René is a Radio Amateur registered at the German "Bundesnetzagentur" and can be reached as DB1AWA. This page has some links to interesting German Ham sites, like the DARC. On HF I use the Kenwood TS-480SAT transceiver. From 6 to 80 meters with an inverted V and a WG5I antenna. At 2-meters I use the transceiver that was build from a kit of Heathkit. When I am mobile on 2-meters and 70cm the Icom Q7e or the Baofeng UV-5R is used I use them with our notebook for controlling the Kenwood transceiver and packetradio. View my current location with APRS. Or find me when I am driving . Or walk .

My Projects:

Apart from al lot of "ready to build" kits (mostly Heathkit) I also realized projects that were created more or less from scratch or a schematic.
The following part shows several of these projects. I will add not yet documented projects later on.

2011-2012 My most recent finished project is this Antenna Analyzer as designed by Guido, IW0BHB. I re-created the PCB from the schematic with Eagle software and learned the skills of surface mount soldering. Some specificatons: Operates from 0,1 to 180 Mhz. Measures SWR from 1-9 (Return loss 0-35 dB) and |Z|, R and |X| from 5-500 Ohm. Due to its concept it includes a nice signal generator up to 180 Mhz. The microprocessor has a serial- and on-board USB connection to connect it to many popular VNA software.

2012 This portable double Inverted-V has a splendid performance from around 100 Mhz upto 600 Mhz. Years ago Rob, PA0DRC gave me a simular antenna to use for 2m and 70cm during one of our vacations to the USA. But it can be used for far more bands. Like the air-band, or weather satellite. When the telescopic antenna's are slided in it preformes good for DVB-T bands. And it's portable! The two horizontal tubes that function as feedlines are 44,5cm long. The BNC connector is in te center of it. No matching network is used. The telescopic antenna's are 65 cm long and are placed in an angle of 90 degrees.

2011 My good old power supply (2-35V 5A) has gathered a lot of dust since it broke down. I made a new PCB and replaced defective parts. It enjoys a second life now.

2010 A bit as a replacement for earlier this year stolen equipment, I added GPS capability to the Dell Axim X5. It is based on the Leadtek LR9552. The Dell is adapted to supply the necessary power. Although the GPS has only one output. I succeeded to duplicate the signal and feed it separately to the Tiny Trak (APRS) and the Pocket PC. Tom-Tom navigator and Ozi Explorer function good in this configuration. Ozi Explorer is also used to log tracks again. The connection between the GPS and interface connector is made by a mini-usb to mini-usb cable.

2005 This screwdriver antenna was build with a glimpse to the design of Don, W6AAQ and some building information as written down by Ron, PH0RMH. It is designed to function from 6- to 80 meters (with different whips). The 6- to 40 meter range can be realised with one whip of 1.80 meter, within the first 1/3 of the coil length. There is still sufficient bandwidth at 80 meters when a good counterpoise is used. After most parts were searched together I had to drill, saw and sandpaper a lot. My neighbour helped me out with some work that had to be done on a lathe. All used metals are stainless or copper. The circular contact to the coil should be less then 0.1 mH. The stainless steel body is directly connected to this circulair contact, so the body is part of the hot side of the antenna. The somewhat "slow" motor (7 minutes from up to down) can be supplied with only a 9v radio battery. A wireless remote unit is used to control the antenna. I made R5/S9 contacts with this antenna to Russia, the Middle-East and North America on 40 and 20 meters.

2006 To connect my Kenwood TS480 to my inverted-V antenna's through coax, I needed a 1:1 balun. All parts came from the "obsolete parts" box.

2004-2005 During this period I became acquinted with words like GPS, NMEA, SiRF, WGS-84 and especially APRS. I wanted to be visible on APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System), at the same time use some kind of navigating system and log the route I travelled. And it had to be modulair and portable. With the help of Bertus I realised these wishes. The core was a U-Blox GPS module with programmable dual output. Track data was saved in 740 Kb EEPROM and could be retreived as binary data through one of the outputs with a special program. The data available at the first output was send to a RS232 serial board and processed for use in my Tiny Trak APRS module. The second output was send to an IrDa board where it was processed to be send as Infrared wireless NMEA or SiRF data to my Pocket PC for Tom-Tom Navigator or Ozi Explorer CE. These programs were made available on my Ipaq Pocket PC. The external connection on the GPS board was for an active antenna. I made it portable for use in our car, mobile home or just in our backpack with standard docking stations. This way I learned very much about the possibilities (and impossibilities) of GPS based reporting and mapping systems. Update: Unfortunatly the module itself and my Ipaq Pocket PC were stolen during our 2010 vacation in Curaçao.

1999 The 300 mW signal of my Icom-Q7 is translated to a comfortable 25 watt at 2 meters with this amplifier. It has a HF-Vox to switch from RX to TX. As of 2005 it proved to be fast enough for intensive use of APRS. Simpel and straightforward. I used the cabinet of an obsolete mobile phone.

1992 My father was very much interested in receiving weather data, especialy polar satellites. Harry van Deursen, one of the active members of the werkgroep kunstmanen -of which my father was a member too- developed a sensitive (scanning) receiver with digital readout for this purpose. Schematic, a set of coils and a professional PCB for this HRX-137 receiver were made available.

1978 Around 1977 my goal was to build my own computer! It became to be the "AMICOS" kit that was marketed by Ritro Electronics, and was build around the American Microsystems S6800 microprocessor chip. Programming was possible through an editor/assembler or a basic interpreter (on EPROM). Booting and entering the first firmware or machine language programs into RAM had to be done bij setting address, upper and lower data-bytes with the switches after each power on and/or running it from a then specified address. Several Eurobus-64 cards contained the necessairy functions, like parallel- or serial I/O, 8k RAM, Video, Keyboard and an audio-cassette interface for "mass-storage". I developed a 180 Kb floppy interface to be used with a BASF 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. Recently I found the bill for this drive... 1.500 Dutch guilders! (690 Euro). I wrote two usefull (basic) programs for this computer. One for calculating insurance contributions and later on a program for accounting/billing. At the end of the last century I donated this computer equipment and documentation to a museum.