Electronics and Ham Radio

Electronics was probably my earliest interest. I was soldering together LED and sound kits at age 7! I am not like other engineers, who often recite stories of pulling things apart when they were kids, and breaking them to try and understand how they worked. Whilst the desire to know was there, the fear of breaking things to an irreparable level was much stronger! Nonetheless I somehow made it. My jobs have taught me a lot, and the engineers have been very helpful with my endless tirade of questions and pointed me to the right resources.

Ham Radio

I first got my amateur license in 2010, passing my foundation license then. After many years on and off, I finally passed my Full license with Distinction in 2021. I do not operate often, I find more enjoyment in understanding the working principles that power radio than actually using it, and never had any real interest in DXing/Competitions. However I'm very proud of my license and use it as a username most everywhere!

Odds and Ends...

The rest of the page will cover some other electronics things I've done that I don't feel need full pages put towards them.

Synsonic Keyboard Repair

Some pictures of a keyboard that I repaired. Initially it wouldn't turn on, turns out that the wiring to the power supply board was done very badly - they had been hot melt glued and had zero solder! After that I found the keys were a bit sticky and the velocity aspect didn't work right, so a clean up job ensued. It works great now!

Quansheng HF Modification

These are snapshots taken from some videos I took regarding doing the the popular "HF Mod" on the well known hackable and budget friendly Quansheng UV-K5 radios. I'm terrible at video editing (and there are now a fair few guides on YouTube) so they never saw the light of day, but I did end up with cool handheld radio that can receive from Top Band to UHF!

Removing parts and trace cuts.

0402 SMD component replacements.

Adding the sub PCB.

Installing the sub PCB

Uploading the new firmware. I was initially concerned I'd done it wrong as there was a ticking sound, but a few days later the main developer of the mod (KD8CEC) uploaded a new firmware as the ticking was caused by the S-Meter process, so now it works superbly.

Other Projects (Planning to add/discuss)

• NinoTNC
• mcHF
• Satellite Tracker
• PCB designs

At the moment I'm back on to building an mcHF kit I started many, many years ago!

I'm always hoping to up-skill my Electronics knowledge. At the moment, Antennas, Filters and behaviours at high frequencies are still a bit mysterious to me. As the core Mathematics behind them is often very complicated even the imaginary numbers abstraction that reactance provides feels pretty far from the truth of differential equations.