Categories
Ham Radio

Back at the nixie clock

[Yesterday: 6 ? miles.  today: rest]

Like I said in the last post, I’ve been all projecty recently.  I dug out the nixie clock project I was working on last winter about this time and I think I have moved it a little further toward completion.  My big problem is figuring out a good way to set the clock, and de-bouncing the switches so that when I toggle them the numbers don’t get bumped up some astronomical amount.  But I think I have moved forward toward a solution.

I also ordered some circuit boards for an SI5351A clock generator.  Jason at etherkit.com has figured out how to use these things as a signal generator.  I can hear you thinking, “I thought he just finished something like that.”  And you would be right.  The benefit of this one is that it will go to higher frequencies.  That that will let me divide it down and play around with I/Q quadrature generation in the HF bands.  I’m thinking about building an R2Pro receiver and to run that I will need the VFO to produce the I and Q signals  (same frequency but 90 degrees separate in phase).  Right now I don’t have anything that will do that.

So I put in a small order to the parts company to populate that circuit board and to replace a couple of power supply transistors in my oscilloscope.  I really am missing having a working oscilloscope.  I have four of them right now but none of them work right.  That’s pretty sad.

I get easily distracted in my project mode.  I’ll go looking for a part in my parts bin, pull out some old circuit board and start to wonder what all of the chips and parts are.  I’ll spend an hour looking them up and maybe trying to think of ways to use them.  It’s fun, but mostly a waste of time.