As an introduction to electronics, over the last few months ive been building a QRP-Labs beacon transmitter. Its a nifty little kit produced by Hans Summers and he offers a number of amateur radio related kits. The kit comes as a number of different modules and so far ive got the base transmitter module, a 40 meter (7mhz) ham band low pass filter and a GPS module built for the kit. The kit can operate in a variety of different digital ham modes and is mainly aimed at being used in a standalone beacon context. So far, Ive got the beacon transmitting the popular WSPR weak signal propagation digital mode, with output on the 40M ham band sitting at around 300mw. Heres a screenshot below taken from the wsprnet.org weak signal propagation reporter network website showing my spots for a 24 hour period. Its pretty amazing just how far you can get with such low power - as a comparison, your average home wireless Access Point will be putting out over twice the power th...
Musings of an internet and radio geek