A fellow ham recently purchased and assembled a nice little signal generator kit consisting of a DDS AD9910 signal generator board/shield, Arduino Mega, OLED display, and TCXO option. I had borrowed it from him for the purpose of generating some modulated AM test signals to check the performance of some 20 MHz oscilloscopes I plan […]
Alinco DR-605 Mic Cable Repair
Calibrating a Leitz Seikkosha TM-20C Theodolite For Multiple Uses
Leitz Seikkosha TM-20C Theodolite Added to Equipment for Checking Towers for Vertical/Plumb, Pad Layouts, etc. Primarily for use in my broadcast engineering work, I recently acquired a Leitz-Seikkosha TM-20C Theodolite. Ironically, I found it on eBay and in the process of buying it discovered I was purchasing it from a fellow ham radio operator up […]
Sad News: KA4BKD, Cooper Hodges, Jr. Is SK
I just received the sad news that our friend and fellow Amateur Radio operator Cooper Hodge, Jr. (KA4BKD) of Five Points, AL went SK on Friday, April 26th. Cooper was a participant/spotter in the East Alabama SKYWARN Network, an active supporter of the LaGrange, GA Amateur Radio Club, and was a well known and very […]
A Sure Way To End Any Future Droughts
A Busy Few Weeks with Broadcast Engineering Service Calls
Things have been crazy busy around here lately. Along with a notable increase in the number of duplexers coming in for tuning (some including repairs), there have been several broadcast engineering service calls. Here’s some of the fun that has been included. Retuning of Marti STL in order to get a new low power FM […]
Reinstalling the 72 MHz Simulcast Transmitter for Warm-Up Period
Just a couple of photos taken while reinstalling a Quintron 72 MHz paging system simulcast transmitter for a client. This is the “main” simulcast transmitter. We switched over to the “backup” transmitter to give it another workout while pulled and I did a re-check of this transmitter, which I had repaired and realigned back around […]
KE4COL 145.230 Gold Hill / Auburn, AL Repeater Now Running on Mastr III
The KE4COL 145.230(-) Gold Hill / Auburn, AL repeater is back to running on a Harris Mastr III machine. I spent Saturday, 2/9/19 reconfiguring, reprogramming, and realigning this machine for Lee (KE4COL) and he transported it to the repeater site and fired it up on Sunday, 2/10/19. There were a few audio drive/distortion issues on […]
Swann Surveillance Systems Plagued By Cheap Power Supply Burnouts
If you own one of the Swann brand multi-camera surveillance systems (I maintain multiple systems at multiple locations) and it has one of these type power supplies (see figure 1 and figure 2), BEWARE! These power supplies are almost 100% guaranteed to fail. To make matters worse, before they fail completely they are very likely […]
Paging System Simulcast Signal Monitoring & Telemetry System Build
Doing the engineering work on a multi-site, simulcast paging system necessitates keeping a check on the operational status of several transmitters which are — by design — geographically spread out all over the place. Anything which can automate some of the process of testing (and, ideally, provide remote, real-time monitoring) is a huge help. Not […]