by Steve Farthing (with apologies to the late great William McGonagall)
It was on the eleventh of July two thousand and eight, In the G0XAR shack a well remembered date, When G0UPL and YL came to stay from London which is far away.
The XAR shack was a terrible mess But construction had started on a beacon for QRSS There were capacitors, resistors and transistors three Soldered to a strip of PCB Plus a crystal for the the thirty meter band All badly soldered by G0XAR's hand
Also, in the course of construction Because of a power supply disruption the output transistor, my last BC107 let out its smoke and went to heaven "No worries" said G0UPL "What you should do" "Is use a 2n2222!"
We soldered in the shiny new part, The power supply we then did start No output current did we see On the meter, which frustrated me G0UPL then said "Upon inspection, I see you have reversed the base and collector connections, that will have let out the smoke" I did not see the funny side of the joke, but another 2n2222 was fitted, and this time power was emitted!
The output signal sounded very rough And finding the problem was exceedingly tough The G0XAR Oscilloscope had lost its trigger, so there was no hope As there was no signal to be seen on its lovely fluorescent green screen.
However G0UPL's massive brain put us on the right track again as we reduced the output power by turning the potentiometer the roughness it did go away Oh happy, happy, happy day.
We connected the beacon to the doublet via an ATU to match the beacon with it we had to guess at the various settings but managed to avoid any more smoke outletting Then we mailed our fellow QRSS knights that the beacon would be on that night and using Argo it might be in sight.
The output power was measured at 10 milliwatts which most people think is not a lot. But was sufficient to be received by G6AVK in Essex which must be 80 miles away. Then a grabber screen we did see from I2NTD In Bergamo, which is in the beautiful country of Italy, clearly showing the G0XAR beacon for all to see!.
From Norwich to Bergamo is over nine hundred miles, For our signals to get there gave 'XAR and 'UPL many smiles Next i will use the Si570 connected to my computer using USB to give me a better choice of frequencies. How far will my qrss signals get? Well we shall see!