Pine Cone
Battery Welder:
Did yuh ever want to replace those NiCad or NiMH batteries in
your HT, then you find out they are welded together with a small strip
of metal. You can try to solder the new batteries, but more times
then not you will destroy the battery or the solder joint will be too
big to allow the batteries to fit back in the case. Well, here's a solution. It only takes a few components and a big
capacitor. These capacitors are what the Big Booming car amps use
to keep the battery supply from dropping with they hit a big base note!
These things are measures in Farads. The one I used is 1.5 farads,
and seems about right. I got mine off e-bay. The key is to charge
the cap up and then quickly discharge it to spot weld the connection to your battery. It
works great. Of course we are talking about a heavy duty amount of
current in a short amount of time. So use as heavy cables as you can
find, and still be flexible. The circuit uses two LM-317's.. The first one is a current
limiter so the cap don't just blow up the power supply when charging. This
limits the charging current to about an amp or so. That's more then
enough to charge the cap rather quickly. The other 317 is to
adjust the voltage. I found about 10 volts is perfect.
Anyway, once the 'spark' of the weld discharges the cap, it will
recharge quickly. Just watch for the voltage to get up to 10 volts
again. That should be no more then a second or two.
Click here for
welder schematic
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the top of this page
The vertex 7000 repeater might be a fine repeater, but
it has difficulity with PL tones. There is an option that says it
will allow the transmitter to be locked unless it receives a carrier and
PL tone. Sounds perfect to me to allow for normal PL operations.
Well, it does sort of work. But has a bad habit of locking out people in
conversations because it appears it take the carrier to be inactive for
3 seconds before it will unlock the transmitter. That's crazy and
drove me nuts.
To get around this problem I came up with this hardware solution
that seems to work great. It involves a off box PL detector and
some digital logic to make sure we don't insert a COR unless we have
both PL and COR from the repeater receiver. Once we have BOTH we
insert COR to the controller and away we go. I also took the
opportunity to add led's on the COR, PL and PTT lines. This really helps
in trouble shooting. Our controller happens to be a CAT-1000 and I
was able to hijack the needed leads from the H4 connector. Click the
link for a schematic of this solution.
Click for Vertex 7000 --
CAT-1000 PL interface solution
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back to the top of this page
This is a fun project that allows you to build a small blinking
Christmas tree out of a Pine Cone and a few electronic parts.
Besides having fun, you will learn about LED's, resistors and soldering.
Not to mention allowing your imagination to run wild. The Pine
Cone forms the body of the tree and we mount a bright white steady LED
at the top. The other LED's are blinking types that randomly change
between red, green and blue. They are also bright LED's but we cut
down a little on the brightness for better affect and also to allow the
9 volt battery to last longer.
Click on
this link to check out our latest (November
2010) meeting project.
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top of this page
Joe Loucka (AG4QC)
