Club Construction Projects
From time to time, the club undertakes a construction project amongst interested members.
Sometimes, these are designed by club members. At other times, we used published designs or commercial kits. We aim to promote construction in a friendly and supportive environment and to build items that are useful.
Typical projects are:
Direction finding receiver for Top Band.
Using cheap, imported DF receivers that were designed for 80m, we modified them so that they could be used with the club’s top band direction finding contests. There was far more to this than simply changing the frequency critical components as that reduced the sensitivity.
A Slim Jim antenna for the 2m band
A Slim Jim antenna is realatively cheap and easy to make. They normally provide a significant improvement over the "rubber duck" type of antenna that is fitted to 2m handhelds.
A 40m Software Defined Receiver
This realatively cheap and easy to make receiver feeds into a PC soundcard.
80m QRP SSB Transceiver
Our second project was the MAKARS80 transceiver, with optional CW adaptor.
The transceiver has:
- 5 watts output
- true SSB (not DSB) with crystal filter
- superhet receiver
- all components mounted on a single PCB
- metal case
The transceiver kit was designed by G6ALU of the Milton Keynes Amateur Radio Society. However, we used a locally designed AF oscillator as the CW adaptor.
We have not provided construction details as many of our projects rely on components that are no longer widely available.