Built an Ultimate3 Beacon

This week an Ultimate3 QRSS/WSPR kit beacon kit I ordered arrived and this morning it was easily built.

The display is super crisp.

I ordered mine with the 30m low pass filter.

The whole thing runs on 5V so I chopped an old USB cable and have been running it from a USB charger or battery.

It's a great kit, with very clear instructions and it came together very smoothly. Mine was missing one small capacitor but it was no trouble finding one in the shack.

The software is very well done and everything is set up using two push buttons placed in just the right spot for your fingers while holding the board with the display facing you.

Amazingly this does WSPR as well as lots of modes:

- QRSS mode (plain on/off keyed slow CW)
- FSK/CW mode (frequency shift keyed slow CW)
- DFCW mode (dual frequency CW)
- WSPR mode (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter)
- WSPR-15 experimental WSPR mode with 15-minute frames
- Opera modes (8 speeds)
- PI4 beacon mode
- Slow-Hellschreiber (frequency shifted slow-Hell)
- Full-speed Hellshreiber
- Half-speed ("DX") Hellshreiber
- CW (plain CW)
- FSK (0-999Hz shift, fast-speed FSK CW)
- Customisable FSK patterns
- manually-keyed CW/FSK transmitter

I ran Hellshreiber for a while but it didn't look too good on fldigi in the house, now I'm running 20WPM morse but that's not decoding perfectly either - my guess is that the signal is so strong that AGC is messing with it but I'm still trying to figure this out.