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RC Aircraft - Styrofoam Vulcan Bomber

    RC Foamie Vulcan Bomber It is reasonably easy and low cost to make a RC plane from Styrofoam.  Foam costs almost nothing - about Euro 2.50 for a block of 5x50x150 cm - and it is available in various thicknesses, 5, 8, 10 and 20 cm being common.   I am building a delta wing plane that resembles a Vulcan bomber, with a 1.2 m wingspan, and a Ducted Fan Engine inside the fuselage.   There are two kinds of styrofoam, Expanded Polystyrene (the stuff used for exterior insulation of a home) and Extruded Polystyrene (More smooth and easier to sand, but heavier and used for roof insulation). Both kinds will cut super smooth with a hot wire and it is the same plastic, so you can just as well use the cheaper and lighter white beady stuff, since if you tune your cutter temperature properly, then you don't need to use sand paper.   For reference, Polystyrene melts somewhere between 170 and 280 Celsius - it depends on the foam and the air pressure where you li...
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Moles

We live in a village outside Bratislava in Central Europe.  This is prime agricultural land and there are infinite numbers of moles in the fields around us, so some will eventually stray into the garden.  Once they are enjoying the good life in the village, it can be hard to convince them to relocate. I tried a few things and can now present here the 100 Horse Power Mole Eliminator : It costs nothing and it works. If you have an old lawn mower, garden tractor, or moped, that may be easier to move around and it produces more global warming badness, but a car starts with the press of a button and a couple of hose pipes clicked together, to go from the driveway to the far end of the yard, works well enough.   The trick is to get all water out of the pipes before you start - lift it shoulder height and walk along the pipe a couple times. The exhaust of a modern car is not very hot and will not melt plastic, but I used a short piece of metal pipe since I really don't want...

Wide Band Aerials For 1700 to 2400 MHz, M1 - M6 Band

The 1700 to 2400 MHz band (M1 to M6) is a good band for the secondary control channel of air and ground robotic vehicles.  Little radios made by Doodle Labs in Singapore are popular and this is an antenna solution specifically aimed at the Meshrider radios ( https://doodlelabs.com/products/mesh-rider-radios/nano/ ).  These antennas will certainly also work well with Microhard in Calgary Canada Nano 2.4 GHz ( https://www.microhardcorp.com/n2420.php ) radios. I employed Ye Olde Fashioned technique of carving an antenna out of double sided board with a ruler and a scalpel, using copper tape for little optimization experiments and fixing the mistakes.  Once one has the hang of it, it is possible to carve an antenna by hand in a day, vs waiting two weeks for a PCB factory.   Etching it is good, if you have the chemicals and safety paraphernalia on hand and know what you are doing. With these 6 to 8 dBi antennas, you do not need a precision tracking system.  ...

OpenEMS with Octave and SciLAB

I wanted to do some advanced RF antenna development work and needed an electromagnetic field solver that is a bit more up to date than NEC2 .  Commercial solvers from Matlab , Ansys and others are hideously expensive (in the order of $20,000 to $50,000) and do not fit in the wallet of a hobbyist or a small consulting company.  Recently, openEMS became available and it fills the niche with a capable free tool.  In general, openEMS is a solver - a Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) numerical engine.  You interact with it through Octave , which is almost identical to Matlab .  You can watch a good video by Thorsten Liebig here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ThMLf0d5gaE   Getting it to work is a little painful, but it is free, so bear with it - then save a backup clone, or a zipped copy of the whole virtual machine directory and NEVER update it, to ensure that it keeps going and doesn't get broken by future updates, right when you are ...

Earth Observation Satellite 1700 MHz Patch Antenna

The L-Band is carved up for many services and the 1690 to 1710 MHz Space to Earth band is shared with 4G cell phone services, with several geo stationary and polar orbit earth observation satellites operating at 1702.5 and 1707 MHz .  Since I recently made an ADS-B 1090 MHz patch I decided to make one for this higher frequency band, while I am still in the swing of things with my mad antenna carving skillz . This Right Hand Circular polarized antenna is carved from Rogers RO4350B low loss PCB and after a couple days of meticulous cutting and measuring it is spot on. It is amazing what one can make if one has enough coffee, chocolate and patience! Rogers 4350B copper clad circuit board has the following RF parameters: Permittivity Dk = 3.66 Loss Df = 0.0031 Dielectric width Dw = 0.508 mm Cu 1 Oz = 36 um This Joint Polar Satellite Service (JPSS) antenna has the following dimensions: Base: 69 x 54.6 mm Patch: 53.3 x 43.4 mm Corners: 12 x 12 mm Slots: 5 x 8 mm Feed: 1.1 x 7.5 mm...

Weather Satellite VHF LNA

Minikits in Australia ( https://www.minikits.com.au/ ) makes a nifty little low noise RF amplifier for a VHF weather satellite receiver, such as the Meteor satellite on 137 MHz.   Note that SatDump is very much improved now - it is all the software you need to see that it is raining outside, without the stress of looking out the window. Some careful soldering is required, but it is not difficult to build. When I test an RF circuit, I run it from a 12V sealed battery - my noise free power supply . Once tuned up carefully with a nylon screwdriver ( the little spatula that you get with epoxy glue! ), it can provide up to 20 dB gain, but on average over the band, expect about 5 to 10 dB.  With some patience I eventually managed to eek out 7.6 dB at 137 MHz .  This may not sound like a lot, but a radio receiver is more dependent on the Signal to Noise and Distortion Ratio ( SINAD ), than the actual signal level. The LNA is a tuned single transistor amplifier with a li...

ADS-B Patch Antenna on RF Controlled Impedance PCB

In a moment of boredom/inspiration, I thought about making a patch antenna for my ADS-B aircraft tracking system, which is part of ADS-B Exchange .  One can make one-off patch antennas from garden variety glass/epoxy FR4 board, but the result will have relatively high loss and it will not be repeatable.  In order to simply order high quality batches of antennas from any PCB factory, one needs to use low loss, controlled impedance board stock . With this antenna, the ADS-B receiver simply sits on my window sill and picks up aircraft 200 km away. Cut Corners The design is a typical rectangular patch antenna, with circular polarization.  A circular polarized antenna allows more mounting options for a conformal antenna. Slots The side slots in this design increases the bandwidth, but it also reduces the operating frequency, so slots can be used to tune a patch antenna design. Board Type There are a variety of RF boards made by various manufacturers ( Rogers , Isola , P...