Hamfest finds, 4/4/26
On Saturday I crossed the valley to the Phoenix Spring Hamfest, at it’s new location. I had a list of small components I was after, but came home with some gems for the workshop instead.
Solid State Design for the Radio Amateur by Wes Hayward (W1FB) and Doug DeMaw (W7ZOI), of particular fame because of its many mentions in the Soldersmoke Podcast. I finally found it, by accident, on my second round to the pile of books on a tailgate.
Published in 1969, I am hoping that this may help me better understand, or remember better, how the transistor works. I am thinking this may work for my brain, since the technology was relatively new at the time, whereas now it is probably treated as implicit knowledge
This device may be a life changer, specifically right now on the test oscillator project. As you can see, it is basically just a rotary switch and a selection of capacitors (their values have drifted a bit), but this tool made me think that it may be a nice idea to replace the variable capacitor with fixed values, so the rotary switch just selects a test frequency for a given band.