A new 30m Vertical - Installed

My new 30m Vertical is Installed at the new Data Centre and the Direct Conversion Receiver (SA602) is providing QRSS Grabber Images to the WEB - so far, it works like a Champ! (fingers crossed).

Installed and working!!
With an under ground feed
Radials will be installed later, before sod is installed

The Grabber Web address is:

http://www.metplx.com/WA0UWH/grabber

I hope the is NOT a premature announcement of a successful move of my Seattle QRSS Grabber with 24x7 Availability.  After making several similar announcements, over the last 6 months, on failed attempts, I think I got all the right pieces in place this time.

I would have NOT believed that it was going to take this long to relocate my grabber and have it in operation.

The new Antenna, Grabber and Data Centre is about 7 miles way from my QTH, which means that I can now transmit PSK or other, without de-sensing or overloading the Grabber Receiver.

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A new Audio Amp for DC Receiver

With my new found abilities of home PCB construction (see previous PCB posts), I have put together the circuit layout for a Audio Amp for my Direct Conversion QRSS Receiver. It has not tested yet, but I am hopeful, . . . (that it does not turn out to be an oscillator?).

 Audio Band Pass Amp using LM324N

Yes, there are four jumpers on the board, plus one under the IC, I did not want to make this a two sided board.

And if you look very close, you can see I forgot one two solder joints on the capacitors to the right of pin 8, and 14.

Forgot Solder Near Pin 8 - This is an Easy Fix!
Note: These are 1210 pads with 1206 parts, also note that there are traces or Ground Plane under many of the parts, it is easy to create solder paste shorts under the parts - as I have found out!

Now for some testing and circuit check out!


UPDATE 1:  Well, . . It is, . . . . an Oscillator! . . . . . I will have to do some more checking on the layout, and maybe some "LTSpice" simulations. Maybe it is just a short, or a miss mounted part - alot more checking is needed.

UPDATE 2:  I think I need to look for another circuit for my "Band Pass" audio amplifier, the circuit that I used was cobbled together without much thought. What I need is about 60-80db of gain with; 200 to 2000Hz Band Pass.

UPDATE 3:   A very old Navy friend of mine, Richard Davis, after seeing the photo, offered this bit of advice on FaceBook: "Don't use Taiwanese electrolytics! ;-)". He must be very observant, as I used the Caps that I had in the junk box. Maybe, I should look at the selection of Caps closer, or maybe the International friends will also have comments.

I found the following Active Band Pass Filter Calculators:

http://www.wa4dsy.net/robot/bandpass-filter-calc

http://www.captain.at/electronics/active-filter/

UPDATE 4:   I found one layout error, the output feedback cap of the third stage op-amp was connected to the bias line and not the the inverting input cap as it should. That would make the op-amp oscillate!

I may change the component values used to implement a 6 pole Chebyshes Filter as the Filter Calculator above suggests, the schematic and layout stays the same (after I fix the layout error found above).

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Moved my QRSS Receiver to the DataCenter

This AM, I came to the Data Center to find that the router stopped working, I am not sure what happened - a reboot of it fixed the problem. I hope this not going to be a standard reoccurring problem.

As a test, I took my QRSS SA602 Direct Conversion Receiver to the Data Center (where this Web Server is located). The system, grabber and Argo uploads are working well, but without a good antenna I do not see any QRSS signals.

I am not sure what I am going to do for the next step.

New Web Server Location

For the last pasted year, I used my home Web Server for posting my QRSS Grabber images. The problem is, my home Web Server is on my side of my Satellite Internet connection - and therefore it is very slow for other web user - it was so slow that it is/was unreliable.

This weekend I moved the Web Server to a new location, with better access to the Internet. The one slite problem, is that the system will be using a Dynamic IP Address, but that should not be a real problem as I will be using "DynDns.com" for serving my systems IP address.

The OLD grabber address was:

http://qrss.ebcon.com/WA0UWH/grabber

My NEW grabber will be at:

http://www.metplx.com:8080/WA0UWH/grabber

http://www.metplx.com/WA0UWH/grabber

I think my ISP provider blocks the default web port :80 for my address - therefore my grabber will be on port :8080, which should not be a problem as most people use bookmarks or links and do not type URL's that much.  Now normal port :80 should work.

Currently only my base grabber page is installed on the server. Now all I have to do is figure out the best way to transfer my home based receiver grabber images to this new server.

I have considered moving my SA602 Direct Conversion 30m receiver to the server location, so that image transfer would not be a problem. This would also allow me to transmit from my home QTH on 30m without overloading the grabber receiver.

While typing this post, this PM, I noticed that my new grabber URL is not working!! Dang, I will have to check it out this next AM.

I hope this server move was not a mistake.