Sunday, January 25, 2009

NSW Home brew meeting at dural

We gathered at the WIA Dural site today for a show and tell and a talk on recovering components from PCBs.

The construction of the new shed is progressing well.

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Contrary to my first guess, that isn't the roof on top of the slab, it's the walls.

There was the usual bits and pieces of interesting junk to pick through.

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John has built a brilliant 3 transistor high gain audio amplifier that can drive headphones from small signals such as those from a direct conversion mixer.

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Kevin showed a helical antenna he built for a Telstra wireless broadband setup on the edge of coverage.

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John also showed a loop antenna for 40 and 80m built in a hula hoop.

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The main presentation by Mark went through all the normally expensive or hard to obtain components that can be found for free in discarded circuit boards.

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Mark had lots of practical tips of getting components off boards with plumbers soldering irons, gas jets, and heat guns. It's not a subtle art.

Update

Alan, VK2ZAY has a nice writeup too.

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