This month’s meeting was a show and tell session where some members brought along recent projects they’ve been working on.
Aaron, VK3AHC, has been working with Meshtastic nodes. The board he’s using includes Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS and a 900Mhz LoRa radio.
LoRa radios have amazing range for their power and Aaron has been testing by going for a long walk with one of the nodes.
John, VK3JCB, needed to wind solenoid coils with 1,200 turns of 0.2mm wire so he built an automatic coil winder.
The controller uses a Raspberry Pi PICO, programmed in MicroPython, with a servo buffer chip and a servo motor from an old disk drive.
The project is powered from an old PC power supply which has been modified to provide 5 and 12V outputs. The resulting coils look very good and would be difficult to wind by hand.
Peter, VK3TPM, has been building the new P3ST 20m transceiver kit designed by Pete Juliano and kitted by MostlyDIYRF.
It’s a traditional superhet radio with an IF at 4.9Mhz. The VFO and BFO are generated by a RP2040 programmed with Arduino software driving an Si5351 clock generator. There’s a rotary encoder and LCD display.
The radio is made up of useful modules for the home builder such as mic and speaker amps, mixers, RF gain stages and filters including narrow IF, band pass and low pass.
There is an active discussion board on groups.io where constructors are sharing their progress and helping each other with any issues. A small Twix was in the kit which will be consumed after the first two way contact.
