Getting Control of the Furlough 40 and First Week's Log

Adding Controls to the Furlough 40

When I got the Furlough 40 up and running a little over a week ago I was so excited just to make contacts that it didn't bother me that the controls were hanging by wires off the edge of the board, but that got quickly annoying. So it was time to build the control panel.  I decided to keep with the al-fresco look and go with something that more-or-less matched the open, modular construction style.  

The controls consist of:

• Rotary digital encoder for tuning
• VFO A/B select mini-toggle
• USB/LSB mini-toggle
• MOX mini-toggle put the rig in to transmit
• Tone - momentary switch to trigger a 10 second tune tone
• Power button (push on/off, not installed yet)

In keeping with the "Home Depot Homebrew Chic" esthetic, I went with 1/8" aluminum angle stock for the panel.  Having none in the shop and while out on my pre-planned weekly social-distancing grocery run, I stopped in at Home Depot to pick some up along with various screws and a carbide tipped saw blade for my miter saw to make it easy to cut the aluminum stock.

As an aside - this rig is so inexpensive to build that I spent more on the saw blade than all the parts of the rig combined.

Here is a hint - knobs, switches and an assortment of electronic parts can be purchased from Marlon P. Jones - MPJA.COM.  I purchased a pack of 5 knobs for $3 - the knobs are good quality with brass shaft screws - and they have flat rate shipping.

A couple of minutes with graph paper and pencil and I had the layout.  The new saw blade made short work of cutting the angle stock to size.  Carbide tipped drill bits in the drill press and ample WD-40 and I had the holes cut.  The labels are from my trusty Brother P-Touch - I need to get some clear label tape, but for now, the white will do. The whole effort - including trip to the store took about 3 hours. Still to do:

• Mount the display using angle brackets
• The right hand side - audio level knob, mic and speaker jacks

The rig is a pleasure to use now. The tune tone is a terrific feature added by N6QW, Pete Juliano, the designer of the rig. It puts an 988 Hz 1/2 duty cycle tone directly in to the microphone input. This is great, not only as a tune-up tone, but it replaces the need for an external signal generator to put a known signal into the rig for testing. I found out, as Pete advised, that I needed to unplug the mic first - other wise you are feeding the audio in to the mic which turns the mic into a speaker.  I am guessing that is not good for the mic element.  

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Furlough 40 First Week Contacts

This is the first week's log - I don't have much time to work the rig in the morning and evening hours when 40 meters is wide open, but even so I am very happy with the results.  There are a few contacts with local club members but the rest are a result of me answering CQs - all good contacts with call signs and signal reports exchanged at a minimum. Responses varied from "Wow! Three watts? Amazing!" to "sound like 3 watts :(".   The distance ranges from 250 miles to nearly 800 miles on a maximum of 3 watts.  From my QTH in Great Falls, VA near Washington, DC I am doing well up and down the east coast and in to the mid-west.  Only DX so far are two Canadian stations.

I even made my first digital contact with my friend Don, KM4UDX on his uBitx.  Using FLDIGI - for receive, I hooked the speaker out directly in to the PC mic input and for transmit I held the mic up near the laptop.  To make this easier I'll need to add 3.5mm mic jack to the rig and decide how I want to enable PTT.  Pete has a simple USB hardware digital interface that I may build or I might go all-in and port the CAT control implementation from the uBitx firmware for full integration with digital and logging software. 

Furlough 40 - First Digital QSO

That's all for now - for the next post we will go back to the beginning and document the build board by board.  Please subscribe, like, follow, share and tell your friends.

73 from Great Falls,

Dean

KK4DAS