LA2YUA – RF and related projects

The ITT Mackay Marine 3021N is a mid 70's communications receiver, designed for merchant marine and military use. I've basically built it again using modern electronics, which will be covered in detail in this series.

This is part 1, covering the basic overview of the receiver and its role in the original marine communications system. I acquired the 3021N some time the middle 2010's, and started serious work on it in 2018. The series has its own tag: 3021N

This one's pretty simple.

Someone gave me two of these couplers, couldn't find too much about them online.

This is a basic teardown of my old cable modem.

The EPC3010 was the basic modem supplied by Get.no, a former cable internet/TV supplier that was bought out by Swedish telecom giant Telia.

I found a late 90's GPS receiver made by Raytheon, let's take a look.

The Wide Band RoF System works quite well, but some practical issues were identified after almost a year in operation.

This article documents a pole mounted dual band radio modem, suitable for use with 9600 baud data, 4800 baud PSK, 1200 baud AFSK, and voice.

After some hard drive failures I decided to up my backup game, and ended up buying two LTO-5 tape drives.

Radio over Fiber is a well established concept by now, this is a look at a wide band multi-antenna receiver system with radio over fiber distribution.

This is a collection of what is required to put a HP Z420 and (probably) Z620 motherboard in a new case.

The Symmetricom X72 is a very compact high quality Rb oscillator, I bought a broken one hoping the physics package wasn't broken.

The C-MAC STP 2373LF is a 2⨉2⨉1" OCXO used in e.g. the Epsilon EC2S GPS clocks. Since a number of these clocks were broken in obvious or subtle ways, I decided to reuse the OCXO's and other useful components from these.

Continuing even further along the military radio thread, I previously discussed military handsets here.

In this post I will show how I built a basic interface-box/intercom for interfacing a generic military handset to mobile radios such as the Motorola GM360 and the Hytera MD785.

The Furuno GT-88 is a GNSS timing receiver intended for precision timekeeping. These are my impressions after some testing, but before I've tried to build a full reference clock system based on it.

The Meinberg PZF180PEX is a fairly uncommon sight in northern Europe. It is a PCIe radio clock receiver for the German DCF77 long wave time signal, made by German company Meinberg.

This is a cute little clock intended for OEM precision timing, let's look at how it's built.

After some time with my modified Comtac-a-like Sporttac setup, I found a good deal on a few proper noise reducing 150 Ω dynamic microphones. In order to use them, I had to modify my setup a bit.

This post details how to modify the band split for a Motorola GP2000 UHF portable radio.

The D-LI90 battery is a fairly standard DSLR battery used by Pentax/Ricoh for most of their medium to high end DSLRs from the last 10 years or so, including the K-7, 5, 3, and 1. Since I started using my 300 mm F⁄4 lens I've noticed that performance across my…

One of the issues with building an RF Over Fiber system is the lack of affordable transmitter solutions. While detectors are extremely cheap, the transmitters can cost hundreds of dollars on the used marked.

The (3M) Peltor SportTac is a common low cost hunting/general purpose medium protection (~26 dB) ear protector headset with hear-through amplifiers.

Token Ring is dead? Long live Token Ring!

I had bought an AAUI 10BASE2 transceiver, mainly to get the AAUI cable for use with another device.

Inside were no major surprises, but still hopefully interesting.

The Pro Logic Audio Card, sometimes known as the 442 Audio Card, is the default computer interface card to drive the previously discussed Pro Tools Audio Interface unit.

Some notes about the HyperDisk 40 pin IDE DOM SSD The Hyperdisk SSD is a solid state storage drive, intended for industrial uses. It's a very compact module that normally plugs directly onto the motherboards 40 pin IDE header (44 pin variants also exist). The module uses a small connector…