Whooped with a ugly stick..

Jeff Tranter, VE3ICH, produces some of the best You Tube ham radio videos going. I absolutely love his style: polished, matter of fact, and everything is neat ~~ as in tidy, cleaned up, organized. Anyway, Jeff built Roger and Wes Hayward's "Ugly Weekender" transceiver as he shows you above. Of course, nothing Jeff does is ugly but you get the idea.

So I was doing a little research and found that there were PCBs -- by Far Circuits, of course -- and they were reasonable at about $13 for the set plus $5.50 shipping. So I tumbled for them and will see how this turns out.

Perusing the two Hayward articles reveals that the components required are surprisingly commonplace: a handful of 2N3904s, an MPF 102, and SBL-1, and an LM-386 audio amp. The rest are resistors and capacitors and easily-wound toroid coils and transformers. The circuits themselves are fairly prosaic (said the electronics whiz kid) with the MPF 102 VFO and a direct conversion receiver. However, there are some interesting features like semi-break-in, a frequency spotting mechanism, and sidetone.

Anyway, so there it is. Probably my next project, the first phase of which will be to roam through my "well-stacked" junk box (as Jeff Tranter describes it) and stuffing the parts into the boards -- or hoarding them and building it up in stages.

"Hmmmmmm, that broad sure has a well-stacked junk box!"

So there it is, too many notes!

-73-