kd1mu

 I’ve started looking into battery charger repairs for some of my baofeng chargers. I tried to buy a charger for my DM 1801 DMR radio, but the ones they shipped me did not work. They would charge, but were unable to detect when the battery level falls. A working charger using the hc5812 chip will flash quickly between red and green. A defective charger flashes slowly. The hc5812 looks similar to a tp4056, only it handles 8 volts, enough to charge two cells providing 7.4 volts. The newer chargers use a HXN-TWS chip that is very similar to an sc6038. I am currently breadboarding a charger so I needed to get the HXN-TWS onto a breadboard. As it is a SMD chip, I bought 10 adapter chips for .89 from AliExpress.  This is the end result. I use 60/40 solder for the mounting pins and 138°C solder paste for the SMD. I have had good luck with this technique and use a hot air station at 180°C to solder the SMD. Shown is a completed chip, a blank adapter board, an SMD chip, and the 2.54mm breadboar

 I just set up the domains so that www.kd1mu.com will com to this blog. I will also make kd1mu.com work. Stay tuned.

 I use CQRLOG for my logging program. When I first started back on ham-radio I was using Linux for everything. CQRLOG was the perfect solution because of its low price and high functionality. Eventually I move to Windows 11 and started running CQRLOG in WSL. The challenge now is that I have multiple computers and I want them to share logging. The problem with CQRLOG, is that it is monolithic. Not GUI / API architecture. One option is to run a share SQL server, but I don’t know if CQRLOG would operate using a share database. It might make assumptions that nothing will change without the front end knowing about it first. I haven’t looked into this yet, but I plan to get the source and start poking around. I will have more once I do this. Meanwhile, I am setting up a database running on windows and will try to point CQRLOG at the database.

 I left social media. I had 1000 ham friends on Facebook and 2000 followers on Instagram. I miss them, but fighting with Meta over misinterpreted posts just made the experience bad. I created a nom de plume for my poetry, but again Meta got upset with me. I will be posting radio stuff and poetry. I expect it will not be a good combination, but I don’t expect anyone to read this anyways. My interests are in digital communications, software, and RF hardware. I’ve built a 200 watt HF amplifier starting with a small kit. I would like to design my own board and build a 600 watt amp based on the MRF300. Other projects involve LPFs, rebuilding old tube radio power supplies, and playing with battery chargers, GPS devices used in conjunction with arduino chips.