BUILDING A TRANSISTOR RADIO HOW TO

It inspired only one person to learn the code, and the majority didn’t know the code. One class was on CW, and how much fun it COULD be. Very few had ever built an antenna, or soldered a connector. They relied on buying pre made cables, etc. Pathetic! 50, 60, and 70 year old hams that didn’t have any soldering skills.

BUILDING A TRANSISTOR RADIO HOW TO

The closing half hour covered how to buy a small soldering set of tools.

Almost every member in attendance, and the were about 40-50 people there that night, participated, since they didn’t know anything about how to solder. Well, it was revealing, since one of the first classes covered soldering. The members decided to have classes in hardware building, which I thought was a great idea. The members knew almost nothing about hardware. I joined a local ham club, and chose one with older folks in the majority. Upon returning to amateur radio, after being away for several decades, I was surprised by the lack of hardware building and experimenting.

In a world with way more electronics than when I was a kid, we have an illusion of technical competence because so many people use tge internet and cellphones, but that doesn’t mean they know much abkut the inner workings. I never pursued radio or electronics professionally, but I was interested in building and it is a foundation of the rest of my life. Just building even simple equipment may not be cutting edge, but it elevates more people even a bit. Small groups working on it, then the masses buying TNCs to just use the mode. For them it was cutting edge at tge time, but for most it just made it easier to use a walkie talkie. For those involved it was a “new” thing and they got deep into it, building repeaters and different controllers, and even networking. Though by now enough big stations are in place to allow more to do it with smaller antennas.īut I think of repeaters, that drove 2M FM. Moonbounce won’t be common, even if more people were interested, too.much equipment and skill. Posted in Radio Hacks Tagged amateur radio, fet, QRP, transceiver Post navigationīut some things are by definition !imited to a few. But then it would no longer be a single-transistor rig, and thus would miss the point, wouldn’t it. It’s worth saying though that it’s not without flaws, as a key click filter and another transistor would make for a much higher quality transmitted signal. This circuit shows us how a little can go a long way in the world of amateur radio, and we can’t help liking it for that. It’s no slouch as QRP radios go, having clocked up real-world contacts. What makes it so simple is the addition of a three-way switch to transfer the single transistor - a J310 FET - between the two halves of the circuit. It’s a 40 meter (7 MHz) QRP or low power transceiver in which the transmitter is a simple crystal oscillator and the receiver is an equally simple regenerative design. It’s certainly the case that amateur radio does not have to mean endlessly calling CQ on SSB with an eye-wateringly expensive rig, and is on hand with a description of a transceiver that’s so simple it only uses one transistor. We installed a transistor radio so we could turn it on and just have it work.We’ve frequently talked about amateur radio on these pages, both in terms of the breadth of the hobby and the surprisingly low barrier to entry. It worked but was mostly for show because it took a bit for the tubes to warm up before you could listen to anything. I had a 1955 Chevrolet Bel-Air in high school and the thing had it's original, tube radio. Transistor radios could be portable, you didn't have expensive tubes to replace and the things didn't have to 'warm up' to be useful. Let's not forget that one of the reasons the transistor radio replaced ones powered by tubes was sheer convenience. Computers were much more affordable, too, thanks to transistors and that low cost made it possible for consumers to afford the things after home computers hit the market. Transistors replaced valves, paving the way for smaller, more reliable computers. Computers used to use vacuum tubes, too, and were huge and somewhat unreliable in those days.

Building a transistor radio