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Old 6th Jan 2022, 12:24 pm   #41
ex seismic
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Default Re: Magazine projects

I built a Texan from a kit, still working and good enough for my cloth ears. Also the stereo FM tuner that went in the same style box.
Then there was a Teletext decoder built from a kit that worked well enough but was let down by the ultrasonic remote which relied on the "buttons" just being pads on a PCB.
Not kits but all home made PCBs were a number of ETI electronic ignition units, all worked straight away and two are still in use.
And a G3WPO (?) FET GDO, also a kit that worked straight away and still does.
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 12:41 pm   #42
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Being quite young when I started off in this game, my main read was Everyday Electronics and I built quite a few projects from there, the most complex (from my point of view) being an ultrasonic remote controlled mains on / off switch, both parts (the remote and the 'base') being built in oversized ABS project boxes of course.

The functionality was broadly equal to that of one of the many 433MHz (radio) remote controlled sockets you can buy nowadays - press button, mains device turns on, press button, mains device turns off. However there was no filtering for a specific frequency, no encoding, the receiver would respond to any source of ultrasonic sound and I soon found that jangling keys and even TV line whistle would toggle the receiver from one state to the other.

When I got my first scope I ended up re-using the ultrasonic transmitter and the receiver to make a model 'radar' system with exactly the same sort of display as the Chain Home radar stations had, and it was interesting to have it pointed down the long landing which approached my room door - as well as the fixed reflections from door frames, bannister rails and the wall at the far end of the landing I could also see approaching parents as a rapidly growing blip, moving from right to left. Quite handy.
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 2:01 pm   #43
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Originally Posted by Malcolm T View Post
I wont forget F.G. Rayer, PW magazine. How many articles was his name on ?, used to love reading about his projects, and still do.
Quite a lot - and there were also articles with no name but G3OGR - these were also his!

One of my early projects was an egg timer from May 1975 Everyday Electronics - I still have it (TIS43 unijunction timer; 2-transistor bistable latch; 2-transistor oscillator driving a loudspeaker, by FGR. It didn't work first time but when I increased the size of the oscillator's capacitor, it did. It does have a rather naughty shoot-through current path across the supply where the current is limited only by the hfe of a transistor, and also the 1000uF timing capacitor is discharged by a spare pole on the on/off switch with no small-value resistor to limit the current spike here either...
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 3:58 pm   #44
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Default Re: Magazine projects

One thing I never really understood was that quite a few of the mags [SWM, PW, RadCom, Radio Constructor] continued publishing AM ham-transmitter designs for VHF and HF into the 1980s, by which time VHF had gone FM and HF had gone SSB.

I wonder just how many new G8-hams built an AM-only VHF transmitter in the 70s, bought crystals for it, and then got disheartened when there was no reply to their plaintive CQ-calls?

"Tuning low to high" ceased being a thing on VHF in the early-70s!
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 4:08 pm   #45
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Hello All

I remember building in the 1960s, a fish bite alarm. Can't recall whether it was in PE or EE. I built it into a 35mm slide box and it had a pivoting plastic arm with a magnet on it which swiped past a magnetic reed switch and sounded an alarm, when the fishing line twitched.

No idea why I built it: I've never been fishing - it just caught my fancy.

Does anyone know which mag/issue this was in? Would be interesting to see it again.

best regards ... Stef
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 5:17 pm   #46
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Hi Stef.

I think it could have been the one in the August 1967 issue of PE.

Regards,
Symon
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 6:44 pm   #47
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Following a post on here that I made and a pm request from another member for more details about the article concerned, which I have now given, do not forget a search of American Radio History if you are LOOKING for a particular article that may or may not have been mentioned in this thread.
I do not want this interesting thread to go off topic, so please do not take it to a discussion of American Radio History.
Rob
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 11:48 pm   #48
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Hi Tanuki... I built my 2M Valve AM Transmitter in the 70's. Yes it was dis heartening.. my freq 145.53 Mhz. Tuning high to low . What killed it was the Liner 2...... everyone and his auntie were on 2M FM....... Occasionally with a "lift" I worked PA0 AA...not bad from the darkest centre of west yorkshire.. I refused to spend money on a Liner 2... I was and still am a constructor. Since I built my HF SSB Transceiver it may have been used 5 times in 2 years. I wish I had kept my 2 M valve TX...just for the heck of it.
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Old 7th Jan 2022, 6:02 am   #49
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I built an AM 2m Valve Tx in 1969, but can't remember where I got the details from.

There was still a reasonable amount of AM working in NZ then.
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Old 7th Jan 2022, 12:14 pm   #50
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back in the 1970'sUsing various circuits from the Television magazine I built a tube booster for black and white televisions using the 15w and 100w light bulb circuit. I modified it for colour tubes by replacing the 100w bulb with a suitable transformer. I have still got it today but it is mostly used as a HT or LT PSU for other projects PSU.
Most of my time has been spent on repairs and that includes a few home brew amps and short wave radio kits, not built by myself, for friends and family.
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Old 7th Jan 2022, 12:57 pm   #51
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I built the PW Purbeck 'scope from the mid 70's using the case from Watford Electronics (as I recall). It was the first big project I undertook and it all worked without major incident. Double sided home etched boards and point to point wiring as per the design. I used that scope for many years.

The PW Europa amp was another. Very unusual (looking back) design for the power amp which worked really well. The preamp with the LM381AN was a disaster and I think suffered major design flaws.

Built a few of Doug Selfs designs, generally they do as they say on the tin.

A 0-30v PSU from another mag, that was good as it went down to 0.00 volts and had a true variable current limit.

There have been lots more projects from mags.

The very very first was a 'traffic light controller' from PW in the mid 70's using TTL to give the correct UK lights sequence. It worked intermittently, not a design fault but a fault of my patchy Veroboard soldering skills.
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Old 7th Jan 2022, 2:01 pm   #52
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To this day, the PW "Marchwood" high-current stabilised 12V power-supply from the late-70s/early-80s is a good design starting-point for anyone constructing such a thing.

I did a version but modified to give 27VDC and used it to power my old R4187 Vulcan-bomber receiver.
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Old 7th Jan 2022, 3:03 pm   #53
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Malcolm T View Post
I wont forget F.G. Rayer, PW magazine. How many articles was his name on ?, used to love reading about his projects, and still do.
Agreed, I did post earlier about him. I only found out recently from my wife, that he also wrote many science-fiction books!
I mentioned the name & call-sign, & my wife then told me that she had read some of his science fiction books.
He must have been a very busy man. I built a number of his projects, -a long while ago.

David.
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Old 7th Jan 2022, 5:39 pm   #54
kalee20
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I believe FGR had a health issue, not very compatible with normal employment. So he made his income from his writings and his projects!

He did rather well, and there's lots of people who owe him a debt of gratitude.
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Old 7th Jan 2022, 9:49 pm   #55
andrewn
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Something that annoys me about magazine projects is the use of obsolete components. I built a digital capacitance meter about 20 years ago from a current article. I ordered the pcbs and then found the LED display driver IC was obsolete. I had to pay £20 for it which was annoying at the time. I still have and use the meter though its not a good as a commercial unit.
Obsolete component choice is still a problem, in a magazine I bought a couple of months ago there was a signal generator project I was interested in building. All the ICs are obsolete/hard to obtain with the author mentioning that in the article.
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Old 8th Jan 2022, 1:38 am   #56
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Another 'annoyance' was the typographic (or other) errors that resulted in having to ensure you had subsequent issues in order to be aware of them! Was this a selling point? Probably not but the proof reading seem to be lacking.

Errors may have stemmed from the original author but I was always reading that 'errors crept in...'
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Old 8th Jan 2022, 3:10 am   #57
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Or the use of esoteric components the average hobbyist has no hope of getting their hands on - still prevalent in a couple of hobbyist magazines today.
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Old 8th Jan 2022, 3:48 am   #58
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I have mentioned before that Radio and Hobbies, and later Radio, Television and Hobbies, had very few errors or omissions, but of course it's inevitable and they did. As far as exotic parts go, today many of them are because today its all semiconductors and no vacuum tubes. Coils packs and complete front ends (Geloso for instance) come to mind, but no longer exist, and winding details for radio front ends and coil winding data were never printed and specifications not mentioned.

Alas, radio itself is on its dying legs today with almost all AM stations being shut down, FM being limited and various entities selling internet radio contracts for lots of $$$.

Like most of us here, it's time to move on.

Joe
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Old 8th Jan 2022, 10:07 am   #59
kellys_eye
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Quote:
Originally Posted by joebog1 View Post

Like most of us here, it's time to move on.

Joe
I agree - to a point. There's no point in re-inventing the wheel as they say. Many of the early magazine projects did what was necessary using commonly available parts (take basic current limited power supply design for example) and if you have one you're unlikely to want to replace it with a modern, noisy, complicated equivalent.

There's a good reason why people such as the membership of this forum like 'old' equipment and this would apply to many original designs/projects that magazines were responsible for.

We can do more today - that much is true - but the basics are still the basics and still only require 'basic' equipment.
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Old 8th Jan 2022, 10:51 am   #60
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AHH kellys_eye can actually see !!
That is a compliment !!.
I would question "basic equipment ".
I started with a 200H multimeter, ( produced in the millions all over the world ), and an Adcola soldering iron.
Dad taught me the math basics. We "made" resistors " with a carpenters pencil on blotting paper. Capacitors came later.

My first radio worked, after all I had a 5000 watt radio transmitter some 2000 metres away.
I still love my old valve equipment, and 99% of the peeps here are the same. I think tis why we visit every day, almost every poster.


Cheers to you all.

Joe
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