Atlanticon 2003 Speaker: N2CX

"QuickieLab Test Bench"

I'm proud to say that Joe has been my 'cohort in crime' here in the NJQRP Club over the last 7 years, and along the way has become my best friend as well. We've all been graced by his insight in RF design and pragmatic approach to development of kits, antennas and field operations over the years. Recently, N2CX has been focusing on a new and flexible QRP experimenter's platform we developed together called the QuickieLab. His initial guidance to QRPers concerning how to build and use the QuickieLab have been published in the QRP Quarterly and QRP Homebrewer magazines ... and Joe's presentation at Atlanticon this year pulls it all together to show the big picture in the form of the 'QuickieLab Test Bench'.

N2CX has a passion for test equipment, and he'll describe how the NJQRP QuickieLab is a great platform with which to build a ham measurement and test bench. The Inherent BASIC Stamp 2 functions, the QuickieLab features, the IOX chip (Input Output eXtender) and DDS daughtercard (Direct Digital Synthesizer) together form a powerful collection of tools with which one can implement a wide variety of test equipment. We will see how the basic hardware plus some added interface circuitry can be used to make a powerful, modular and integrated test bench consisting of a DC voltmeter, frequency counter, signal generation, AC/RF voltmeter, SWR meter, RF power meter, remote-reading field strength meter, antenna analyzer building blocks, sweep generator/detector, two-tone generator, digital thermometer, comparative headphone tester, semiconductor parametric tester, VFO, signal tracer ... and the list goes on even more! I've read Joe's paper, destined for the Proceedings that everyone gets, and its terrific! And so will be his presentation.

About Joe Everhart, N2CX .....

Joe Everhart, N2CX is product of "space age" as his imagination was fired by technology during those heady days. First by necessity and later by inclination, he has always been a homebrewer. With over 25 years in the aerospace industry, Joe has learned the hows and whys of all that neat stuff he's built along the way - and sometimes knows that it shouldn't work but does anyway! Having worked on everything from LF antennas through the S-band comm system on the ISS Alpha, Joe loves to roll his own and then to write about it to help others learn what this radio stuff is all about. He is a radio-active member of NJ-QRP deeply involved in the popular homebrew kits offered by that club. He even gets on the air once in a while to check his homebrew rigs and antennas in QRP contests, as well as from portable locations at hotels in strange cities.