I was able to come in and get radioactive yesterday. I got there ~2:30 and started spinning the dial on the Alinco, tuned up on 20, 40, 80 just fine, until about 7ish. For some reason the tuner stopped reporting a match and the MFJ was reporting 3:1 SWR! I prolly should have put of a sign on the AR SIG bench but I forgot to. If someone is around the space maybe put a note up to check the SWR before trying to TX. Can we get the antenna analyzer from storage and keep it in the bin with the Alinco? It would be helpful in trouble shooting issues like this.
Ben and I also took a closer look at Walter’s blue receiver board. After double checking how he was feeding power to the Raduino we were fairly confident it wanted 12v. Powered up fine and started pulling in signals right way. It does need a broadcast band filter. Which isn’t surprising to me as my uBITX had the same issue on that antenna. The Raduino code is a rather early version of the software; again, not too surprising as the community has forked and updated the code heavily over the last year or two. That’s only really an issue because it’s trying to show/tune the frequency to too many decimal places so the last few digits aren’t stable. Which really wouldn’t be an issue except every time the frequency changes the Raduino clicks. The clicking is a known bug with a fairly simple fix. The first part is adding a couple of filter caps on the power regulator and then removing the extra unused wires.Which brings me to a question we can discuss at the AR SIG meeting on 12/16. Should we leave the demo radio as is or make the upgrades to improve it?