Clifton Laboratories 7236 Clifton Road  Clifton VA 20124 tel: (703) 830 0368 fax: (703) 830 0711

E-mail: Jack.Smith@cliftonlaboratories.com
 

I've been remiss in not updating this page in the last two weeks. I've had a rush of kit orders to get out and also working on a couple of new kits. The one closest to being available is a very simple, but useful add-on to the Z10040B Norton amplifier, a bypass or transfer relay, model Z10080A.

The Z10040B has an input relay that disconnects the amplifier input and grounds (through resistors) the RF input. This is intended as a safety measure, to prevent the amplifier from seeing potentially excessive signal levels when power is removed. The excessive signal levels might occur if the Z10040B is used near high power transmitters or from nearby lightning strikes.

Some Z10040B owners have requested a different configuration; when power is removed, the RF input is connected to the RF output. It's not a simple matter to revise the Z10040B design to accomplish this, particularly if the current safe-when-off configuration is retained as an option. I've instead designed a small printed circuit board holding a relay, diode and gas trap. It can be added to a Z10040B enclosure as illustrated below. To make installation simple, the board has been designed for plug in connections to the enclosure and the Z10040B, via a series of short extension cables.

I've received the printed circuit boards, but have not completed the manual. I hope to write the manual and add a web page for the Z10080A "soon."

I've added loss measurements for the Digiwave cable and a similar length of "real" RG-58  to the page "The Curious Case of Digiwave RG-58 Cable" The results were not what I expected.

I've added a page "The Curious Case of Digiwave RG-58 Cable" with an analysis of a sample of Digiwave DGC-RG58 cable. This cable has two oddities, one of which is explainable and the other is not.

I've updated the Z10040B Norton Amplifier manual to reflect the most recent printed circuit board revision (revision 3). The new manual may be read (4.9 MB PDF file) by clicking here or from my Downloads page. The manual for PCB versions 1 and 2 remains available at the Downloads page.

The new PCB revision does not alter the Z10040B's performance, but rather incorporates changes that were made in an ad hoc fashion in version 2.

This web site is developed and maintained with Microsoft's FrontPage 2003, which is the last FrontPage release. This site relies extensively upon tables - all the paragraphs are table-based. Most images are embedded in tables.

The site is several hundred megabytes in size, and has well over 100 individual pages, all in FrontPage.

My web host has implemented the "FrontPage extensions" and so far has not notified me that it will discontinue the extensions, but its clear that sometime in the not distant future, I will have to reconstruct this site to be more friendly with the current internet standards. FrontPage is most emphatically not in compliance with the current accepted best practices for web page construction.

So far my research has established  that this transition will be neither smooth nor painless nor simple. At the moment, I'm considering options. One route is Microsoft's Web Expressions 3, which is probably the closest in philosophy to FrontPage, but it is far from being simply an "updated" FrontPage.

I welcome any comments and suggestions on a transition strategy and web software.

Ron, K8AQC, has supplied the two images below, showing the Doppler shift of CHU at 7850 KHz and the received signal level at his QTH near Detroit, MI. The two plots are are 1000 seconds long (16.6 minutes) and are time synchronized to within a few  seconds.