Bible
Verse
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 / Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. (NIV)
President's Report
Hello All,
Most of you have seen a change in the repeater this month and hopefully you will get to see more changes in the near future as we implement more upgrades. The old repeater and controller was taken off line a few weeks ago and we have a low power unit in place at the moment. If all goes well we should have the old repeater back on soon, we are just waiting on a few parts to come in. If anyone would like to donate to the repeater fund for upgrades please get in touch with one of the board members with your donations and if you would like to keep it anonymous we can do that too. Just to update everyone, the upper antenna is bent and is leaning towards the tower. We hope to have a new one soon and hopefully get a crew to mount it into place.
Come join us for our September meeting. It will be held at the Checker Board on Saturday the first at 9am for social and 10am for the meeting. If possible we will meet in the front room, so be sure to look for us.
73's Charles Grisham KB5SZJ
Next MARC Business Meeting
The next business meeting will be held at the Checker Board Restaurant on Saturday, September 1st beginning at 10 A.M. Come join us for breakfast, coffee and fellowship.
3D printed parts for ham radio
By Dan Romanchik, KB6NU
One of the things that I keep telling myself that I need to learn how to do is 3D printing. This morning, I ran across a couple more 3D printing projects for ham radio that I thought I'd pass along.
The first I found on reddit: 3D Printed Parts for Portable Tape Measure Yagi Designs. The summary on Thingiverse, which is a web site where "makers" share their designs, says:
These parts are made for use with 1-in. PVC pipe and 1-in. Harbor Freight tape measure steel. You can use electrical tape to attach the element holders to the side of the pipe, and use the driven element bridge to give structural rigidity across the driven dipole element. I have used this with up to 5 elements on 2m with good success. When not using the antenna, just pinch the elements to remove them from the holders, and store them INSIDE the tube! You can add some end caps to make this ultra portable. Use these parts with any of the multitude of tape measure YAGI design guides online. |
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Here's a look at an antenna made with these parts:
The element holders are attached to the boom with electrical tape in the photo above. While I haven't tried it, I'd suggest that the antenna might be a bit more robust if you could screw or perhaps glue the holders to the boom.
There are lots of other cool amateur radio 3D printing projects available on Thingiverse. Browsing through the list quickly, here are just two that look like they might be useful to me: "
Finally getting in gear
Last week, I attended a 3D printing class at our local maker space, All Hands Active, and now I feel like I can finally attempt a 3D printing project. I'm thinking about starting out with the simple Soldering Fingers project. If that goes well, I'll try a Raspberry Pic case and finally start using that in the shack. And, while these projects all seem pretty cool, I feel like I'm only scratching the surface.
Have any of you 3D printed anything cool for your ham radio projects? Is there another source of designs for ham radio 3D printed stuff besides Thingiverse?
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When he's not 3D printing enclosures for his ham radio projects, Dan blogs about amateur radio, writes exam study guides (www.kb6nu.com/study-guides), and operates CW on the HF bands. Look for him on 30m, 40m, and 80m. You can email him about your experiences with 3D printing at cwgeek@kb6nu.com.
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