A few new screens:

• NextEvents() - New screen showing Next Equinox/Solstice, Easter, Lunar/Solar Eclipses in sorted order, i.e. sorted after date as shown to the right
• SolarEclipse() - New screen showing solar eclipses for this year and coming years (table-based until 2030)
• Equinoxes() - New screen for time of equinoxes and solstices

Demo mode now has a choice of increase, decrease, or random next screen number (selectable in Secondary menu).

More languages selectable: {"en", "es", "fr", "de", "no", "se", "dk", "is"} Any language with max 4 special letters in alphabet can be implemented.

Better accuracy:

• More accurate prediction of sun rise/set times
• More accurate formula for Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter magnitudes in clock_z_planets.h, now follows Meeus [thanks Richard]

Now runs on Adafruit Metro Express (M0). This makes it much faster for the Hebrew calendar in particular.

And some more minor fixes, see details on Github.

Front panel design by W4OA. 3D print design files on github.

The new discussion group is https://groups.io/g/Multi-Face-GPS-Clock/messages.

I just applied for additional credits for my DXCC status with Logbook of the World (LOTW). However some countries that I applied for, and which were awarded, are still in the "pending" category and don't seem to count.It's a mystery for me that LOTW has approved of a QSO with for instance Equatorial Guinea, but it is still in the "Pending" category. 

1000 spots over the last 2-3 days of reception. Image from WSPR Rocks.

This month a new receiver station in the International WSPR Beacon Project was established near Longyearbyen, Svalbard. It is located at the Kjell Henriksen Observatory, at 520 m above sea level. This is a nice location for reception, but it is a tough place for outdoor antennas.

Version 2.1.0 of the clock now implements interrupt-driven setting of the second. It needs the Pulse-per-second PPS output from a GPS for that. The result is that the clock is more accurate as it now changes seconds a few hundred milliseconds earlier and aligns perfectly with other clocks I have.

I finally got the hardware for the HamClock and installed the free software. It really looks like a labor of love on the part of its creator, Elwood Downey, WBØOEW.

I show the ISS footprint, for the occasional APRS signal from/to it, and DX cluster reports from zones near where I live.

The hardware is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B - 8 GB, with a 7" inch Touch Screen. This particular screen is nice in that the Raspberry Pi just plugs in on its back, so no dangling cables are needed.

If I should change something, I might have opted for a larger screen. On the other hand, it is nice that it doesn't take up so much space on the desk.

I needed some progressbars and collected all the bars I could find and implemented them on an Arduino with 20x4 or 16x2 LCD. 

There is a total of 10 different bars and here are the two which are used in the upcoming version of the Multi face GPS Clock.

The main design principle is that no more than 8 custom characters should be required per bar. That means that the custom character set is uploaded just once for each bar, giving much less probability for wearing out the LCD character memory with its presumed finite limit on the number of write cycles. 

This excludes some fancier bars that require more or less continuous updates of character sets during progression of the bar.

The code and images of the other eight bars can be found on Github.

First, the 24 screens of the Favorites subset (make sure to turn on subtitles): 
Second, how to change the clock from EU to US setup (language, time zone, date format):

A brief press on the rotary encoder will enter the setup menu with these options:

< 0 Clock subset >, < 1 Backlight >, < 2 Date format >, < 3 Time zone >, < 4 Local language >, <5 Secondary menu>.

Submenus will lead the user to : 

• Menu 0: Clock subset, gives a choice between Favorites (24 screens), All (40 screens), Calendar (13), Fancy clocks (22), Astronomy (16), Radio amateur (13)
• Menu 2, Date format, gives a choice between EU, US, ISO, French, British, Period format, Dot format
• Menu 3: 20 different time zones
• Menu 4: English (en), French (fr), German (de), Norwegian (no), Spanish (es) day names for local time
• Secondary menus will enable a choice of among others GPS baud rate

Chosen values will be stored in EEPROM so next time the clock is started it will start with the values used in the previous session.

A long press will reset the clock.

The code can be found on Github.

This was a fun holiday operation from the island of Tenerife with 2.5 - 4 Watts running digital modes, mostly FT8 and some FT4 using a low-band and a high-band QDX.

The best bands were 30 m (29%) and in particular 10 m (65%) with a lot of contacts across the Atlantic ocean as the picture shows. In total 62 different entities/countries were contacted. 

QSL via Logbook of the World.

I have now used both the low- and the high-band QDXes daily as EA8/LA3ZA for a period of two weeks without destroying the four BS170 final transistors. Here are some procedures and tips.

But first, I do actually have experience in blowing the finals. That happended under testing prior to leaving, and all it took was 9.5 Volts for my 9 V build and what I thought was a dummy load, but which might have been an open circuit load. One BS170 developed a short between drain and gate with the result that 9.5 Volts was passed directly into the outputs of the driver IC5, 74ACT08, so IC5 blew as well.

My three tips for avoiding such failures are:

1. Use a reduced power supply voltage for tuning

2. Use a current limited power supply

3. Use Zener diodes to protect the final transistors

The latest addition to the Multi-face GPS Clock is a clock face that for hour, minute, and second cycles through the corresponding chemical element in the periodic table. This is shown in the image to the right.

This is screen number 39 for this clock, all of them selectable by rotating a rotary encoder. The project, with Arduino Mega hardware and software is documented on Github, where the current release is v.1.6.0 (2023-04-14).

The display also shows  the full name for the element corresponding to the second, as shown above for element 3 which is Lithium. It is located in group (column) 1 and period (row) 2.

My QDX twins from QRPLabs: 

1. On top, the high-band version, 20-10 m, with a revision 4 PCB
2. In the bottom, the original 80-20 m version with a revision 3a PCB

Elecraft K3: Upper trace is start of sidetone and lower trace is start of RF ~15 ms later.

An amateur radio transceiver is not a precision measurement device. This is apparent when it comes to measuring time for your own round-the-world signal or when characterizing Long-Delayed Echos (LDE). One cannot just substitute onset of sidetone for the actual start of transmission of RF. Similarly there may be an unspecified delay between received RF and start of audio output on the receiver side.  

The main specification for ham radio transceivers is that the sidetone is synchronized with the keying. The delay to start of RF is only of secondary importance. All numbers should therefore be judged against the length of a dot which for instance at a morse code speed of 30 WPM is 40 ms. 

Here are some measurements for the Elecraft K3 and K2 that I did in 2021 for a presentation on LDEs at the HamSci 2021 conference. A video of the presentation is also available: Long delayed radio echoes – the illusive secret of the ionosphere

The first image shows that start of the sidetone is about 15 ms before RF is transmitted in the Elecraft K3.

Elecraft K2: Lower trace shows RF and upper trace start of AF output some 8 ms later.

I would expect other transceivers to have similar delays, that the delay will vary from one type of transceiver to the other, and even with settings of e.g. filter parameters for a single transceiver. 

Here's my low-band (80m - 20 m) 9 Volt QDX with a voltage regulator. Its only modification is a green rather than a red LED, as I don't like red LEDs to indicate anything but error conditions. 

The TFT GPS clock with touch control which has been designed by Bruce E. Hall, W8BH, is a very nice clock with a large and easily readable 3.2" color display. Its three different screens have been nicely laid out and designed also. The processor is an STM32 Blue Pill.

I cloned the software and modified it in two simple ways:

1. EU option

This is a backwards compatible version which can be Europeanized with formats for date and units. It also has possibility for removing the display of the battery icon, when running from a USB supply.

New boolean variables to set:

• US_UNITS - if false: m, kmh, Little-endian date with '.', if true: feet, mph, Middle-Endian date with '/'
• BATTERY_DISPLAY - true: as original code, false: no display of battery icon and status

2. Minor fixes

• There is now a new way of initializing Serial1 (used for GPS input signal) as the original one didn't compile in Arduino IDE 1.8.13. See https://github.com/stm32duino/wiki/wiki/API#hardwareserial
• The satellite count in the upper right corner is more agile so it now drops to 0 whenever the GPS signal is lost, rather than stay forever at last satellite count.

Another update, this time to add:

• Azimuth and elevation for inner and outer planets relative to your present location. The inner planet screen shows Venus and Mercury and alternates also every 10 seconds between showing the position of the sun and the moon. The % illumination is also shown along with an estimate of apparent magnitude
• The combined local time and UTC display now has an option to show ISO week number, defined to start on Mondays. (It is my understanding that the week number in the US is different, as Sunday is the first day of the week)

• A new calendar screen now shows Gregorian (western), Julian (eastern) as well as Islamic and Jewish dates. The calculation of the Jewish calendar is tough for the Arduino Mega and takes some 5-6 seconds
• A screen showing GPS Info has also been included. This screen shows the number of satellites in view (line 0), the number of satellites in use for position fix and their average signal to noise ratio (line 1), the mode and status indicators (line 2), and the Horizontal Dilution of Precision, Hdop, and its characterization in plain text (line 3).

I got myself one of the marvellous digital transceivers from QRPLabs recently: The QDX - QRPLabs Digital Transceiver. It is set up with receiver bandpass filters and transmitter lowpass filters for 80, 40, 30, and 20 m. It has also been found that the 40 m filters work well for 60 m. 

The latest firmware, version 1_04, has a new "Band Configuration" screen where one may configure the list of supported bands. It is the intention that higher bands will eventually be supported.

I am not so interested in 80 m, so I wanted to see if I already now could get the receiver to work on 17 m and 15 m. With reference to the schematics, I modified the input filter's inductor, L12. 

It is tapped at 19, 30, 36, and 41 turns for 20, 30, 40, and 80 m respectively. It resonates with input capacitors C28-C31, with 22, 30, 56, and 220 pF respectively. 

I gave the inductor 36 turns, omitting the extra turns for 80 m, and then tapped L12 after 13 turns. I also also changed C30 to 15 pF. That give me the  bandpass characteristics shown below, as analyzed with the built-in analysis function of the QDX:

The filter peaks at about 19.5 MHz and is about 2 dB down at 18.1 MHz and about 7 dB down at 21 MHz. It seems to work well, and in my first tests, it receives FT8 well on both bands. 

Here's a new sweep with firmware 1_05_002 (beta) which uses colors which are easier to read:

The multi-face Arduino GPS clock is inspired by the Clock Kit from QRPLabs. It is an open source project on GitHub, and it now has support for many more languages in the newly released versjon 1.4.0. As a language nerd myself, I love fiddling with multiple languages and character sets.

The local language option is for display of day name in case local time is shown. The default is English for local time. No matter the choice for local time, English is always used for UTC day name. Here are examples:

French:

As is evident from the examples, the letters ø and ö are displayed when needed. The same goes for å, á, é, ð, and þ which are all displayed properly according to need in the various languages. The wiki of the project on Github gives instructions for how to select language. It is also easy to add more languages.

Like many I was disappointed with the Chinese antenna tuner kit "QRP manual days" back in 2014 and I never really got it to work. 

That was even after I had replaced the two polyvaricon capacitors. The two screws for mounting each of the variable capacitors were too long. The result was that they interfered with the moving plates of the capacitor and I ruined both of them. There was no warning of this in the manual, so beware anyone who buys this kit.

Despite fixing this, it didn't really tune anything. I later learned that it probably works for low bands like 80 m as it is, but I didn't notice that. I thought maybe the toroid core of the inductor was of inferior quality, but never really investigated it, so it sat unused on the shelf for 7-8 years.

Recently, however I learnt that there is an error in the instructions which makes all the difference: The order of the taps in the inductor should be reversed. In this way, one can get the small inductance value consisting of only a single turn at position A of the rotary switch. Prior to this fix, the inductor starts with 10 turns at position A, and this is too much except for the lower bands like 80m. 

This is explained in this video by KP4MD, Carol, from 7 July 2021 starting from about 10 minutes. The particular frame that shows this is reproduced here also.

What I did was to desolder all 12 or so connections from the inductor to the rotary switch - be careful not to melt the plastic around the switch contacts. I actually did that and had to disassemble it in order to get it back in working order. Then I unwound the wire from the toroid core and rewound it in the opposite direction. And then resoldered it back.

That made the trick, now it tunes 20 m also!

By the way, the odd name for this tuner seems to be a mistranslation from Chinese. It should have been the more prosaic "Manual antenna tuner kit".