I just built a HiPerMite. Had I seen the one from New England QRP Group first I probably would have gotten it for its adjustable center freq and bandwidth for a few dollars more. My HiPerMiteWorks pretty well even though it's center freq isn't exactly what my Kenwood's side tone is. I even put it in a blue wintergreen altoids tin. I built it as per the instructions for zero audio gain but I swear that it is adding gain to my audio signal. It was a real easy build.

QuoteThe BEST, that I recommend is my favorite becuase it's designed for just-in-case and so it strong of WHY things work: Emergency Navigation.

That looks like a good book. If I order it along with the long term almanac suggested by Wally I can get free shipping on both :)

I've been keeping my eye out for a Mk V sextant or similar on ebay but have yet to see a suitable one. It would be a bit tricky using one in a C-206 but it'd be fun to try.  :D

QuoteI figured I could use it to determine an accurate time of day in case over-the-air time services vanish.

Good point Quietguy. Timekeeping was one of the reasons I bought the sextant I have. You can actually find local noon fairly accurately with only a sextant and no pubs. Sailors have used noon sightings since before almanacs. It's not accurate enough to set your chronometer to but definitely accurate enough to set a sked.  Of course for you to be able to collaborate with other people you'd have to know the difference between your geographic local noon and time zone noon.

You take several successive sightings of the sun starting a little before noon. As the measured altitude continues to grow it is approaching noon. There will be a couple of minutes where the sun doesn't seem to be going up or down and then the sightings will start to show that the sun is coming down. The middle of that time where the sun is not rising or setting is local noon. Set your watch to that and then correct it by the number of minutes needed to read time zone noon.

QuoteI don't have sightlines to anything that looks like a horizon because of the trees around here so I don't know how well a sextant would work.

I feel your pain. I live in the middle of the dessert and our duckpond is about the biggest body of water I have within a hundred miles (that might not be entirely true). I definitely don't have a good horizon to work from. Normal bubble levels attached to the sextant are not accurate enough and true navigation grade levels are like you say, way out of my price range. That's why reflection sighting is so cool. Water's surface is perfect because it is self leveling and very reflective. Rather than measuring the angular difference between the sun and the horizon you measure the difference between the sun and it's reflection on the surface of the water. You then divide that angle in half and what you get is the angle of the sun over the horizon. One problem with this method is that even the slightest breeze will make the reflected image bob up and down so much as to render it useless. They make special "artificial horizons" that have built-in wind guards and sun shades but they cost about $30. I don't need the sun shade because my sextant has a horizon shade and I'd like to think I can build some kind of a water container with an effective wind block for much less than $30. It's on my to-do list.

I picked up this plastic sextant on ebay for about $35. I'm surprised at how accurate it is, being plastic and not as rigid as a metal sextant. Like Gil says, it's good for practicing. It would also work for emergency navigating which is what it's made for. Celestial nav is pretty easy really, If you can learn morse code cel. nav should be a breeze. I used "Dutton's Navigation and Piloting" as my primmer. It lays it out in an easy to understand way. The hardest part of cel nav is using the reduction tables. I use an iPhone app called "Sight Calc" to calculate the reductions. I think it was free. I also use another iPhone app called "ezSights". It's a full solution nav app that replaces the almanacs, reduction tables, and plotting charts. It works well and is about as inexpensive as any of it's peers. It takes all the work out of it. Just enter a few variables and the reading off of the sextant and it instantly draws your LOP. I also have some nautical almanacs for the ipad from the same people that make ezSights, if I want to look up the information longhand. Of course the only problem I have is that all of my cel nav publications are electronic which means that when all electronics are fried I can't use my sextant. Obviously I have to go out and buy some paper copies. They have some multi-year almanacs out there that you'd only have to buy once every several years as an alternative to the normal nautical almanacs that are only good for one year and cost just as much as the multi-year solutions.

I highly recommend that you got to straitofmagellan.blogspot.com and go to his celestial navigation 101 series of posts. He lays out cel nav basics in a way that everyone can understand in a few short blog posts. He also lists three of the stand-alone paper pubs for cel nav and talks about what sextant to get. He actually gives high praise to Gil's plastic sextant.

When I was a private pilot, I flew all over without a GPS. Every pilot did back then. Of course I was young and did a lot of dumb things. Like go cross country with only a half hour of fuel reserve (the legal limit). After being blown a little off of course and not knowing my real ground speed I finally landed at my destination running on fumes. Or the time I set off on a night crosscountry flight in a rental. I foolishly planned to use the airplane's ADF to guide me to my destination airport without first confirming that the plane's ADF was operational or that the NDB at the destination was operating for that matter. That was my first mistake that day. The second was not to trust my compass on that calm night but instead I let myself get fooled into thinking that the lights of the city to my South looked too close for me to still be on-course so I let myself be duped into turning several degrees to the North. I soon found myself over mountainous terrane at night without a clear idea of where I was or how to find my airport. I'd like to say that it was my skill, resourcefulness, clear thinking and coolness under presure that got me through those times but I'm affraid it was more likely dumb luck that's kept me alive.

Today I fly a Cessna TU206 in the mountains of Mexico. I never go anywhere without at least an hour of fuel reserve and I don't know how I would do it without a GPS. I always keep a handheld one in my flightbag as a backup to the panel mounted one. Many of the airstrips are not more than a straight stretch of logging road. I've had trouble spotting airstrips when my GPS was telling me "you're circling right over it dummy". The only reason I knew I had arrived at my airstrip is because the GPS swore I was there.

I'm afraid that my dead reckoning skills are pretty rusty. Sometimes I tell myself "I'm going to do this one without the GPS" but then I remember that if a get a bit off-course and add several minutes to the flight which is costing someone several dollars a minute I'm costing someone several dollars just to prove to myself that I haven't lost it.  One of these days I'm going to do it and pay the difference myself. It will give me extra incentive not to get off-course.

At the end of the day, the level of precision and safety the GPS has given aviation can never be understated. Back in the days before GPS, getting lost was one of those occupational hazards we just lived with. Occasionally it would end in disaster for someone but that would never happen to me. I've always found my way eventually haven't I? GPS has given us a new perspective of the risks involved. Today, navigating without a GPS on board introduces  unnecessary  and unacceptable risks  and we simply don't do it. 

Bob, you're a genius! I popped in one of the new transistors you sent me and she works like a charm. I think I'll practice with it for a day or two again and then attempt my first QSO with a keyer.  Do you take American Express?

At the date of this posting this story can be found on Fox's front page on the web.

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/05/19/ham-radio-old-technology-gets-new-respect/?intcmp=features

Alright, I'll do it. I'll have to see how well this $20 pencil iron does on a board. I'll pm you with my address too.

Here it is, for your viewing pleasure, one flipped board and one backlit board. Thanks for your help on this.

QuoteGiven that this is MFJ, I would check the soldering as well...

Wise advice Gil :-\

Cockpitbob, I don't know how you can know all that just by looking at the photo but I'm glad that you do.

I'll give you the results of the test in reverse order from how you gave them to me.

First, the voltage at the gate of the transistor behaves exactly as you say it should. 0V unkeyed and 5V keyed. That's good news.

Second... First let me explain that I don't have an auto-ranging ohm meter. It has a a range selector switch with scale settings of 200, 2k, 20k, 200k, 2M and 20M. Set at 200 I get infinite, so at least the resistance is more than 200 ohms (good). I do start to get readings at the 2k scale setting though (not so good). However the exact amount of resistance continues to climb as I go up through the scale ranges. At 2k it reads 1.3, at 20k it reads 1.8, at 200k it's 2.1 and so on. These values are the same whether the unit is turned on or off. If I reverse the red and black leads the values are a bit higher. 

Finally, your first suggested test: The resistance between the center of the jack and the cathode of the diode is exactly the same as the above values found in checking the resistance of the jack itself. When I check between the diode and the outer-cunductor of the jack then I get 0 ohms. It is 0 ohms no matter which way I have the meter leads. Obviously the diode goes to the outer-conductor and not the center. Resistance from the outer-conductor to the other side of the diode is infinite unless I switch the leads, then it goes up to 154k on the 200k scale.

That's all I know ???

I've found the schematics for the D model but not the C model. I've found the manual in a couple of places but the page labeled schematic is blank. The board is pretty simple looking. Nothing looks wrong just by looking at the top but then you'd never see a blown transistor just by looking. I will remove the board and flip it over to see if there is anything obviously wrong with the solder joints. Does anybody know how to test a transistor with a DVM?

Hi cockpitbob. Thanks for the encouragement. I think that I am probably trying to send too fast. If I slow it down to what I can reliably copy I will probably struggle less with the dits. I've tried playing around with the weight adjustment but I don't really notice much difference when adjusting it. Of course I don't really know what I'm listening for.

The C model is a bit different from the D model in that rather than one output jack with internal jumpers to select direct or grid-block it has two seperate connectors. I've tried connecting to both of them and the radio keys up continually on both. The manual says it will do that if you connect to the wrong one for your radio but it shouldn't do it on both as far as I can tell. Any thoughts on putting a resister in the line?

Hi guys. I decided to finally learn how to use paddles. Because of my tight budget I bought what came up at good prices. I wound up with a Ham-Key iambic key and an MFJ-401C keyer. I've been using the keyer's sidetone off the air to just practice using a paddle for the first time. I can tell it's going to be nice having QSOs with this when I get a little better. Hopefully others will understand me better with this than my straight key too but right now I still make too many mistakes with the paddles. I often key to many or too few dits. As it stands though, I can't get on the air with this even if I wanted to. It continually keys up my Kenwood TS-140S as soon as I plug it into the key jack. I measured the resistance of the MFJ's key output jack while not keyed and it is about 1500 ohms. Apparently that is too little for the Kenwood and it sees it as a closed circuit. I know that a few of you here are kind of electronic savvy so I thought I'd throw this problem out there and see if anybody has any obvious answer to my frustrating situation.

I meant to say prefix and number (not letter) so I went back and changed it.
It turns out I did get your full call sign. I wasn't sure I had but I QRZed (a new verb like googled) what I thought I may have heard and up you popped. Guess that makes it official, but I don't do QSL so I guess it doesn't matter.

I got the prefix and number but not the suffix.
I had the same experience copying you. You started to get stronger for a bit and I thought we'd have ourselves a QSO but then you dropped off again.