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In response to concerns about the destructive effects of ozone depletion, the United States, along with 23 other nations and the European Economic Community, recently signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Among other things, the Protocol calls for a freeze on the use of CFCs beginning in approximately 1989, a 20 percent reduction in their use beginning in 1993, and another 30 percent reduction in their use beginning in 1998. The Protocol also places a freeze on the use of Halons beginning in approximately 1992.
This Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) evaluates health and environmental effects in the United States of regulatory actions taken around the world in accordance with the Protocol. It examines the role of the stratosphere in protecting human health, welfare, and the environment; evaluates potential depletion of stratospheric ozone; and describes the environmental and human health effects of regulatory actions. In addition, this EIS estimates the social costs of regulatory action taken in the United States. This EIS examines a range of future control levels, including; (1) no controls, (2) Protocol controls, (3) controls that are less stringent than the Protocol, and (4) controls that are more stringent than the Protocol.

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Tips for Working With Friends

Scott Newman

By Scott Newman

So you just found out your buddy got a big promotion and is now ready to buy a sexy luxury condo in downtown Chicago.  He’s your boy–you’ve known him since grade school–of course he’s going to give you first crack at the business, and you’ve already started spending the commission check.  But before you blindly agree to be his agent, stop and think of the potential consequences of working with close friends and how you can make sure it’s a positive experience for both of you.

Treat Them Like Any Other Client

Many real estate pros go one of two ways when they work with friends – and both are bad.  The first is when all their professional experience and training goes out the window and they act super lax and unprofessional thinking it will be OK because they know the client.

The other is the agent who takes things so seriously that they literally suck all the fun out of the entire process for the client, who then ends up never wanting to work with–or refer anyone to them–again.

What’s the lesson here?  Forget about the personal relationship you have with this particular client and give them the same high level of service and overall experience you provide to all your other clients. If you follow that golden rule, you virtually eliminate the risk of damaging the personal or professional relationship with the client.

Expect To Go Above and Beyond

I have literally seen agents arguing with close friends they are representing while in the hallway outside the closing office. The expectations the client had vs. the expectations the agent had might as well have existed in two separate universes.

If you work for people you know personally, know from the beginning that meeting the minimum acceptable requirements of your job will not be enough. If that’s all you do, then you will likely upset your client more times than not.

Remember, your friends are hiring you because they think you’re good at your job and because they want to give you the business. But they also subconsciously might expect to lean on you a little more–and probably expect more than if they hired some agent they saw on a billboard. For example, I have cleaned up more cat and dog messes than I can count for friends who didn’t have time to make it home to clean up before a showing. I’ve also picked up disgusting dirty clothes, picked people up from the airport, driven them to the suburbs, and even let them sleep on my couch when needed.

The bottom line is, if you’re not prepared to go above and beyond for the people you have pre-existing personal relationships with, then this is not a good source of business for you. If the idea of working with friends leaves you with apprehensions, then focus your energy in other areas.

Over-Document to Avoid Disaster

Some people handle stress better than others. And anyway you slice it, selling or buying a house is a stressful experience for any client.  Things are said, things are forgotten or misinterpreted, and in the end, feelings can be hurt and relationships damaged.  Fortunately, there is an easy way to avoid this: over-document.

You should never conduct any business for a friend without having detailed and explicit direction in writing.  This goes for counter offers (which often happen orally or via email after the initial offer is submitted), commission changes, or anything else that can be misinterpreted or otherwise come back to bite you in the butt.

I learned my lesson the hard way. I had a client who I had known for years, and we discussed multiple times during the process that she’d be taking the washer/dryer (which were wedding gifts from her parents) and replacing them with similar models.  I assumed the expectation couldn’t have been anymore clear.

However, right before closing, the buyer’s attorney asked why those items were missing during the final walk-through.  My client suddenly had amnesia and denied ever having a conversation about replacing the washer and dryer. In fact, she was adamant that I had committed to giving the buyer a credit for these items out of my own pocket.

What were my choices at that point? Because I’d done such a poor job documenting the transactional details, I had no choice but to give up $1,000 of my commission to cover the cost of the credit so the deal would close and I could salvage the relationship with my client.

The lesson here? Documentation and organization are key to being successful with any type of transaction, and become even more essential when dealing with clients you have a relationship with.

If you have a strong network, leveraging personal relationships to grow your business can be one of the best paths to success. But it doesn’t come without risks. To effectively work with friends, it’s important to treat them like all your other clients, expect to go above and beyond, and over-document to avoid damaging either the professional or personal relationship. Follow these tips and you can make working your personal network a key part of your success in 2014.

Scott Newman is the broker-owner of Newman Realty in Chicago. Connect with Scott at or @newmanrealty.

  1. Great advice. I’ve worked with lots of friends over the years and haven’t had a bad experience… but it’s because I go above and beyond and treat them like other clients. I agree that many agents will loose their professionalism while working with friends, thinking that it’s easy money. Under promise and over deliver, especially when working with friends. Friends are the best source of referrals, so I make sure they have the best experience and value my expert services.

    That’s a lesson learned the hard way about the washer and dryer!

  2. extracted from the OPN (Old People’s Network):

    In every transaction where there is disappointment -seller, buyer, lessor, tenant – the problem always comes down to expectations. The client wants the agent to perform miracles for them, overwhelming the market with expertise in their favor because they don’t have proper expectations. My experience (3 decades now) with folks I go to church with, meet at Boy Scouts, on the soccer fields, and live next door to, is to treat them like any other client – with my professinal best! Providing them with accurate, no hype information about the marketplace, the process and my capabilities. The NAR Code of Ethics provides the absolute best guide for how to do business … with ANY customer. Set a realistic pace for growing your business, establish routines that will outlast any trends, develop scripts that describe yourself and what it takes to complete a transaction in today’s marketplace and you won’t lose any sleep at night when a deal goes south because you, as an agent, are not a magician.

    Best wishes to the YPN! someday you will be in the OPN!

    J Knight,
    Real Estate & Construction Specialist

  3. Scott,

    It looks like you are the main blogger here. : )

    One of the last deals I did as a full-time realtor was with a friend. It ended up being a bad deal for both me and my client.

    I wanted to help him out. He had to leave town in a few weeks, so I took his overpriced listing (mistake #1).

    I guess I thought that once they left town, he would be motivated to get the pricing where it needed to be. (mistake #2)

    Then I offered to keep and eye on his house for him. (mistake #3) I think I spent more time mowing his yard than I did mowing my own.

    I actually moved out of the area and left the listing with another agent.

    One of my first real estate website clients was actually the next listing agent on that property. : )

    My friend basically followed the market down, always about 5- 10k over market value until finally he had bled about $100,000 and relented to sell the house.

    I was a little upset because of all the time and money I spent showcasing and promoting his property. If he would have been a REAL client, I probably wouldn’t have taken his listing.

    That deal ended up being a bad deal for both of us.

    I don’t know what I would recommend. I guess that the way I would do it again, is just to not break any of your own listing rules or buyer pre-qualification rules because they are your friend. At the end of the day, you are running a business.

    If you were selling furniture, would you give them free furniture?

    -James Premium Real Estate Websites. IDX Broker Customizations. Content Marketing for Real Estate

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Submission + - Performance improvements in JDBC module published->

stacey7165 writes: Filip Hanik, one of the well known committers for the Apache Tomcat project, has published preliminary tests of a new high concurrency alternative to connection pooling called jdbc-pool. Hanik published an article earlier on his development efforts, citing that the independent module has been tested working with Tomcat 6, and may be considered for Tomcat 7 if the committers feel that the module is viable. Today, Hanik published a series of performance numbers to help understand the performance improvements by directly comparing jdbc-pool, DBCP and C3P0 against each other. The performance study illustrates promise for the new module showing that it scales linearly, outperforms DBCP when validation is turned on, and establishes very consistent wait times when dealing with lock fairness with requests under contention.
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Performance improvements in JDBC module published

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I'm Back, I'm Back!

Back from Chicago of course and we had a few hectic, sleep filled days since! The final number of photos number around 1900, and I’m amazed at what we managed to see! I’ll hopefully post photos over the next few weeks with a gallery to come afterwards.
It’s great to go away, but great to get home too!

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Donncha Ó Caoimh is a software developer at Automattic and WordPress plugin developer. He posts photos at In Photos and can also be found on Google+ and Twitter.

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michelle money ellen degeneres 'Bachelor's' Michelle Money on 'Ellen': 'There's a little bit of crazy in me'“The Bachelor’s” latest eliminee Michelle Money stops by “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” Wednesday (Feb. 16) to talk about her experience, who she thinks Brad picks and that she really is a little crazy.

On who Michelle thinks Brad picks:

Ellen: It seemed like you did have chemistry [with Brad] and it seemed like he did like you. But then what happened?
Michelle: I think at the end of the day, I’m not Brad’s type. I think it was in Anguilla when you could kind of tell his heart was with someone else.
Ellen: Who? Who do you think it’s with?
Michelle: Emily.
Ellen: I do too. At the beginning I kind of picked her but it seemed too obvious.
Michelle: Well, they’re like Ken and Barbie. They look like they should be together.

On Michelle’s shocking exit:

Michelle: Brad and I did get to have a conversation.
Ellen: You did?
Michelle: Yeah. It was a good conversation. I got my closure. We said really great things to each other.
Ellen: On camera?
Michelle: Yes.
Ellen: So they just didn’t air that?
Michelle: They just forgot.
Ellen: You said what things? He just said not the right relationship?
Michelle: Well, yeah. I just wished him the best. Obviously at the end of the day, I did want a rose and I did want to be there but he just wasn’t that into me. What else can I say? I wished him the very best. I think the world of him. Brad is an amazing man. I just said anyone here is lucky to be with you and I wish you all the best. And he said the same thing.
Ellen: You said all that and we didn’t see any of it?
Michelle: Yeah.

(Editor’s note: That isn’t exactly what host Chris Harrison says happened when she left.)

On Ellen thinking Michelle was “crazy”:

Ellen: I like that about you, that you’re straight up. But you seemed a little crazy.
Michelle: I will say, any time there’s creepy music playing, anyone is going to look crazy.
Ellen: No. The crazy music gives us an indication. Here it comes. Crazy.
Michelle: That’s the truth. There’s a little bit of crazy in me.
Ellen: There’s crazy in you, admit it.
Michelle: Absolutely.


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“Doomsday Preppers” is back on NatGeo Thursday (July 24), with a refresher episode titled “Back to Basics” followed by new episode, “To Fail is to Die.” Check out the above preview video of the Season 4 premiere.

In “To Fail is to Die,” we meet Montana resident Jimi Falcon, who is prepping for a potential World War III; Cindy Stewart, who preps for a foreign nuclear attack by using her taxidermy skills to disguise IEDS; and Rod Godfrey, who has a military-style command and control center in his home.

“Doomsday Preppers” Season 4 airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on NatGeo.


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Jimmy Kimmel‘s wonderful, horrible Halloween prank on poor unsuspecting children just got its third installment. The late night host premiered “I Told My Kids I Ate All Their Halloween Candy 2013” on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Nov. 4, and it was just as devilish as ever.

The responses from the children who found out their parents had apparently eaten all their Halloween candy were hilarious, with the news resulting in many tears, screams and even a curse. One of the best moments came when a daughter lamented that her mother does this to her every year, while another son complained that this “Jimmy Kimmel” guy must really not like him.

With Kimmel pulling this same prank every year, he has to acknowledge that at some point there’s going to have to be an uprising from the hundreds to kids who have been candy’d. Some day soon he and their parents are going to get what’s coming to them. Who knows, maybe those kids will eat all their kale?


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teen mom jail 'Teen Mom' star Jenelle Evans heads back to jail

Jenelle Evans was all smiles on Monday (August 12) … despite the fact that she was headed back to jail.

The “Teen Mom 2” star was in court for drug charges (including heroin and illegal Percocet possession) and a drug paraphernalia charge since cops say they found wrapping papers and a pipe on her, TMZ reports.

Evans reached a deal with prosecutors and pled guilty to the paraphernalia charge in exchange for having the other charges dropped. She nearly made it through the whole ordeal without jail time, just being served with 18 months unsupervised probation. However, the judge had her randomly drug tested on Monday morning, and she unfortunately tested positive for marijuana. The judge then sent her to jail for 48 hours.


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They (Don’t) Need Me Every Hour

Hi, my name is Petra and I’m not needed in the Church.

No, seriously: I don’t have any special skills that no one else in my ward could provide; I’m not building the kingdom by bearing children; and I don’t contribute to the basic functions of the ward by performing ordinances or conducting or organizing meetings, or even activities. I serve in a calling, and I try to be helpful, but since anyone else could do what I do, I’m not needed. If I stopped going to church it would pretty much be business as usual.

I’m not really needed in my family, either. My parents love me but they have other children, and my husband loves me but could have married someone else or been happy single. (He was pretty happy for 26 years before I came along, after all.)

Does this sound like a giant pity party I’m throwing in this post? I hope not. I don’t need to be needed, in my family or in the church. Even if they could function without me, my ward wants me (I hope!) because I’m willing to serve, because I positively contribute, and because they like me. And even if they could function without me, my family wants me (I hope!) because I’m willing to serve, because I positively contribute, and because they love me.

My contributions to my church and family aren’t unique or exclusive to me, but I still like to think they matter, and I matter because I do them. If I woke up one morning and suddenly announced that I was leaving the church because someone else could be a Sunday School teacher, or that I was leaving my husband because he could do the laundry himself without my help, I’d be decried as selfish and short-sighted. I’d be sacrificing good things that make me happy–my church and family relationships–simply for the sake of feeling uniquely needed, and I’d be overlooking the many places I’m wanted, and the many places I can contribute, in favor of the one special role only I can fill.

That isn’t my attitude to my ward or family, though, luckily. I know that just because I’m not needed doesn’t mean I’m not wanted.  I may not be needed, but that doesn’t mean I can’t serve. Anyone else can teach my Sunday School class, but that doesn’t diminish the service I offer. My husband can do the laundry himself, but it still shows my love when I do it. The fact that someone else could take over the vast majority of my service doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable when I do it, and doesn’t mean that I should quit showing up and offering it.

So tell me: why are we making that argument for male-only priesthood?

This entry was posted in Uncategorized by Petra. Bookmark the permalink.

About Petra

Petra is another refugee from academia; last year she fled a Ph.D. program in linguistics and landed in a "real job" whose perks are magnificent enough to compensate for spending 3 1/2 hours a day commuting. Her father once described her as an "emotional F-117 stealth bomber" and her mother once told her, musingly, "I could see you as another Hitler." She loves to read, run barefoot, and bake bread, although she typically only tries two of those three at the same time. She has also been known to hike, but only to make her husband happy.

6 thoughts on “They (Don’t) Need Me Every Hour

  1. 1

    I feel that same way. If the church is a stone cut from the mountain, I was a little piece that chipped off as the massive thing hurled itself down the hill.

    The institutional church builds in fail-safes into the structure and culture to strategically guard against a reliance upon individuals and diversity. Even PH holders are not individuals, but “servants” who are supposed to be interchangeable. To that point, it probably doesn’t matter if the servant is a he or she. We are the “Borg” and it doesn’t matter.

    Your point is well made. Still, I point out that we all look the same if we’re butt-naked from behind, but we look different in the front. I don’t buy the priesthood-is-for-boys-childbearing-is-for-girls argument, but I do wonder if there isn’t something intrinsic to our divine gender roles and the use of priesthood/priesthoodess powers.

  2. 2

    You “wonder”? That has pretty much been the message for years.

    So you get the Priesthood in this life. Then what? Female Apostles? Of course. The you can hang with the boyz in the Church Office Building and feel good about yourself.

  3. 3

    OAK, please don’t be dismissive of women’s experiences of being less valued in the Church. You say “feel good about yourself” like it’s a bad thing. Don’t women deserve to not be put down when attending church, when worshiping, of all things? I think you also clearly miss the point that women who want to be ordained want to *serve*. Do you seriously think that’s a bad thing?

  4. 4

    I think implicitly the argument is based on men’s fragile egos. Sometimes this is made explicit. Am I understanding that right? It’s the idea that men will only participate in church if they feel like they can make a unique contribution. People will point to men’s generally lower rate of participation in religious activities (e.g., church attendance) and say that men will only stay around if they get to do something that the women don’t.

    Just thinking out loud here, I’m not sure if I buy the assumption or not. But even if I do, it seems unfair to bend things to men’s direction just to accommodate our egos.

  5. 5

    Amen, Petra!

    Besides the specific problems associated with that line of argument, I think your post nicely demonstrates the problem with members creating non-doctrinal explanations for why things are the way they are. The arguments often are faulty and even embarrassing, if we try to imagine how they might look to someone who is not a Mormon, such as someone who is investigating the Church, e.g., we feel it is important to exclude women from the priesthood because it makes some men feel better about themselves and more committed to the Church; maybe if we still excluded blacks then white men would feel even better about themselves and even more committed to the Church.

  6. 6

    I totally agree. I read a book about a Black church in the New York metropolitan area (can’t remember exactly where) called Upon This Rock. A very controversial pastor revitalized whole neighborhoods through his church, and one of the things he did was put responsibility on the men to be leaders. They had been failing their families and communities, but when he put them in charge of church stuff, they started doing their family and community duties as well.

    I drew two lessons from this: 1. It can be inspired to have policies that are unequal for genders IN A SPECIFIC CULTURAL CONTEXT. 2. If we think we are that cultural context, then it means we men need to repent. If we are going to stop doing our duty towards our families and communities just because we aren’t in charge, then we have a serious problem. I also think it shows very little faith in the faithfulness of LDS men to imagine that we will leave church activity just because we aren’t in charge (and maybe we should leave if we are that prideful and unwilling to change). Alternatively, it shows a low opinion of LDS women to think that they will stop respecting men if men aren’t in charge. It’s just a pessimistic view of the Saints that I don’t share. We can do the better thing.

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2 definitions by Denim Dan

Top Definition
A person who prefers wearing denim. Comes from the not-so-famous early 1900's mafia gangster called Denim Dan because he always wore denim.
Denim Dan is the shit.
作者 Denim Dan 2007年1月07日
The new black. It's cool and everyone wants to be it. As aposed to obese, which is actully "fat".
Damn, man, I wish I was as fat as him.
作者 Denim Dan 2006年7月04日

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ZSB Home » Academic Programs » Executive MBA in Healthcare Administration

Executive MBA in Healthcare Administration

Executive MBA in Healthcare Administration

The Executive MBA in Healthcare Administration Program is dedicated to the graduate business education of practicing professionals in the healthcare industry. The Program, which is the only one of its kind in the metro New York City region, is accredited by both CAHME and AACSB, seeks to advance student knowledge in essential business disciplines and to instruct students in the application of this knowledge to managerial issues in healthcare.

Our graduates exhibit the flexibility required to cope with the rapidly changing healthcare environment and are able to function effectively in a wide range of settings and organizational forms. Many of our graduates attain senior positions within the field and will work in a wide range of healthcare organizations that reflect the diversity of the field and the diversity of populations to be served.

Some of the positions our graduates move into upon graduation include:

  • Medical Director

  • Director Human Resources

  • Assistant Director of Finance

  • Assistant Director of Operations

  • Chief Operating Office/Vice President of Operations

  • Assistant Director of Behavioral Health Services

Click here to see other popular healthcare career paths and their projected salaries

Click here for news about MBA Career Paths in Healthcare

Click here for current employment trends in Healthcare

The Basics:

  • Part-Time, Accelerated, Executive program with a trimester schedule

  • Total Credits Needed to Complete the Program: 57

  • Average Length of Program: 3 years

  • Graduation Rates:

    • Class of 2013: 93%

    • Class of 2014: 93%

  • Course Schedule: Tuesday and Thursday evenings with a few Monday evening classes during the first year
  • Academic Year: Begins in September and runs through the end of June.

  • Program Costs*:

NY State ResidentsOut of State Residents
Year 1: $20,816 $27,851
Year 2: $18,911 $25,911
Year 3: $18,911 $25,911

*Based on Fall 2014 tuition and fees

The Zicklin School of Business is accredited by The American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

The MBA in Healthcare Administration Program is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education (CAHME) and recognized by its parent organization, The Association of University Programs in Health Administration (AUPHA).

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Zildjian Artist Tim Alexander Clinic Tour

Tim Alexander Clinic Tour

Touring throughout Switzerland

Zildjian Artist, Tim Alexander, drummer for Primus, A Perfect Circle, Blue Man Group, and more, will be heading to Switzerland for a clincic tour. This is your chance to see and hear all of the insider secrets of Tim's style and playing experiences. Don't miss out!

Tour Schedule (listed in local time):

03.05.2011 at 19.00 @ Musik Shop Linth in Kaltbrunn
(Clinic held at Kupfertreff in Kaltbrunn)

04.05.2011 at 19.30 @ Drum Corner in Azmoos
Clinic held at Gemeindesaal in Grüsch)

05.05.2011 at 19.00 @ Drum 4 Fun in Brig-Glis
Clinic held at Regionalschulhaus in Brig-Glis

06.05.2011 at 19.00 @ Musik Hug AG in Basel

07.05.2011 at 21.00 @ Drummer Wettbewerb in Altishofen

Dates are subject to change.

Zildjian Artist Tim Alexander Clinic Tour in Switzerland

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Easter Eggs

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The following Easter eggs are found on the DVDs, although some can be found without the DVDs. Other than Bloody GIR, these Easter eggs range from transparent images to even deleted scenes.

The Most Horrible X-Mas Ever

Alternate Jingly Bells scene

Switch to animatics for the alternate scene of "Jingly Bells".

Tak: The Hideous New Girl

Before Tak leaves, Zim has no contact lenses (same as in The Voting of the Doomed). His face is seen from the side and for a very brief moment of time.

Transparent image

Go frame-by-frame when Gretchen is crying, seen just after the transmission of Tak pops up. As the camera zooms away from Gretchen, there is a transparent transition of 2 views of Tak and Dib talking.

Alternate "Attempt" scene

In the scene where Zim begins his numerous attempts to learn human 'affection', if one switches to animatics, one can see an alternate version.

Video Clip

At the part where Tak is describing her downfall on Devastis, you see her in front of an Irken Control Brain for a short time. On the Control Brain's main screen, a few clips from the very beginning of The Nightmare Begins can be seen, namely the ships that fly towards Conventia as the title appears.

Unveiling Tak's Plan

When Zim, Dib, and Gaz view Tak's plan in Zim's base, Dib's shirt is white and his ears are missing.

Hobo 13

An alternate Hogulus canyon scene can be viewed when one switches to animatics.

The Wettening

A little movie clip that goes even when paused (go frame-by-frame).

Alternate escape scene (switch to animatics).

A copy of Jhonen Vasquez's Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is "fused" to the blob alien.

The Girl Who Cried Gnome

The paramedics in the back of the ambulance that take Moofy away are vampires (switch to animatics for a single frame).

The Voting of the Doomed

During the 'awkward silence' scene, Zim's contacts are missing.

The Wettening

The comic book Jhonen's reading is an issue of "Happy Noodle Boy".

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ZSR Library

Hours Today: Open 24 Hours library hours

During November 2008

ZSR Holiday Exhibit

Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Oh My!

This month’s emerging technologies talk was requested from several people: a discussion of some of the similarities and differences between popular photosharing sites. We were working with a limited time span, so we covered the three top contenders: Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook. If you’re interested in more information about current photosharing site, ReadWriteWeb has a... more

Writing Symposium – Ways of Writing for the 21st Century: The College Classroom and Beyond

On Monday, November 17th I attended the Writing Symposium panel discussion in Benson along with what appeared to be 75-100 faculty, staff, and students. The symposium was sponsored by the Department of English, the Teaching and Learning Center, and the Offices of the Dean and Provost. Tom McGohey of the English department gave a background... more

First Year Seminar exhibits – Herodotus

On December 8, 16 students in Dr. Jeff Lerner’s FYS on Herodotus discussed their exhibits as a final projects. While the doors let in extremely cold air and people streamed in and out of Starbucks, the class which were divided into groups of 2 and 3, discussed each display. These students will worked on their... more

The Election of Barack Obama

Several library titles were placed in the new exhibit cases to signify the importance of the election of 2008. This exhibit-although small-was noticed by many, who asked that I remove the books so they could check them out!

Wake Forest Homecoming

To honor Wake Homecoming, I made a small exhibit with WFU library titles in the new cases at the library entrance.

New exhibits on Reynolds 4

On the newly renovated study area on Reynolds Level 4, I installed new exhibits on Frank Lloyd Wright, Dime Novels, North Carolina Women Writers, the Secrest Artist Series and Albert Schweitzer.

Turkeypalooza 2008

On behalf of the Staff Association Committee, THANK YOU LIBRARY STAFF for your generous donations to this year’s Turkeypalooza, hosted by Campus Kitchen. Campus Kitchen provides meals to local food shelters and community centers in Winston-Salem and hosts Turkeypalooza each November, which prepares roughly 15,000 Thanksgiving meals. This year, the ZSR Library provided 5 gallons... more

Air Fresheners

Please remove the plug-in air fresheners from the computer room. This is my second year at Wake, and I spent the first half of this semester wondering why the computer lab smelled so bad this year. I finally figured it out! Many people are sensitive to air “fresheners” and other perfumed products, which can exacerbate... more


text:
amanda j

Posted on: April 19, 2009

Two sleeps . . .

Here is the prize that Purl won last year – how amazing!

We had a meeting yesterday and talked through her itinerary. She leaves on Tuesday and won’t be back until 8 May. It’s the longest she has been away from home, and obviously the furthest. She is going to the dawn service at Gallipoli, through Belgium and France, following the trail of Frank MacDonald, one of the last surviving ANZACs. Today just about everyone we know flowed through the house starting at 9am to say Bon Voyage. I am fluctuating between panic, pride and have a constant lump in my throat. She is packed and ready. WHAT AN ADVENTURE.

I, of course, knitted through the meeting and barely elicited a glance from the others. They must be very well adjusted people. I am making another placket jumper for my friend’s son. It is coming along very nicely.

Number One Son turned 9 last week. Another milestone! He is growing to be such a lovely boy. We took him and his friends to see Monsters VS Aliens and it was great!

Here is Tiny Madam in her Oriental. I modified the pattern as it is intended for little teeny girls. I think she looks very cute. She is a teapot, not so short and not so stout.

Tipe me over . . .

Tip me over . . .

I am knitting furiously, because I have to finish all of everything I have before I can order more yarn. This, in my mind, includes re-knitting a Spunk sized jumper because I can’t live with the ugly neckline of the Seamless that I knitted recently.

However, if Mr Rudd manages to stimulate me in the next week all bets are off! Like many people, I am very excited that Bendigo has released Luxury yarn and it comes in 10 ply! Woo hooo! I have so much stuff in my Ravelry queue I barely know what to do first!

We have just had a lovely week off school, with a kind of do-nothing philosophy. It has been great. However, I probably should get going and organise myself for tomorrow. I will be on deck in twelve hours and have barely given school a thought! Time to start counting down to our next holiday! Six weeks . . .

I mentioned our trip away for the decade of wedded bliss. Here I am at Pyengana where we had lunch. Look at the green paddock! Imagine the smell of cow poo! It was lovely!

I love the smell of cow poo in the morning!

I love the smell of cow poo in the morning!

Happy Autumn!

6 Responses to "milestones"

I love that jumper, the colours pop! Gorgeous. And how exciting that Purl is finally off on her wonderful adventure.

We went to Pyengana during our honeymoon in 2000. It smelled like cow poo then too!!

Bon Voyage Little Purl, our best wishes and Labrador Tail wags go with you. Happy Birthday #1 Son and I love Tiny Madam’s style!!You look right at home there in the paddock!!! Happy Stimulation Package: I bought A Baby with mine!!!

Ooo! Hope you are coping all right with #1 being away!

Back to work? We return next week – after two weeks of holidays it’s always tough [and I’ve had three weeks due to being part time and a TAFE teacher not a school teacher]

Hear Purl being interviewed on the ABC yesterday – she sounded so grown up – and I know the man from Latrrobe – he will look after all the kids well! Knit furiously – it will be cold when she returns!

A piece of erdotiiun unlike any other!

How exciting for your daughter to be travelling over there. I just discovered 2 weeks ago now while doing some family research that my great uncle died over there in WWI and is buried in the Torreken Farm cemetary in Belgium. He was only 23 years old and it makes me feel quite sad that he never lived a full life like many other soldiers who lost their lives so young. It makes me feel proud though that he was a very brave man who fought for our lives as they are today. I am sure that most of the people doing the same journey have an enormous amount of respect to do this and she will be fine amongst them, although I can imagine how nervous you would be feeling too.

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Will Sam Bradford Be a Bust? An Open Forum.

The Next Who?

Sam Bradford had his pro day in Norman today.  It was his first real workout in front of pro scouts and GMs and by all reports Bradford was very impressive.  Gil Brandt at NFL.com was left “speechless.”  Bradford threw 63 balls, and showed plenty of arm strength.  I’m sure it answered questions for some, and probably further peaked the interest of the St. Louis Rams.  Their interest in Bradford appears to be increasing.  Perhaps they’ve realized they can’t continue to pass up first round quarterbacks.  Full of holes or not, the Bulger/Boller/Keith Null era probably needs to come to an end.  If the Rams take Bradford, it drops the two prized defensive tackles (Suh and McCoy) into the laps of the Lions.  We’ll see if they can mess that up.  I guess I’m just wondering what people’s thoughts are on Bradford.  I’m no talent evaluator.  When looking at quarterbacks I apply the following:

Arm Test:  Probably my biggest concern.  Though I can frequently be wrong about this, my general stance is there are a lot more quarterbacks in the league with good arms than there are with noodle arms.  The poster boy for the bust with the arm is and will always be Jeff George.  If you could convince people George was 22, and he ran through Bradford’s workout today, he’d probably be going in the top-5 picks next month.  That’s all I’m saying.  You don’t need a huge arm to play in the NFL, Drew Brees doesn’t throw lasers, but a weak arm in my book is equivalent of a guy being 5’11”.

Face Test:  Some guys look the part.  Brady Quinn failed the face test.  Cade McNown?  Fail.  This is not a fool-proof plan either.  Take a look at Eli Manning.  Complete fail on the face test, and he turned out to be a good quarterback.  Romo doesn’t score too high on the face test either.  Mark Sanchez, we’re going to wait and see.  The hardest thing to do is differentiating between pretty boy confidence and straight-up asshattery.  Take a guy like Brady, Matt Ryan maybe, and you can’t deny that these are some clean-cut pretty boys.  But, they don’t crossover the idiot threshold where you find guys like Matt Leinart, Brady Quinn and where I assume you’ll eventually find Jimmy Claussen.

Who’s Going to Draft Them:  I think this makes a difference.  The Browns shouldn’t draft quarterbacks.   The Redskins haven’t done so well.  I’m a little concerned about the Rams.  This isn’t going to be a good situation in the first year, no matter if Bradford is good or not.  Look at what happened to Matt Stafford this season.  Was an entire year taken off his career with the beating he took this season?  I guess I just wonder if someone like Aaron Rodgers ended up in Washington instead of Jason Campbell…would their careers be in similar spots to where they are now?  I think you have to take into account the beating a guy is going to take, the likelihood the team is going to a 2-14 walloping, things like that.

That’s about it for me.  I like some things about Bradford.  He probably passes the arm test and fails the face test.  If he goes to St. Louis, that’s an uphill battle.  We’ll see.  What do you think?

Coming to Terms with Moyer.

Moyer Shows off the Grip of his Medium Ball.

It happened Friday night.  The night that will go down as the moment Jamie Moyer kicked Kyle Kendrick out of the Phillies starting rotation.  I had my hopes up.  Moyer traveling to face a team of Yankee starters.  The planets seemed to be aligning.  Moyer would get shelled.  I’d get the peace of mind that comes with not having to watch the grand old man pitch every fifth day.  Only problem was, the Yankees couldn’t touch him.  Six and two-thirds innings, six strikeouts, not a run to be seen.  For the guy who had the inside track on the job all along, it was more than enough.  Barring an injury, Moyer will be in the rotation to start the season.  Kendrick will take root in the question riddled bullpen.

I’ve ridden Moyer harder than anyone here.  It’s not that I think he’s a bad guy, or that I want him to fail, but I just don’t trust him.  Honestly, he could go out and win 15 games, and I still wouldn’t want him pitching in the playoffs.  Maybe that’s just me.  But, it’s the truth.  It was about a year ago at this time, one of the first posts I ever made on this blog, if not the very first, I predicted Moyer wouldn’t last in the 2009 rotation.  I believe I said he was starting a smooth transition to pitching coach.  Well, he didn’t last in the rotation.  The run support gods allowed him to have a decent record, but his ERA was grisly.  When Pedro showed up, Moyer was supposed to be out of our hair.  But, you can’t get rid of this guy.

I don’t see any reason to think Moyer will be better in 2010 than he was last year.  I’m sure there will be starts where he has young teams confused and nine miles out in front of everything.  There are also going to be starts where he gets absolutely shelled.  I promise you that.  More than his fair share.  But, this is the position the Phillies have put themselves in, and I guess we have to deal with it.  Jamie Moyer, despite his experience, is about the least versatile pitcher in the Major Leagues.  He adds very little value to the bullpen, other than his lucky stretch as a rain-delay reliever in 2009.  He’s not a strikeout pitcher, he can’t pitch two days in a row, he’s making 8 million, it takes him an eternity to warm-up.  Sounds like a starter to me.

And, so he’ll start.  For now.  Is this the lineup that gives the Phillies the best chance to win?  I’m not sure.  Would they be better with Kendrick in the rotation and a different relief pitcher in the bullpen?  I think they very well could be, but they’re strapped to the contract and to the supposed sense of loyalty. There’s nothing left to do at this point.  Sarcasm, jinxes, they didn’t work.  Moyer survived.  We’ll see how it goes.  I just hope the Phillies are smart enough to use a short leash.


text:
Fred Glozman

The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.

July 1st!! Canada day!!!I expected there to be fireworks that night. I grabbed my camera and tripod, and got to the park early to get an nice spot with a clear view of the show. I set up my camera in bulb mode. I switched my lens into manual focus, and focused at infinity. I raised my aperture quite high and i made sure that my camera was stable and securely positioned.

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I just received the repair bill for my 16-35 Lens, and my breakfast is coming back up. Haven't even SEEN the bill yet from Bitsy, my 5D2 who died when I managed to take her with me on a face first trip into a fjord.
Recently returned from an aurora hunting trip to Norway led by the brilliance that is Antony Spencer and David Clapp. The stories would take years to write down, but most of them involve driving, zero sleep, a most wonderful collection of great folks, and hot dogs. I'd love to tell you where this fjord is, but I have no idea. It all kind of runs together after awhile. It was, however, amazing. Incredible scenery in 360 degrees.

UPDATE: Bitsy is dead. Canon says no repair possible. Looks like I'm going to have to start looking for work as a stripper.

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boylanlogoBoylan Bridge Brewpub
201 S Boylan Ave
Raleigh, North Carolina
Visited on June 8, 2013

Wow, what a view.

Boylan Bridge has an amazing panoramic view of downtown Raleigh, which makes it’s outdoor seating extremely popular on warm summer evenings. The place was packed when I visited it as the third brewpub on my birthday Raleigh beer tour. Luckily, we had someone there before our arrival to hold down a table.boylanview

The beers that came out after ordering a sampler weren’t as impressive as the view. Most everything hovers around the five percent range and just tasted a little thin and plain, especially after having visited Lonerider and Raleigh Brewing, which have a lot of rich, imaginative offerings. That’s not to say Boylan’s taste bad; they’re just not outstanding. They seem to concentrate on refreshing styles that go well with drinking a lot while sitting in the sun on their porch.

boylanoutNot a bad business model. I bet it’s doing just fine for them.

My fiancé and I also split a sandwich, which comes out on a pretty cool wooden tray for presentation purposes. We had the Silver Star – a spicy chicken Philly with some veggies and provolone, and I had the waiter add some avocado for good measure. Everything about the sandwich was pretty tasty, and the accompanying onion rings had some great beer batter on them.boylanin

The waiter was a bit slow, and seemed to be a bit preoccupied with making sure his hipsterness was blaring brightly with reckless abandon. But I can’t criticize all that much; I had a pleasant experience.

Not bad Raleigh. Not too bad at all.

Location: 20
Food: 17
Beer: 15
Service: 16
Overall: 17
Total: 87

Boylan Bridge Brewpub on Urbanspoon


text:
Dave Richards AA7EE

July 27, 2012

Using the NM0S Hi-Per-Mite Filter From 4SQRP To Make A Simple 40M DC CW RX

When 4SQRP brought out a version of the David Cripe NM0S-designed Hi-Per-Mite Filter, I noticed that it could be configured to give up to 50dB of gain. Like many others, I’m sure, my next thought was that it would make the process of building a simple direct conversion receiver even simpler. I decided that at some point, I needed to use this little filter board as the audio chain in a direct conversion receiver for CW.  I wanted to see for myself how it would sound.

In the meantime, my preoccupation with direct conversion receivers continued, as I embarked on building a G3WPO/G4JST DSB80. The receiver in that DSB rig uses an SBL1-8 DBM. That particular mixer package is out of production, but I used an ADE-1 and was pleasantly surprised by the receiver. I had some problems with the TX section, so put it aside and started building a ZL2BMI DSB transceiver.  I’d known about this little rig for a while from the pages of SPRAT, but a comment on Twitter from NT7S encouraged me to have a go at building it. The receiver is a simple NE602/LM386 combination with just a single-tuned filter on the antenna input. Of course, the receiver is not THAT simple, as each chip contains more complex circuitry, but the schematic at the chip level looks almost too simple to work.  As with the DSB80, I had problems with my ZL2BMI rig transmitting a sizeable residual carrier, but was surprised that the receiver sounded pretty good. The seed was sown…..

The ZL2BMI DSB rig was actually only the second time I had built an NE602/LM386 direct conversion receiver. The first was about 20 years ago when I bought a kit for the Sudden receiver on 20M. At the time, I wasn’t that keen on it and it soon ended up in pieces. I’m not exactly sure why I wasn’t taken by it, but I think it was a combination of factors. Firstly, I was living in an apartment in Hollywood with no outdoor antenna and was using just a short length of wire indoors as an antenna. It’s also highly possible that band conditions weren’t great, but I just remember not hearing many signals and also not liking the fact that a half-turn of the variable capacitor covered the entire 20M band. Because of this one not so great experience, I have since harbored a bias against using NE602’s in direct conversion receivers, an attitude that I now realize was unfair.

After achieving only partial success with both these rigs but enjoying the fact that the direct conversion receivers in both of them worked quite well, I wanted to build a simple receiver and use the Hi-Per-Mite kit that had been sitting patiently on my shelf for the last few weeks.

Look at the schematic for any NE602/LM386 DC receiver, and they are almost all the same, differing only in whether they use a crystal, ceramic resonator, or free-running VFO for frequency control, whether they have a single-tuned or double-tuned antenna input filter, or whether they use a differential or single-ended audio output.  The circuit is so simple that there is only so much room for variation, but there were a couple of things I had in mind for my mine.  While the receiver portion of the ZL2BMI rig only has a single-tuned filter on the antenna input, I wanted to do what G3RJV did with the Sudden, and place a double-tuned filter there. It’s an easy thing to do, and living in a built-up urban area, I have a lot more RF around me than ZL2BMI does when he’s using his rig in the bush, so a bit of extra bandpass filtering certainly couldn’t hurt. The other decision to be made was the method of frequency control. I was curious to see how the internal oscillator in the NE602 would work as a free-running VFO.  My apologies to you folk who have built umpteen simple NE602-based receivers and have-been-there-and-done-that.  I guess I need to get this out of my system! Another thing that I had seen in other circuits but hadn’t tried was the use of a 1N4001 diode as a varactor. Some call it the poor man’s varactor. Sounds like it was custom-made for me!

So that was my configuration – double-tuned input filter (just like the Sudden) and a free-running VFO tuned with a 1N4001 diode.  From what I’d read, I knew that I should be able to get enough capacitance swing from the 1N4001 to cover at least the bottom 30-50KHz of 40M. Here’s what I ended up with:

There’s nothing original in this schematic  but as you’ll see soon, it did turn out quite well, so I decided to name mine “The Rugster” after my cat, whose full name is Chloe-Rug, but who gets called several different variants of that name, of which “The Rugster” is one.  For the input bandpass filter, I used the vales of L and C that are used in the GQRP 40M Sudden Receiver. The pre-wound inductors in that design have a value of 5.3uH. I decided that I wanted to use T37-2 cores, so I used the calculator on W8DIZ’s site to figure out that I’d need about 36 turns on a T37-2 core to give 5.3uH of inductance. I fiddled around a bit with the values of the parallel fixed capacitors before settling on 47pF for those. I had originally thought that a higher value of around 68pF should work, but that didn’t put the peak of the filter somewhere in the mid-range of the adjustment of the trimcaps.  Some experimentation revealed that 47pF fixed caps achieved this.  Your value may vary depending on what value of trimcap you are using.  For the VFO inductor, I found a design for a 40M DC RX on the internet that was tuned by a 1N4001, noted the value of the inductance, decided that I wanted to use a T50-7 core (for stability) and once again, used Diz’ site to calculate the number of turns needed.

When building receivers, I like to start with the audio chain first. It’s quite affirming to be able to touch the input and hear that reassuring loud hum and mixture of AM broadcast stations in the speaker! So I got out the 4SQRP Hi-Per-Mite kit. Close inspection of the PCB revealed a small problem that was easily remedied. There was a very, very narrow copper trace connected to the ground plane that had been bent so that it was contacting the input pad.  A DVM test confirmed that the input pad was shorted to ground. I didn’t take this picture until I was part of the way through removing the offending trace, but you should be able to see the problem:

A minute or two with a sharp craft knife and that pesky little trace was history. Here’s the finished board:

The only thing that prevented me from putting this kit together even more quickly was my own compulsion to solder the components into the board so that they line up as straight as possible. The holes for some of the capacitors were a bit larger that they needed to be so that if you just plug them into the holes and solder, they’ll be a bit off-square. It’s not a big deal, and most builders won’t be bothered by it, but I just can’t control my OCD tendencies sometimes. Anywhere, I finally got there:

Although with modern low-flux solders, there is no need to remove the flux, it sure does make a board look nicer. I recently started using flux remover on my boards so that I can show off the underside too. At the suggestion of W2EAW, I apply it with a cheap plumber’s flux brush obtained (for 19c) from the local hardware store. Look at that nice clean board!

Trader Joe’s sells Green Tea Mints in a clear-top case that fits the Hi-Per-Mite board well if you’re looking to use it as a stand-alone device. There’s also room for power and in/out connectors (though you might need to cut off the top corners of the board in order to make room for the connectors.)  The tin in this shot had been knocking around my bench for a while, so the clear-top is a bit scratched up, but you can see the potential:

The next step was to build the direct conversion receiver with the NE602 and some of W1REX’s MePADS and MeSQUARES. The most frequency-sensitive part of the VFO circuit was built ugly-style, with the help of a 10M resistor for a stand-off, to help the stability. I don’t have any pictures of the board without the Hi-Per-Mite audio filter/amp added, so here’s the finished board. In the earlier shots, you can see the VFO toroid before I decided to slather it in hot glue in a bid to make it a bit more stable. There is only one component in the final receiver that I missed from the schematic, and that is a 1N4001 diode in series with the 12V supply for reverse-voltage protection.  I’ve blown too many fuses in my shack supply to not use these little fellows in the future :-)

Another shot from basically the same end of the board, showing the input bandpass filter on the left, VFO toroid on the left at the back and the DC input circuit nearest you on the right (reading from right to left, you see the reverse-polarity protection diode,  10uF input smoothing capacitor, 78L08 voltage regulator, and the 0.1uF DC output bypass capacitor. I’ve had those green trimcaps for a long time and it was time they were used. They don’t take solder well (I think I got them from Radio Shack about 10-15 years ago) but it seemed a shame not to use them in something:

Here you can see the varactor tuning circuit built ugly-style just to the left of the VFO toroid. The 3 connecting cables are for the AF gain pot (which is connected in place of R11 and R12 in the Hi-Per-Mite, as per the Hi-Per-Mite instructions), multi-turn tuning pot, and AF output jack. I’ve used lavalier mic cable that I bought from a local pro-audio store. It has 2 inner conductors shielded by a single outer braid and is very flexible, which makes it useful for wiring up small radios.  RF connections (which you’ll see in later photos) will be made with Belden 8216 coax:

At this point, I was very gratified to discover that the receiver actually worked, and seemed to work quite well too. That fact gave me enough inspiration to start building an enclosure to house it in.  The next shot isn’t ideal, as the back of the case is a little out of focus. You’ll notice that the front, and the two bolts sticking up on the right side are in focus, but the back of the case (and especially the bolt at the back left) isn’t. When I realized this, I was too far along installing the board to go back and take another shot and besides, sometimes I just have to control myself and keep forging ahead:

A view of the board installed in the case, with the lid:

A closer view from the top, in which you can see the VFO toroid now doused thoroughly in hot glue.  I’m not sure if it helped the long-term stability at all, though it did help to make the VFO more resistant to physical shock. Another way of securing the VFO toroid in a vertical position would have been to drill 2 small holes in the PCB and use a small nylon tie:

The coax that leads from the 1K log RF attenuator pot to the board is a little long, and that is because the one you see in the photos is a 10K linear pot. It was all I had at the time of building.  I am going to swap it out for a 1K log pot when the next order arrives from Mouser in a few days, and kept that lead a little long in case I need to chop some of the end off when changing the pot out.

Here’s another view of the innards. I am quite pleased with the way this little receiver turned out. You can see one of the 4 brass nuts that are used to secure the lid to the rest of the case. I use brass, as I can solder to it with regular solder. When placing the nut, and before soldering, I screw the 4-40 machine screw through the side of the case into it so I know the nut is in the right place.  If I were to get a little over-zealous when applying solder and accidentally get solder on the screw it wouldn’t stick, as the screw is made of stainless steel:

This is what The Rugster looks like in her case with the lid on:

If you look closely at these pictures, you’ll see that the PCB panels don’t line up perfectly and that the edges are just a little rough.  I am somewhat detail-oriented, but I am not a craftsman by any means, and I know my limits.  I made a conscious decision not to spend a lot of time filing and sanding edges. After making deep scores in the board and breaking it, I ran the edges across a file on the bench a few times and left it at that. Good enough is good enough in this case, and it’s certainly good enough for me.

A view of the underside:

I’ve spent a few evenings listening to it and most of the signals that my K2 could hear, this little receiver could hear almost as well. With the very weak signals the K2 won, of course.  A small part  of this could be due to the fact that the DC receiver, even with it’s 200Hz-wide filter, is still listening to double that bandwidth, as it is hearing on both sides of the local oscillator.  Naturally, I expected my K2 to be the better receiver (duh!) but was really surprised at what an enjoyable experience listening to this one is for such a simple circuit.  As expected, it does overload in the evenings, but all I have to do to get rid of the breakthrough is to adjust the RF attenuation pot back a little from “full gain”, and the breakthrough disappears.   Elecraft use an NE602 in the front end of the K1, and it has an attenuator for the same purpose. I’m not sure whether the breakthrough is from strong in-band amateur signals or from AM broadcasters – it’s actually hard to hear the content due to the narrow bandwidth of the Hi-Per-Mite. One small adjustment of the RF gain pot and it’s gone – then I just bump up the AF gain a bit to compensate. Volume is enough to drive my MFJ-281 ClearTone speaker.  I normally like to listen to CW with a 500Hz note, but because the response of the ClearTone drops off below 600Hz, I kept the Hi-Per-Mite filter at it’s design center-frequency of 700Hz, and the speaker sounds good. EDIT – If the AM breakthrough is from signals in the 550 – 1700KHz AM broadcast band, which I strongly suspect that it is, a simple high-pass filter with the cut-off set somewhere around 2 or 3MHz should work wonders to eliminate this.

The fact that the tuning rate is quite low helps a lot in the enjoyment of this receiver too.  The 10-turn pot covers 6999KHz – 7051KHz giving an average tuning rate of about 5KHz/rotation. The VFO shifts in frequency very little indeed when  the receiver is knocked or moved. Drift is not great, but manageable.  Drift in the first 10-15 minutes is only slightly worse than after that initial warm-up period,  so I’ll give you the results from switch-on, which were 90Hz drift in the first hour,  140Hz drift in the second hour, and 110Hz in the 3rd hour. All the drift was downward – there was no upward drift at all. The drift was steady, and with a little bit of compensation, I think those figures could be improved upon quite a bit. However, for casual listening (and this is all I am going to use this for) it is adequate.

This receiver is certainly not perfect, but considering it’s just an NE602 and an LM386 (oh – and a quad op-amp IC for the filtering), it’s not bad at all.

Thanks Dave NM0S and 4SQRP for this neat little audio CW filter kit.

Here are a couple of videos that I just made of The Rugster. Please excuse the poor video quality – it’s an old, cheap camera:

This one is a little shorter:

June 3, 2012

The DSB80 – A Direct Conversion DSB Transceiver for 80M By G4JST and G3WPO – First Stage Of Building

I was 19 years old in March 1983 when the UK magazine Ham Radio Today published the article “A Low Cost DSB/CW Transceiver for 80M”. Being short of cash and wanting to get on the air, I sent away for the kit and soon after, was surfing the phone portion of the UK 80M band on my new DSB rig.  I didn’t get too many QSO’s due probably, to my poor 80M dipole, although G3UMV who lived just a mile down the road heard my home-brew signals and came over to see where they were coming from.  The receiver seemed to work very well, and I spent many hours listening to the chatting between 3.6 and 3.8MHz (80M only goes as high as 3.8MHz in the UK). The whole thing was enclosed in an aluminum case and tuned with a Philmore vernier attached to a polyvaricon.  I don’t remember any drift, so it must have been stable enough for sideband, and it didn’t have any noticeable microphonics either.  As it was my first DC receiver, I didn’t even know that this type of circuit often suffered from microphonics, as this one didn’t have any to speak of.

That little rig made it with me across the Atlantic and met it’s end one day in my apartment just a block from Hollywood Blvd. In a passing wave of nostalgia for my earlier radio days, I hooked it up to 12V DC to see if it still worked. It would have, had I not connected the 12V the wrong way round, and if I’d had the foresight as a kid to provide it with reverse polarity protection. I still don’t know why I didn’t just put it aside so that at a later date I could have replaced the damaged active devices. Unfortunately, I tossed it into the dumpster of my apartment building. What a shame – and it had an SBL1-8 mixer too!

From time to time either when moving or thoroughly tidying my apartment, I come across the copy of the original article that came with the kit. Trouble is, whenever I looked specifically for it, I could never find it, and the only copy of the article I was able to find on the internet is of too low a resolution to be of much use. I’ve been wanting to recreate this rig for a while and recently, when the desire became too strong to ignore, decided that I was going to find that article even if it took a day or two of searching. It did, but I did.

Pure nostalgia wasn’t the main reason for my wanting to build this rig again. A big reason is that I have always been drawn to simple receiver topologies such as regens and direct conversion receivers, yet not all designs are created equal. I remembered this one as working well and on top of that, it used something in the circuit that you don’t see too often in DC receiver designs these days – a passive diode ring mixer package (NE602 anyone?)  I wanted to build a DSB rig that used a diode ring mixer package, so this is why I am here.

The schematics for this rig aren’t that easy to come across.  I eventually a found a low-res version of the article online after some searching but it’s not really good enough to work from.,Ham Radio Today is no longer being published, and the company that sold the kit back in the 80’s, G3WPO Communications,  went out of business a long time ago. On top of that, Tony Bailey G3WPO is no longer an active radio amateur. On this page on his website he gives a link to a reprint of an article about another of his projects, the Minisynth VFO. Judging from this, and what he says in the whole of that 3rd paragraph, I don’t think he’d mind my publishing the schematics for the DSB80 here on my blog.  That is what I am hoping as I’m pretty sure that some readers will want to see the schematics, and there doesn’t seem to be any other way to get them. I’m having a bit of trouble with the VFO (more on that later), so by showing you photos of my construction and the schematics, I’m hoping someone may be able to help me.

The plan is to get this working well as a receiver first, after which I’ll add the transmitter stages.  So to kick things off, here’s a block diagram of the receiver, a pretty standard diagram of a direct conversion receiver:

I built the VFO first of all. It seemed to work OK and be reasonably stable, with drift of less than 80Hz/hour after warm-up. I know that’s not stellar, but a bit of temperature compensation could help that.  Somewhere in between adding the buffer and adding the rest of the receiver, I noticed that the VFO was drifting a bit more and FM’ing, which makes SSB sound pretty bad. However, if I can lower the drift on the VFO and get it to stop FM’ing, I think I’ll have a nice-sounding direct conversion receiver on my hands. There are virtually no microphonics – you have to turn the volume way up and really be listening in order to hear them. For all practical purposes, microphony is just not a problem; something I like very much in a DC receiver.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the original circuit for the 80M VFO in the DSB80. I did leave out a trimcap, 1N4148 diode and associated components that were used to switch in a CW offset, as I won’t be using this rig for CW:

Important – please note that I experienced instability with the buffer transistor Q2 (it wasn’t doing a lot of buffering). I don’t understand why Q1 was coupled to Q2 with a 100 ohm resistor instead of a capacitor, but at the suggestion of K4AHO, I replaced it with a coupling capacitor (I used a 39pF NPO) and put a 100K resistor from the gate of Q2 to ground. My problems with the buffer cleared up and the receiver sounded really great. I’ll publish the schematic of the entire receiver section of this rig in a future post.

The oscillator is a Colpitt’s configuration and the 260pF variable was, in the original design, a polyvaricon.  I wanted to modify the VFO for varactor tuning (at what point did we stop calling them by the more descriptive term varicaps and start using the name that makes them sound like a prehistoric bird?) and also figured that a 78L08 regulator in place of the 8.2V zener diode could only help. This is what I came up with:

All the caps marked “poly” are polystyrene. I changed the values of the 2 x 1000pF caps to 1200pF simply because that’s what was available.

Projects always look pretty when I first start them, before I’ve had a chance to mess them up –

Here’s the VFO, although I have yet to add the varactor at this point – it will be located at the far right end of the board –

One more view just for the heck of it –

Somehow, by the time I got around to adding the mixer, AF preamp, AF amp and bandpass filter to complete the receiver, the whole thing started to look just a little bit messy. You’ll notice that I ditched the nylon mounting hardware for the VFO toroid in favor of a single nylon strap. I figured it would be one less material in contact with a frequency-determining part of the circuit that might cause drift. I didn’t clean up the board for it’s photo-op, as this is a work-in-progress that may not make it out of the emergency room –

VFO drift was steadily downwards after the initial warm-up and probably something that could be brought to within useable limits with some temperature compensation work.  There are almost no microphonics to speak of (always a good thing in a direct conversion receiver), and only a small amount of broadcast band break-through which is only coming through at the kind of high volumes that will rarely be used. This breakthrough is not coming from the DBM, but from the preamp, which is set for a gain of 1,000 (60dB). If this rig makes it to a later stage of building, I may reduce the gain of that preamp just a bit – we’ll see. The receiver sounds pretty good on 80M SSB with one big problem – the VFO FM’s when receiving signals, and that IS a problem.

The documentation that came with my kit for this rig in 1983 had something to say about  FM’ing of the VFO:

Hmmm….but I was using J310’s in this re-creation and was still getting FM’ing of the VFO.  As far as I can remember, it was not happening in the original version I had.

I decided to build the original VFO circuit with the zener diode regulation and with an air-spaced variable capacitor instead of a varactor to tune the circuit (the first schematic in this post and the second image down). I wanted to do this on a separate board, before connecting it to the rest of the receiver.  This is where it started. It sure was exciting looking at a bare board (blank canvas) with just an air-spaced variable capacitor. The variable capacitor was given to me by a friend and boy, what a great gift. Thank you – you know who you are. I was looking at this thing and thinking of all the possibilities – a signal generator, crystal set, or a regen perhaps?  Air-spaced variable capacitors are very inspiring to me –

Here’s the VFO circuit built – no buffer yet, and you’ll notice that I have not yet installed C2 and C3.  I wanted to see what the frequency coverage was without those capacitors first.  It was pretty wide, so I ended up installing C2 and C3 in the values suggested, and removing a few turns from L1 to achieve coverage of 3600 – 4000 KHz with one gang of the capacitor, which was about 330pF at full capacitance –

And with the buffer added, and temporarily terminated with a 51 ohm resistor for drift testing:

I noticed that on touching the output of the buffer with a small metal screwdriver, the frequency of the VFO changed by about 600Hz when terminated with the 51 ohm resistor. I wonder if this is the reason the VFO I built on the main board FM’s when receiving signals? The only difference between this one and the one that is incorporated into the rest of the circuit as pictured 5 images above, is that the one directly above is tuned by a variable capacitor, whereas the other one is tuned by a varactor. Either way, it suggests to me that I need another stage of buffering. Before I even look at the drift and figure out how to compensate for it, I need to tackle this issue.

To be continued……..(unless another project derails this and it ends up on the shelf, with the variable capacitor used for something else…..)

July 6, 2011

Common-Mode Hum Issue With VRX-1 Fixed and YouTube Video Posted

In the last post I mentioned a hum issue that I’d been having with the VRX-1 that I bought as a kit from 4SQRP. When I related that it only happens on connecting the antenna, Jason NT7S told me it was probably common-mode hum. For a better description, refer to EMRFD, but my layman’s understanding is that it is caused by signal from the local oscillator being radiated by the antenna, picked up by AC wiring in your house, and re-radiated with the 60Hz component from your AC supply imposed on it (which the receiver then picks up).  The solution is to prevent the receiver from radiating, and an RF pre-amp can do this.

The first place I looked for a suitable schematic was Todd VE7BPO’s site and lo and behold, I found one.  It uses a J310 JFET in common gate configuration.

I’m feeling the need to make some kind of excuse for the messy look of the circuits I have built Manhattan style. Part of the reason is that I’m not as disciplined with my building technique as are masters of Manhattan like Jim Kortge K8IQY and Chuck Adams K7QO. The other part of it is that I think I need to recalibrate the way I look at my projects and reign in my OCD tendencies. With an experimental project like the VRX-1, it was inevitable that bits would get added on, and it would be a work in progress for a while.

Here’s the completed RF pre-amp board:

And here it is installed in the VRX-1. It cured my common-mode hum problems beautifully, by the way:

If you’d like to hear how it sounds, I created a YouTube account for my ham radio shenanigans, and the video of the VRX-1 is here:

February 9, 2010

The Fort Tuthill 80 – A Direct Conversion Transceiver For 80M

A week ago, the Arizona ScQRPions released their Fort Tuthill 80M TX/RX kit. I’d been keen to build it ever since I became aware of it (thank you AE5X) due to a long standing interest in DC receivers, and the fact that the first transceiver I ever built was also for 80M and also utilized a DC receiver. That was back in the early 1980’s.  I brought that rig with me to the US when I moved here from the UK in 1987 and then fried several of the active devices in it by accidentally connecting the power the wrong way round.  Yes I know – for some reason I didn’t want to use a diode to polarity-protect it (probably didn’t want to lose the 0.6V forward-bias voltage drop).  At the time I was going through a phase of my life in which I was distinctly uninterested in amateur radio, so rather than replace the fried devices, I threw the whole thing out and somewhat regret that decision to this day.  I don’t remember it suffering from any of the problems normally associated with DC receivers – microphony and hum pickup. However, this could very well be a case of my looking through the past at rose-tinted glasses.  As it was the first transceiver I had ever built, it was the apple of my eye, and well, proud parents can be quite good at ignoring flaws in their offspring.

OK, here’s what you get for your $53.  The silvery bag contains the active devices, and you also get 2 sets of decals:

Considering the amount of work that goes into designing something like this, designing the PCB, sourcing and ordering all the parts, as well as bagging them all up ready for delivery to you, the end consumer, $53 is a steal. Dan N7VE, the designer of this transceiver, knows a great deal about active filtering in receivers and has applied his expertise and knowledge to the design. Look here for a presentation he gave on the subject of active filtering in receivers.

A closer look at the board that Dan designed for this radio:

One of the many great things about the internet is that manuals for kits can be more detailed, with more pictures than ever before.  Dan’s manual makes building this little radio a lot of fun, and with the help of the Yahoo Group, expert advice from the designer, or other builders, is not far away.

The build went smoothly.  As tends to be the case with these things, I stayed up all night to finish it off and ended up finally hitting the hay at 9am.  I find that it’s easy to get so engrossed in a project that I’ve barely noticed that it’s something like 3am.  By that time I’m within spitting distance of finishing – or so it seems.  I’m not fast at doing things, tending to get distracted easily by things like the need for coffee breaks, the urge to look at something on the internet etc, so what some might call an 8 hour kit build, is closer to 3 times that for me. Next thing I knew it was 9am, but the board was finished, and all the external connectors temporarily connected:

The board with external connectors temporarily attached. On the far right just above the middle you can see the 2 PA transistors epoxied to the heatsink. Just above that is the trimpot for controlling output power. The VFO toroid is on the far left about 2/3 of the way up the board.

Initial impressions are favorable. Although some of the capacitors are microphonic (to be expected in a DC receiver), I can tell that this is not going to be a problem in use, especially when the board is mounted on standoffs in a case.  The other main problem with DC receivers is the issue of hum pickup.  I’m a little concerned, because I am getting quite a lot of hum pickup through the antenna connection. I’m hoping that enclosing the board in a metal case will help.  An enclosure will be arriving later this week, so we’ll see how that helps.

The receiver is sensitive and VFO stability seems to be good enough for regular usage.  Using my FT-817 as a reference,  I measured about 60Hz of drift in an hour from the VFO after it had already been on for several hours, operating in a room of reasonably constant temperature. I then measured the frequency drift every hour for 6 hours. After 6 hours, the VFO had drifted 90Hz higher than the original frequency; the maximum drift from the original frequency within the 6 hour period was 150Hz. Not bad! I intend to fix the VFO toroid more firmly to the board with a nylon nut, bolt and washer to help improve the resistance of the VFO to physical impact.

At this point, my main concern is that of hum pickup in the receiver.  We’ll see what happens when I’m able to install it in a metal case. To be continued………..

Postscript – nothing better to do with my time this morning than stare lovingly at the PC board and ponder on what a thing of beauty it is:

The board after disconnecting the temporary knobs, switches, power etc and before mounting in a case.

Hum Problem Solved – I haven’t begun to put the FT80 in a case yet, but the hum issue has already been resolved.  The radio was connected to an antenna via an LDG Z11 tuner, which was powered by an unsmoothed wall wart transformer.  On unplugging the wall wart from the wall, the hum all but disappeared.  There is still a very low level of background mains hum, but only at the level you’d hear in a mains powered receiver with a well smoothed power supply. At this point, the radio is very usable in just the current bare board situation; things can only get better when it is installed in a metal case. Dan N7VE made the point that if you mount the board close to the bottom of the case, as the traces are on the bottom of the board, and the top of the board is mainly ground plane, then the traces will be sandwiched between two ground planes. The FT80 looks like it is going to be a very usable little transceiver. I’m really looking forward to when QRP Kits start stocking versions for other bands.

January 11, 2010

Software Defined or Hardware Defined – Which Way to Go?

The main project going on in the AA7EE  “shack” (for which read “main room of my studio apartment”) has been, and will continue to be, the monumental task of committing my sizable collection of cassettes, CDs, DAT tapes and broadcast carts to backed up hard drives.  This is an ongoing project which I expect to take several years. Over the course of a 22 year career as a DJ, I amassed a lot of stuff that is becoming wieldy and expensive to lug around, so it’s time to start consolidating.

So whenever I’m listening to the radio or soldering something, I’m often also ripping a CD, scanning the artwork, or calling up my friend Antoinette and trying to give her as many of the CD’s that I just ripped as possible. I spent 22 years accumulating stuff (opens in a new browser window) and I now want a good portion of it gone (thanks Antoinette!)

All that aside, the amateur radio goings-on here have included building a neat little direct conversion receiver for 40M – the VRX-1 designed by NT7S and sold by the 4SQRP club. It’s a cool little DC receiver.  I’ve been having a bit of a problem with the input bandpass filter, so it’s on the back burner for a while, but it’s been a fun Manhattan building experience:

NT7S’ fun DC receiver got me all charged up.  The first successful TX/RX I ever built was an 80M DSB TX/RX designed by G4JST and G3WPO and published in the UK magazine “Ham Radio Today” in March 1983. It utilized a direct conversion receiver, to which I added an audio filter built from a 741 op-amp.  It was my first experience with DC receivers, and I remember being surprised that such a simple receiver could sound so good. Jason’s VRX-1 re-introduced me to the pleasures of DC receivers, as well as the technique of Manhattan construction (my first time), so by the time I’d finished construction, I was all primed up and ready to swoon at any direct conversion receiver that might flit it’s tail feathers at me.

John AE5X’s post couldn’t have come at a better time. Allow me to repost this picture of the 80M direct conversion TX/RX that the Arizona ScQRPions will be providing a kit for very soon:

The details are here. I was beyond excited when I found about this (thanks John).

I have a mental list of several different QRP rigs that I want to build, among them the Weber Dual Bander, and either the Elecraft K1 or K2. However……SDR has been on my mind too recently.  I built the SoftRock Lite II for 40M a few months ago and was impressed with the performance for such a simple piece of hardware, and low price too.  Of course, the simplicity of the hardware and the low price is a bit misleading because the signal processing is all done in software.  This is the beauty of SDR though – if a better demodulator or filter is available, you just download it.

I’ve been using the SoftRock to monitor the CW portion of 40M, and then once I see a signal, I can work him on the main rig, which is currently a Norcal 2N2/40.  Yesterday, I built a combined switch and dummy load into an Altoids-type tin so I can easily accomplish switching the antenna between the SoftRock and the 2N2/40.  The 2N2/40 is a cracking little rig – a sensitive low-noise receiver with a stable VFO (after the intial warm-up period).  It has a nice narrow crystal filter too which is great for working people, but not as convenient when you’re trying to find stations to work.

So….what I do is use the SoftRock to look at a wide portion of the band.  With my soundcard, I can look at a 96KHz-wide slice of the band on my screen, and the minute I see a station, flip over to the 2N2/40 and work him. It works well but it got me to thinking – why switch over to a traditional radio to work a station that I find with SDR? Why not just get an SDR transceiver and avoid having to switch over to a hardware defined radio?

Hardly original thinking.  I’m sure it’s the same thought process that has led many an amateur to adopt an SDR rig as their main station radio. FlexRadio are about to introduce their Flex-1500, which is a 5 watt all HF band SDR transceiver.

Mighty tempting and with my limited amateur radio budget, I’m now wondering whether to continue building all the QRP transceiver kits I’ve had my eye on, whether to build the SoftRock v6.3 HF TX/RX, or whether to go for broke and get the Flex-1500 when it comes out.

In the meantime, I have a KD1JV Digital dial on order, which will turn the Norcal 2N2/40 into an even more usable little radio.

Oh, and I have 1,000’s of CD’s to rip and perform hi-res artwork scans.  It’s not as if I’ll be sitting here twiddling my thumbs.

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