Recently the RASON technical committee was hard at work at the repeater site repairing our 2 meter repeater antenna. One of the members commented to me that I should write an article about collinear arrays so that we could all build our own. While it is not always feasible to home-brew a commercial quality antenna designed to take hurricane force winds, it is very feasible to built a collinear antenna for average use. This article describes a collinear antenna made from very inexpensive RG58/U coaxial cable and encased in PVC pipe.
Before we start building we need to cover some ground about the characteristics of coaxial cable. First remember that there is something called the velocity factor for coaxial cable. For RG58/U coax it is typically .66. This means that when we calculate the length of ½ wavelength in free space we need to adjust its size by multiplying it by the velocity factory. Simply put, RF slows down by the velocity factor when traveling through coaxial cable. All that aside now, lets calculate the ½ wavelength of RG58/U coaxial cable with a frequency of 444 Megahertz.
Posted on Saturday, May 21, 2011 • Category:
Power Supplies
Here's a laboratory power supply with output voltage continuously adjustable from 0 V to 24 V DC, remote voltage sense capability (Sense internal/external), output current limit is continuously adjustable from 0.04 A to 4 A and output current can be limited continuously or output shut down (Limit/cut).
Remote sensing means there are two additional wires which sense the delivered voltage at the load and compensate for any voltage drop along the cables which carry the delivered current. This improves voltage regulation at the load considerably but requires two additional wires for the sensing. A switch allows internal sensing at the output terminals for simpler operation when remote sensing is not required.
I like to have a switch which lets me choose between limiting the output current continuously (useful for charging batteries), or shutting down the output if the current limit is reached (useful for protecting equipment being repaired).
Another thing I like to have in the power supplies I build is a push button switch which multiplies the current scale by a factor of 10. That way one can momentarily press the button and get a much more precise reading of current. By making the switch a push button one cannot forget to turn the function off and risk the instrument being damaged when a large current is put through it. In this case and for now I am not installing this function because I am using the instrument's shunt resistor to sense the current for the electronic control system and I would have to change several things. I might do this in the future.
Posted on Friday, May 20, 2011 • Category:
FM Transmitters
The power output of many transmitter circuits are very low because no power amplifier stages are incorporated. The transmitter circuit described here has an extra RF power amplifier stage, after the oscillator stage, to raise the power output to 200-250 milliwatts. With a good matching 50-ohm ground plane antenna or multi-element Yagi antenna, this transmitter can provide reasonably good signal strength up to a distance of about 2 kilometres. The circuit built around transistor T1 (BF494) is a basic low-power variable-frequency VHF oscillator. A varicap diode circuit is included to change the frequency of the transmitter and to provide frequency modulation by audio signals. The output of the oscillator is about 50 milliwatts. Transistor T2 (2N3866) forms a VHF-class A power amplifier. It boosts the oscillator signal power four to five times. Thus, 200-250 milliwatts of power is generated at the collector of transistor T2.
Posted on Friday, May 20, 2011 • Category:
LED
Here's a really simple and inexpensive Power LED driver circuit. The circuit is a "constant current source", which means that it keeps the LED brightness constant no matter what power supply you use or surrounding environmental conditions you subject the LED's to.
Or to put in another way: "this is better than using a resistor". It's more consistent, more efficient, and more flexible. It's ideal for High-power LED's especially, and can be used for any number and configuration of normal or high-power LED's with any type of power supply.
As a simple project, i've built the driver circuit and connected it to a high-power LED and a power-brick, making a plug-in light. Power LED's are now around $3, so this is a very inexpensive project with many uses, and you can easily change it to use more LED's, batteries, etc.
Posted on Friday, May 20, 2011 • Category:
PIC
Rotary encoders are very versatile input devices for microcontroller projects. They are like potentiometers expect of digital nature and unlike analogue potentiometers they never wear down. Rotary encoders not only provide 360 degrees of rotational freedom they also allow digital positioning information to be gained without the use of analogue to digital converters (ADCs). When using rotational encoders in projects it's possible to use the same encoder to represent a number of different input types, however this requires some form of feedback display to let the user know what information he is inputting and the 'position' of the encoder. The project is based around a 24 position rotary encoder, 16 LEDs arranged in a circle around the encoder, an A6276 16 LED serial driver IC and the PIC182550 microcontroller. A rotary encoder has 3 pins usually called A, B and C. The C pin (which is normally the centre pin) should be grounded and both A and B should be connected to the microcontroller with individual pull-up resistors on each input. In this project I used RB4 and RB5 on the PIC to connect the encoder; this has 2 advantages, firstly you can use the PORTB internal weak pull-up (which means you do not need external resistors) and also the PIC provides an 'interrupt-on-change' which can be used to monitor the encoder.
Circuit-Zone.com © 2007-2022. All Rights Reserved.
