Fox 1 The Story
Well the picture above (click on it for a larger picture) was the first attempt. It works quite well and here is its story!
It all started a while a go when one of my friends told me about the PIC Micro controllers. I decided it would be fun to use them in some projects. Early in 1998, I attended one of the PIC seminars and then never used them, although I did purchase the PIC Start Plus development system. Then came the "PIC ID'er" project in QST Magazine October 1998 page 34.
The QST project had a few problems. It made no use of many of the PIC features, and you programmed the ID by hardcoding in calls to routines name "dit", "dah", and "space". I knew and ID'er could be done much better, I had written an ASCII to Morse routine in 1982. So my first PIC project was to translate my ASCII to Morse routine from 8085 to PIC. It went quite well.
The next step was to learn how to use the EEPROM on the PIC16F84. It went quite well and I was playing an ID out of the EEPROM in no time at all. Then a soft UART was added so a terminal program could set the ID message. Again no problems. A simple interface and I hade a trivial ID cicuit I could hook up to the microphone input of one of my HT's.
HT's are not good for fox transmitters since the are not usually heatsinked enough for continuous transmittion. I started to think about building a transmitter.
I had previously built a reciever out of a Motorola MC145170 PLL and a Motoroal MC3362 Reciever building blcok chip. So I figured, why not try and build a transmitter. One problem I had was the the VCO of the MC3362 does not work well at 2 meter frequencies, and I wanted to build a transmitter not a reciever, so I started to research VCO designs.
I wanted to build an inexpensive and easy to build VCO, and I started to look for ideas and building blocks. Most of the ideas I came up with were $7-$15 worth of parts just for the VCO. Then along came another project in QST - A 2M Receiver, February, 1999, page 35. What caught my idea on this project was the VCO was done with only about $1-$2 worth of parts.
Around that time, a friend, a local ham offered some transistors to experiment with and the transmitter and fox2 were born.
So whats in store for fox3?