Sometimes one discovers these beautiful gems in the depth of the internet. Occasionally I enjoy listening to shortwave broadcast stations on my little TECSUN PL660 portable radio which is an amazing radio for little money. So i was looking for a good source of a global program schedule and ran into the beautiful software RADIO EXPLORER..

French Amateur Luc, F6BQU has designed a very simple and low cost Antenna Analyzer, ANTAN, which allows measurement of complex impedances (real part between 0 and 250 Ohm, imaginary part qualifiable as positive or negative but not quantifiable). For the average amateur need, this is absolutely sufficient. The instrument generates a square wave between 1 and 30 MHz through an LTC 1799 SMD chip and feeds this into a bridge where the bridge balance is being measured with a detector and a sensitive analog meter. The bridge offers a resistive and a capacitive regulator so it allows the measurement of complex impedances (R +/-jx)

On a recent visit to see the in-laws, I mentioned to Jan-Mark that I needed a facility to hold my fiberglass antenna rod vertically when doing mobile shortwave (the last time I tied the rod to a tree with zip ties, no joke!)

After a couple of months of careful design and build came what I dare to affectionately call "The Tank". a rock solid piece of pure stainless steel into which the antenna rod is mounted and where one of the cars wheels is used to hold it in a vertical position.

I had the chance to build a beautiful kit, a TenTec 1380 for a fellow ham in the area. I had seen this kit before in the ads and liked it by the looks but always thought it looked a bit flimsy. To my surprise, that was a bit of a misunderstanding. The kit is rock solid and very nice to build.

This little toy was so attractive, I had to own one! To avoid any more comments the like of "What... ANOTHER radio??" I thought I'd sell off a few other radios on eBay and finance the purchase with the proceeds. 

The sale went well, so the kit was ordered. It sells for a fairly moderate 120 Euro and comes as two cigarette pack sized PCBs and an aluminium case.