Not Enough Hours in the Day

One foot in front of the other

Hello! I’m writing to you from my brand new workspace, which I’ve dubbed Shack 3.0 (backstory of the name is not really worth mentioning other than my last workspace at our Beaverton house was called Shack 2.0).

NT7S Shack 3.0

Yes, it’s been a while since my last post, However, there’s been a good reason. I’ve been working very diligently on on the new shack. Since we have moved from Beaverton in 2022, my workspace has first consisted of a tiny little table in our travel trailer, followed by a slightly larger laptop desk in the corner of our bedroom. Obviously this very limited amount of space makes it a challenge to develop projects without having your usual stable of tools and test equipment. I was able to make do with what I had, but it was certainly a less-than-ideal way of working.

Our new house is great, but it does not have a spare room for me to use as a shack. So starting about a year ago, I have been working on building a small detached office near our house to use for my new shack, as well as a place for our extra freezers/fridge, and a small workout room. The framing and roof were completed last fall, then we had to take a break over the winter and spring to attend to other things. However, we had to get Shack 3.0 completed before the western Oregon rainy season started this year (in October), so nearly all of my free time went into finishing the building completely. That included exterior trim and siding, wiring, insulation, drywall, ceiling, floor, and interior trim. Fortunately, Jennifer and I (with some help from our two sons) were able to get it fully completed, and then move a large chunk of my office and shack equipment into here over the last few weeks.

So while I regret that I haven’t been able to write here nor advance Project Yamhill for months, there was a very good reason for it, and my choice will allow me to do a lot more going forward.

The Way Forward

Now that we’re well into the rainy season here in the beautiful wine country of Yamhill County and I have a proper place to work, I’ll be able to devote much more of my limited free time to my unfinished projects. In order to get to my longer-term goal of a completed Project Yamhill, I have some intermediate steps to complete first.

First and foremost is to get EtherKeyer Mini in a really solid state. It’s about 90% of the way there but needs a bit more refinement and bug fixing, mostly on the firmware side. Having a really solid CW keyer will be absolutely necessary for next few steps.

Once the keyer algorithm is locked down, I’m going to be shifting my effort into completing a design for a traditional superhet CW QRP transceiver using the MAX2681 mixer IC and a Si5351 as the LO. As far as whether it will be single-band or multi-band, and what features it will exactly have, I’m not sure yet, but the whole point of perfecting a keyer here was to be able to integrate it into a CW rig that I can actually use for portable operations.

Having a solid radio architecture will then allow me to pivot to having that as the starting point for the base-level set of blocks for Project Yamhill, which I can then branch off from to expand Project Yamhill into a full-featured learning platform for radio electronics.

What’s Next

So I’ll be diving back into the firmware of EtherKeyer Mini to get the basic functionally as solid as I can reasonably make it, and then hopefully get some units in the hands of actual CW ops who can put them through their paces. As it stands now, I’ve finally got the sleep mode in a pretty good state, and I can leave the CR2032 in there for many months without losing a significant amount of charge while idle.

EtherKeyer Mini case remix by AB2TS

The next update of this publication should have more details about where this project is at and what improvement are still in the pipeline. Thank you for your continued support! I’m looking forward to being able to get back into being able to put time into these projects.