer and morph in my mind for about a decade before all pieces of the puzzle came together – in my case, as the KX1.
Early Attempts
The story of the KX1 really begins in the 1970s. Like many hams who grew up in the era when transistors and ICs had just become affordable, I had the great fortune to acquire a copy of Solid State Design for the Radio Amateur by Wes Hayward, W7ZOI, and Doug DeMaw, W1FB (silent key, 1997). Armed with a Radio Shack etch-resist pen and ferric chloride, I home-rolled Wes’s Mountaineer, a crystal-controlled, direct-conversion, 40-meter transceiver. From then on I was hooked on both homebrew and QRP.
But it was the small, grainy photo of Wes operating the Mountaineer with gloved hands and wool cap – while while standing – that fired my imagination. Wes listed the many difficult constraints he had to satisfy in this design. The rig had to be small and lightweight to be suitable for backpacking, which dictated the use of QRP and a small battery pack. The antenna system had to be similarly light, so he opted for a simple dipole and RG-174 miniature coax cable. It had to be usable in cold temperatures, which suggested crystal control. Finally, it had to be usable in many different operating situations, including sitting on the ground, lying in a sleeping bag, or standing beside a trail. These constraints would inspire my own explorations in the TFR design space.
In 1989, I designed something I called the Safari-4 (QEX magazine, Oct. / Nov. / Dec. 1990). While not exactly a TFR, this 5 x 7 x 3″, 4-band, 1-watt transceiver did push the envelope on integration. It included an internal 0.8 amp-hour gel-cell, manual antenna tuner, SWR bridge, and keyer, and had a stack of four transverter boards covering 40, 20, 15, and 10 meters. Like the KX1, it had keyer paddle mounted on the front. Unfortunately it was actuated by skin resistance, and despite the gold-plated comb pattern on either paddle, it suffered when humidity was low. It also could not be used with gloves on.
Still, a rig like this had been my dream for many years. All you needed to set up a station was a random-length wire and a pair of headphones. I used the Safari-4 at every opportunity, and once managed to work Angola from Arizona on 15 meters with 200 milliwatts and a 16′ wire strung horizontally just 8′ off the ground. All of the credit goes to the operator in Africa, of course, and to extremely quiet band conditions.
I built my first truly back-packable, hand-held HF transceiver in 1991 while living in Massachusetts. It was 2 x 4 x 1″, operated on 15 meters only with a VXO and superhet receiver, and had a push-button CW key on the top. With two internal, paralleled 9-volt alkaline batteries, it eked out just one-half watt. This level was significant. According to Solid State Design, a half watt represented a good tradeoff between communications efficiency and battery weight. Taking this wisdom from my QRP heroes for granted, I took the little rig out on many occasions and made several interesting QSOs. The most memorable happened when I was operating mobile, driving north on I-495 outside of Boston one winter day. Using a three-foot-long whip on the roof – a Radio Shack CB antenna re-resonated at 21 MHz – I had a solid, 10-minute QSO with a station in St. Louis.
A PIC in the Pocket
Several years later, after designing a few PIC microcontroller projects at work, I decided to see what a PIC might do for the cause of further transceiver integration. The result was another hand-held, which I dubbed the Koala. This was a 2 x 4 x 1″, half-watt, 40-meter superhet that ran from a single 9-volt battery. The Koala had a keyer, dot and dash buttons on the top cover, frequency counter, battery voltage monitoring, and most significantly, audio-Morse-code frequency readout of all parameters including the VFO. This allowed operation with no display.
I should also briefly mention my club project phase, which led to the NorCal 40, Sierra, and SST transceiver kits. Again, these were not TFRs, but each furthered my goal of optimizing transceivers for portable use. All three were also enhanced by the addition of microcontrollers.
The NorCal 40 was the first NorCal club project. Doug Hendricks, KI6DS, Jim Cates, WA6GER, and others helped me specify the NC40’s features, which included small size, very low current drain, “wireless” construction, and the now-ubiquitous BNC antenna jack – I liked the small size, and I couldn’t find a PCB-mount SO239 anyway. I can’t thank Doug and Jim enough for their efforts, which made this rig and other NorCal projects a success.
The KC-1 keyer / counter option was added when another NorCal member, Bob Dyer, K6KK, started Wilderness Radio to sell the NorCal 40A commercially. The KC-1 used a PIC as a keyer and audio-Morse frequency readout – features now widely found in small transceivers. But I added one other unique firmware feature: the operator could use the keyer paddle to enter a target VFO frequency in kHz, then rotate the VFO knob until they heard an acknowledgement from the KC-1.
To minimize complexity while preserving low current drain, I used plug-in band modules in the Sierra, NorCal’s second transceiver project. Having tried a band switch in the Safari-4 and modules in the Sierra, I am now a firm believer in a third solution—latching relays—which I’ve used in every multi-band rig since, including the KX1. I later designed the KC-2 keyer / counter for the Sierra – yet another PIC-based unit. By running the KC-2’s MCU at just 100 kHz, and using a non-multiplexed LCD display, I was able to keep RFI to an absolute minimum. The Sierra construction article, sans KC-2, can be found in any ARRL Handbook from 1996 through 2003.
In the case of the SST, or Simple Superhet Transceiver, I tried to cut the size, parts count – 85 or so – and current drain to absolute minimums while preserving ease of construction and decent performance. The receiver still included AGC, the transmitter put out 2 to 3 watts, and there was room inside the box for a 9-volt battery and a KC-1. The combination of these features has made the SST popular as a Spartan Sprint rig. I suppose it could even qualify as a sorta-TFR if the KC-1 controls and dot / dash buttons were installed on top.
The NC40A, Sierra, and SST are all still available from Wilderness Radio.
Five Field Days
Before I could turn my attention to a serious TFR, a most amazing thing happened: I quit my day job. I did this even though my wife and I were only a few months away from having our first child. What inspired this irrational behavior was my teaming up with Eric Swartz, WA6HHQ, to start Elecraft.
Eric and I had met quite a bit earlier, through NorCal. He was recruited as a technical advisor to the club, and helped me with some last-minute Sierra design issues. He also proved he was serious about QRP by racking up over 100 countries on his NorCal 40.
But it was doing Field Day together for five straight years that laid the foundation for Elecraft and for our transceiver designs. At FD 1995 and 1996 we used a hodge-podge of radios, batteries, antenna tuners and antenna switching schemes, often doing more QRP experimentation than operating. Finally, in 1997, we looked at that year’s pile of gear and concluded that there just had to be a better way. By early evening we had abandoned operating and were sketching out the K2 on the backs of FD log sheets.
The K2 was our notion of the ultimate Field Day rig, with all-band coverage, wide receiver dynamic range, current drain of about 200 mA, and internal accessories – battery, ATU, antenna switch, power meter, and contest keyer. But it was not really a backpacking transceiver. So in 2000 we introduced the K2’s baby brother, the K1. Now we were getting close!
The K1 is just a bit larger than a NorCal 40, draws 55 mA or so on receive, covers up to 4 bands without modules and includes an integral battery and ATU. We wanted the K1 to function like a TFR, so we designed a special tilt stand (KTS1) that would allow the rig to be aimed up, even when it was resting on the ground. The tilt stand is fully collapsible for transport, keeps the connectors up off the ground, and provides a place to mount a keyer paddle such as the Paddlette Backpacker.
But the K1 still doesn’t meet all of the design constraints for a TFR. It’s too heavy for many backpacking expeditions, and can’t be used conveniently in difficult operating situations, such as when sitting in a camp chair, lying in a sleeping bag, or standing up. So for two years the idea continued to simmer. And then, finally, something bubbled over.
Inspiration, Perspiration
One morning in March, 2003, I woke up suddenly with the design for a plug-in, physically-reversible keyer paddle in mind. This was the all-important missing link. The trick was to mount the paddle at a 45-degree angle for ease of use. I could thread a metal-bushing eighth-inch stereo plug into the custom mounting bracket and use a captive thumb screw to hold the paddle firmly to the panel. I quickly sketched out a TFR-style radio around this paddle: controls facing up, paddle facing forward, and batteries accessible via a removable bottom cover.
A few days later Eric and I fleshed out a set of performance and feature requirements. Like usual, Eric pushed performance and features, while I aimed for low current drain and ease of construction. Then, at the expense of other projects that I had been pursuing, I spent the next month doing the design.
This is where, for me, all of the constraints and possibilities of the CW TFR finally converged. I now felt that it was possible to satisfy all of the requirements Wes Hayward had laid out for us in the Mountaineer, while providing much better performance, enhanced usability, multiple bands and more operating features.
The most important design decision was to use a DDS VFO. This would eliminate a number of parts, including the transmit mixer and its crystal oscillator. While it wouldn’t provide the high spurious-free dynamic range of an L-C VFO, it would be very stable over a wide temperature range, and also frequency-agile, allowing full coverage of 40, 30, and 20 meters as well as nearby SWL bands. Other designers had used DDS VFOs in QRP rigs with success, notably Dave Benson (NN1G) in his DSW series. But I’d been holding out for a DDS chip with much lower current drain. Luckily, one appeared: the Analog Devices AD9834, which draws just 5 to 8 mA.
Another critical question was whether to use an LCD or LED for the 3-digit display. An LCD would have required a backlight, complicating packaging given the small area available for the display. It would also have required a separate display driver, since the KX1 had to get by with only a 28-pin MCU. So we opted for a rugged, incredibly efficient red / orange LED. The unit we selected can be driven directly by the MCU (multiplexed), and requires less than 100 microamps average per segment in typical room lighting. For outdoor use, the current requirement increases to as high as 0.8 mA per segment, meaning the LED contributes up to about 10 mA average (12 segments lit) at its brightest setting. However, we included two refinements to make this a non-issue: a programmable display-off timer, and a 100 percent audio Morse-code interface, even including menu text.
The Morse-audio feature allows the KX1 to be used without looking at the display, which is great for bicycle mobile operators, too-sleepy-to-keep-your-eyes-open Field Day operation, and operation in extremely bright sunlight. But we’ve also discovered that blind hams appreciate the KX1’s Morse-audio interface, and that alone was worth its inclusion.
Revisiting the Power-to-Weight Issue
In order to allow room for the automatic antenna tuner option (KXAT1), we decided to use just six AA cells for the rig’s internal battery pack. We discovered we had to use two 3-cell sockets with a gap in the middle to accommodate the keyer paddle jack and the I.F. and BFO crystals.
Six 1.5-volt lithium cells work very well in this application, providing around 1.5 to 2 watts output. And they last forever, it seems, with a rating of nearly three amp-hours and a very long shelf life. I did six KX1 field-test outings from May through September on a single set of these batteries.
So let’s return to the issue of how much power output is required for a backpacking rig. As you recall, Wes Hayward suggested one-half watt to attain a good power / weight tradeoff. But he didn’t have access to lithium 1.5-volt AA cells, which were invented in 1992. Alkalines have a similar milliampere-hour rating, yet their voltage rapidly drops as they discharge, and the mA-hr rating is based on an end-of-charge voltage of 0.9 volts. In contrast, lithium cells have a nearly flat discharge curve, remaining at about 1.4 volts for some 90 percent of their charge life. They also weigh just over half as much as alkalines – a six-cell pack weighs just 3 ounces.
So the equation really has changed. Given lighter batteries with better performance, I think the optimal power level for backpacking rigs is around 1.5 to 2 watts. This will produce more QSOs and more reliable emergency communications.
Finishing Touches
There are a number of other subtleties in the KX1 design that contribute to its small size and moderate parts-count. For example, the transmit low-pass filter is a careful compromise, covering three bands yet using just one relay. Only three crystals are used in the varactor-tuned IF filter, rather than four (K1) or seven (K2). T-R switching of the receiver’s bandpass filter is handled using a series-tuned circuit and an NPN transistor clamp rather than PIN diodes. The BFO is fixed-frequency, optimized for a 600 Hz sidetone / TX offset. A contacting rather than optical encoder is used, the former being much smaller and still having a long predicted lifespan of more than 100,000 rotations. Four sidetone levels are provided by simply using two outputs on the MCU and two resistors (i.e., a 2-bit DAC). And finally, a simple AGC circuit is used in combination with limiting at the AF amp. The LM386 runs from just 6 volts, so it clamps leading-edge thumps pretty effectively.
Two other features provided the icing on the cake: the log lamp and SWL coverage.
The integrated white LED log lamp elicits a lot of smiles when we demonstrate the KX1. It’s really handy for nighttime operation, allowing you to shut off your larger lantern or flashlight, which might disturb someone sleeping nearby. The LED only requires about 6 mA when operated from internal batteries, and since it has its own on-off switch, it doubles as a book lamp, flashlight, or a visible signaling device. During field test someone suggested that we use a red rather than white LED, since white light attracts flying insects. You can easily swap LEDs if this is a concern.
The KX1’s SWL coverage allows you to get news, time beacons (including WWV at 5, 10, and 15 MHz), weather information, and a variety of perspectives on world events. This seemed like a useful addition to a backpacking rig, since it may be the only radio you carry, and it has proven popular with early builders. The crystal filter can be widened out to about 2 kHz to listen to AM and SSB stations. For flexibility, we also added 5 kHz tuning steps, three frequency memories per band, and USB / LSB capability.
The KX1 could be made much smaller if we had used surface-mount components and AAA batteries, left out the ATU, and had been willing to pack the controls together more tightly. While this might help someone win in the “skinny” division of the Sprint, it would also make the rig less rugged and a lot harder to build and use. Instead, we designed the rig from the ground up to be a reliable, easy to build, easy to use, fully-integrated station. Our chosen 3″H x 5″W front panel size allows quite a bit of room for controls and display, and the 1.2″ height allows for AA batteries and an automatic antenna tuner.
K-zero (Not!)
Initially we didn’t know what to call the rig. We tried and rejected K.5, KR5, K-zero, and other names that would complete the dubious mathematical series { K2, K1, … }. We also rejected “Elecraft Elf,” although we may use that for something else . . . someday. “KX1” won in the end. “K” would keep the KX1 firmly planted in our line of transceivers. “X” was a reference to “eXtreme” operating conditions or “eXtremely small.” And “1” seemed a reasonable choice, since the rig is just too small to be a “2”.
When I first envisioned the KX1, what came to mind right away was the Adventure Radio Society. Russ and I had had a meeting about his ARS proposal a few months before the launch, and it was clear that he really did have adventurous and innovative plans for the organization. Given the many serious backpacking trips taken by Russ and other ARS members, the KX1 just seemed to be a good fit. I’m hoping we’ll get a lot more feedback on the design as the rigs find their way into the field.
But I also had a more esoteric goal for the KX1: I wanted it to be the ultimate radio for couch potatoes. Imagine lying on the couch, working CW DX with a paperback-novel-sized lap-top transceiver. It’s an entirely new way to experience CW – anywhere, anytime!
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Wayne Burdick, N6KR, a founder of the Adventure Radio Society with membership No. 2, is one of amateur radio’s leading designer / innovators and co-owner of Elecraft, manufacturer of the KX1 trail-friendly transceiver.
The Wayback Machine
I’ve really been enjoying Bill Continelli’s, W2XOY, web posting on the history of amateur radio entitled the Wayback Machine. Well written and very engaging.
I received a package from home containing the last two issues of CQ and the last issue of QST so I spent a good portion of last night reading through those. Also got a copy of the latest issue of DX Magazine – I always enjoy reading the articles about hams on exotic DXpeditions.
Listened to the Voice of Russia for a little while but couldn’t find any solid shortwave stations to listen to last night.
FISTS, the organization of the International Morse Preservation Society, has a great beginners guide to a CW QSO on their website.