story of radio communication

Henry, Maxwell, Hertz, Tesla, and Marconi.

Fessenden, Edison, Flemming, DeForest and Armstrong

The sinking of the RMS Republic and the birth of ham radio
Ham radio in the last 80 years
Becoming a radio amateur

Chapter 2
HOMEBUILDING AMATEUR RADIO EQUIPMENT

What qualifies as homebuilding?
When homebrewing is not appropriate
Barriers to modern homebuilding

Time, frequency stability, and lead inductance
Basic electrical knowledge

Magnets and static electricity

Voltage, current, resistance, energy, and power


(Illustrated with drawings of water and mechanical analogies)

Conductors, Insulators, and semiconductors
Capacitors, inductors, transformers, and alternators

Home power distribution, transformers at low and high frequencies
2.

Chapter 3
SETTING UP AN ELECTRONICS WORKSHOP

R&D as recreation
How to build radios (or anything else) in your basement

Persistence, read books, keep a notebook, and work in small increments
Minimum tools needed
The ARRL Amateur Radio Handbook

Soldering irons and small tools

Drills & thread taps

Wood carving gouges for making PC boards

>50 MHz Oscilloscope
Frequency
counter
Quality
multimeter

Lab power supply
Calculator
Lab
notebook

Collection of electronic junk
Parts catalogs
Capacitance meter
Test leads and socket boards
Nice-to-have tools
RF and audio generators, spice software, and spectrum analyzer


Chapter 4
HERTZIAN WAVES IN THE BASEMENT

The nature of radio waves
Mechanical and LC electrical oscillators
Antenna and transmission line theory
Crystal set components
LC
tuner
PN junction diode detectors

P-type and N-type semiconductors

Detection of AM signals
Homebuilding the parts for a crystal set

The Jamestown diode

The Caribou headphone
Revisiting Crystal Sets in 2006

Learning to troubleshoot
Selective
tuning
Recreating Hertzs radio equipment 3.


Transmitting and receiving as simply as possible

The 1880 ten-meter communicator
Proving that radio waves exist and arent just capacitive or magnetic coupling
Demonstrating standing waves to measure frequency
Building homebrew transistors

Bipolar transistors, PNP and NPN
Demonstrating voltage gain
The Boulder Rock Radio
Chapter 5
GETTING ON THE AIR
- DECIDING WHAT TO DO FIRST

How to earn a license
The rules of the homebuilding game Whatever makes you happy!
Picking an HF band
Getting acquainted with the HF ham bands, 160 10 meters + 6 meters
Instant high quality HF communications
VHF/ UHF handheld transceivers
Building an antenna

Dipoles, regular and folded
Multi-band
dipoles

80 meters when you dont have room for a dipole

The curtain rod vertical

A multi-band vertical antenna
Lightning
protection

Chapter 6
BUILDING A QRP HOMEBREW

A single-band, crystal-controlled, QRP module
The transmitter mainframe
HF construction methods
Making your own PC boards
Dead Bug and Gouged Board construction

Superglue Island Boards
Coax jumpers
Shielded
boxes
The complete QRP crystal-controlled transmitter
Transistor amplifiers and oscillators
How an amplifier becomes an oscillator
Class A and Class C amplifiers
Stabilizing the operating point, bypass caps, and emitter resistors 4.

Quartz crystals the key to frequency stability
The 40 meter QRP circuit

Oscillator and buffer
Inductors, RF transformers, and impedance matching
Tapped toroid inductors

How to wind them (and mistakes you might make)
The final amplifier stages for the QRP

Tuned versus broadband - Use both for best results
Bifilar wound, broadband transformers


How to wind them (and how you might screw up)
Ferrite bead RF chokes, expensive RF power transistors, heat sinks, & output connectors
Conquering inductors
Calculating resonance
Calibrating trimmer capacitors
Calculating turns on powdered iron and ferrite toroids
Chebyshev output low pass filters
Keying your QRP
MOSFET power transistors
A spot switch for the QRP

Chapter 7
BUILDING A CODE PRACTICE RECEIVER

A simple, direct-conversion receiver

A great first project for a new ham

Excellent sensitivity and good stability
Poor
selectivity
Adding 700 Hz audio filtering

High pass and low pass filters

Cascaded bandpass filters increase selectivity
Operational
amplifiers
Building with integrated circuits
AM broadcast filter
Getting rid of the image

Chapter 8
POWER SUPPLIES

Line powered power supplies
Power supply safety features

Isolation, 3-conductor cords, fuses, switches, ratings
Supply performance and regulation 5.


Rectification, ripple, chokes, capacitors, and bleeders

Zeners, linear regulators, switching regulators

A QRP regulated power supply
A battery power supply for the radio shack

Solar cell charging, low drop-out regulators

Battery powered shack lighting

Chapter 9
ACCESSORIES FOR THE TRANSMITTER

A straight key
An electronic bug
Building dummy loads
T type antenna coupler
A low pass filter
How to stay legal with a homebrew transmitter
Antenna and power relays
Homebrew QSL cards

Chapter 10
VARIABLE FREQUENCY OSCILLATORS

Drift is a big deal today
Low frequency VFOs drift less than high frequency VFOs
JFET transistors
The oscillator circuit
The buffer, final amplifier, and output filter
The 50 secrets of avoiding drift
JFETs, single-side PC boards, cast metal box, multiple NPO caps, small variable caps,

precision voltage regulation, and more
Vernier tuning
Varactor tuning elements advantages and disadvantages
A precision power supply
A voltage doubler power supply for battery use

Square wave generator with a multivibrator

Squaring up the square wave

Charge pump, diode/ capacitor voltage doubler

Schottky diodes for efficiency
Temperature compensation methods
Positive coefficient capacitive trimmer compensation

How to adjust the compensator
Thermistor/ varactor temperature compensation 6.


Chapter 11
Building a VFO for the higher bands (PMOs)

Old approaches that no longer work
Frequency
multiplication

High frequency oscillators
PreMix Oscillator method of frequency translation
A VFO-controlled QRP module
Crystal oscillators are stable, arent they?
Crystal oscillator circuits
Butler oscillators and big crystals
Mixers, bipolar transistor and dual-gate MOSFET

Optimum drive requirements

Direction of tuning, drift error cancellation
Multistage filters and filter/amplifiers
The QRP final amplifier stages

Chapter 12
FINAL AMPLIFIERS

The basic features of a modern linear power amplifier
It looked easier in the Handbook

Linear noise mode operation
A tuned 50 watt class B amplifier
Ferrite balun transformers
An untuned, sort-of-linear, class B, amplifier
Keying the 50 watt transmitter
A linear Class AB amplifier, this time for sure

Single Sideband (SSB) needs a linear

Biasing without thermal runaway

Clamp diodes prevent runaway
Mechanical
construction

Chapter 13
BUILDING A HOMEBREW HF RECEIVER

Building a receiver - an unusual adventure
Whats a reasonable goal?
An adequate performance HF communication receiver
Does it have to be so complicated? 7.

Planning your receiver

Direct conversion versus superhetrodyne

Why not single conversion?
Start with a single-band, single-conversion superhetrodyne
How do modern digital receivers do it?
Receiver construction build with shielded modules connected by thin coax.
The 80 meter preselector
Reception on 80 meter and 160 meters is aided by a tuned transmatch
The Variable Frequency Oscillator
Mixer magic

Mixers will give you lots of static and howls and squeals

A practical homebrew mixer made from discrete parts its harder than it looks

Dual gate MOSFET mixers

Not all MOSFETS work equally well

A JFET alternative mixer
Crystal ladder filters essential for CW

All 9.000 MHz crystals arent equal

Using the BFO oscillator to match crystals

Switch in filters with a rotary switch
The IF amplifier

Lessons learned from a dual-gate IF amplifier

The cascode amplifier strip - variable gain with constant Q
Automatic Gain Control (AGC) - not a luxury
The product detector

Nearly anything works at least a little
The AF amplifier a vital part of the signal dynamic range

Protecting your ears from strong signals

How Hi-Fi should it be?
Driving a speaker
HF converters for the other ham bands
Crystal
oscillators
Bandswitching
Receiver power supplies
Use a linear regulator, not a switching regulator

Chapter 14
OLD-TECH VACUUM TUBE RADIO

How old can radio technology be and still be used on the air today?
Why bother with vacuum tubes?
Glowing filaments, colored plasmas, and Jules Verne glass envelopes
Power supplies for tubes 8.

High voltage power supply safety
The old-tech QRP transmitter

Vacuum tube amplifiers

The three roles of the triode filament

RF sinewave oscillator
Quartz
crystals

Triode and pentode oscillators
Old-tech voltage regulation big, crude, expensive, but beautiful
The travails of triode tubes

The oscillator and buffer

The final amplifier triodes chirp
The transmitter powe