Ripples in the Ether

Pardon the Crass Commercialism

Jason Milldrum — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:06:07 +0000

..but I'm raising more capital for Etherkit, so I need to sell off some more gear. Please see my For Sale page for an Icom IC-V8000, a new Tektronix bench DMM, and a lower price on an Xbox 360.

OpenBeacon Pre-Release Sale Successful

Jason Milldrum — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:09:54 +0000

After a marathon session of hacking firmware, writing documentation, fixing bugs, and setting up my Etherkit shopping cart software, I was finally able to get the OpenBeacon project to a ready-to-sell state. I had enough parts on-hand to make 10 kits, so I spent a good portion of Sunday night getting them all packaged up [...]

OpenBeacon to ZL-Land

Jason Milldrum — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 08:27:36 +0000

My single HF antenna (a ZS6BKW) is pretty good for multi-band use, but it is fairly lacking in the 30 meter department. So any 30 meter OpenBeacon captures that I've been getting have been pretty exciting to me, given that I'm running 300 mW maximum power out of the transmitter. God only knows what my [...]

OpenBeacon Update

Jason Milldrum — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 09:50:57 +0000

Now that we are starting to get settled into a routine life with our new baby boy Eli, I've been able to sneak in some more work on the OpenBeacon project. The beta test is going fairly well, but I made a poor design decision in choosing a USB Micro-B connector and also made some [...]

Please Welcome Elisha Henry Milldrum

Jason Milldrum — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 06:03:37 +0000

Born March 2, 2012 A blessing from God. Photo Card View the entire collection of cards.

Dayton Or Bust

Jason Milldrum — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:41:04 +0000

I've got another grab-bag of miscellaneous news for this post, but I'm going to lead off with the big one: I'm going to be a presenter at the world's preeminent QRP convention: Four Days In May 2012. The tentative topic for my presentation will be about the free and open source tools that I use [...]

Catching Up With Etherkit

Jason Milldrum — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:14:07 +0000

The year is not starting out as well as I had hoped. Back during the beta test of the CC-20 I had set a goal to complete my revisions and be ready to sell production kits by 1 January 2012. Obviously that date has come and gone and I'm still not on the market. A [...]

SOTA Fail on Clatskanie Mountain

Jason Milldrum — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:22:54 +0000

This post is a bit late, but I wanted to be sure to document my first attempt at a SOTA activation and what I learned from it. The title is probably a bit harsh, but the eternal pessimist in me couldn't help it. I decided to attempt a SOTA activation after seeing a lot of [...]

Liquidation

Jason Milldrum — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:57:47 +0000

I'm in the process of selling off some of my ham radio stuff so that I can fund further development of the CC-Series. Right now, I've got a Yaesu FT-817ND along with a few other items for sale. I've also got a very lightly used Kindle with the leather case with integrated reading light. Occasionally [...]

Single-Ended Mixers and Reverse Isolation

Jason Milldrum — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 09:50:16 +0000

Progress on CC-Series development proceeds at a reasonably-good clip right now. One of my last big hardware bugs to stamp out is some nasty microphonics that seem to be generated by the combination product detector/BFO. Today, I believe that I made some significant progress towards solving it and wanted to share what I learned. I've done a [...]