Dec. 22, 2004

Trip to replace the beacon with a 5 Watt Version

DOH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Robin forgot his camera!

Oh well, here is a block diagram of the new beacon.  The main additions are an antenna tuner so the new 5W transmitter looks into a better match, and a triplexer so that we can later experiment with other bands on the same antenna.

Here is a picture of the beacon with an afterburner.  Basically the same Versabeacon driver with a Mitsubishi hybrid amplifier to bump it up to 6.4Watts. Pieter Ibelings,N4IP worked his RF magic and assembled and tested it one Saturday morning. Its all mounted on a monster heatsink Robin got at a hamfest.  Lots of overkill but it looks cool.

One additional mode was squeezed into the beacon code.  It now outputs RTTY as well as CW and SSTV.