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QRP Inflection Point ?
I have enjoyed the hobby of amateur radio for over 45 years. During
that period I have had the privilege of being in the grand stands when
major changes (inflection points) occured in our hobby. I seen SSB go
from home brew 5 and 10 watt amplifiers with monster capacitor banks to
the sophisticated solid state rigs featuring DSP of today. Packet grow
from 25 users to thousands and FM from converted taxi cab radios to
pocket size units communicating through satallites. Each of those were
but a ripple at the start and hardly noticed by the amateur community.
Today, I believe we are standing at the next major Inflection Point in
our hobby. No, it is not QRP operation. It is the ability to
communicateat QRP levels with high reliability. The technology has been
available for the past several years. However, only now have a few
(less than half dozen) reduced it to amateur use.
The real hero of a QRP QSO is the operator that can pull a signal out of
the noise level. Anyone can run microwatts. Very few have the ability
to build a world class station that can receive a -20 db signal in the.
noise and QRN of today's amateur bands.
Today experiments are being conducted on 3591 khz with BPSK for both CW
and ASCII text messages. Those experiments are being done at low power
levels (1 watt). The amateur experiments grew out of efforts by the
Lowfers running similiar tests on 175 khz. In both areas there has been
success. What do you need to get into on this next major development in
our hobby ?
1) A stable transmitter and receiver (xtal control will work)
(a simple modification to a NorCal 40A)
2) A watt or so of power (you know how to do that)
3) A computer, an old 286 or 386 running 20mhz to 40 mhz (cheap today)
4) Software (available for downloading from longwave web page and or
ve2iq's web page on the internet)
5) A simple circuit from Jan 92 QST for receiving.(I think kits are
are still available) I used a radio shack board and a little wire.
6) A simple Ex-Or driver for keying your xmitter
So we are standing at a major Inflection Point in low power amateur
communications. You can look backward and build a old TNT xmitter
and regen receiver, OR look forward and modify your station for the next
decade of communications. The choice is yours.
de Stan AK0B
microres@crl.com
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