working on my 10GHz system, preparing for the Golf Channel AmTour's National championships, playing with my granddaughter and new grandson, and working to pay for all of this,
was fiddling with my light system, namely the housing for the receiver and transmitter.
This is what I came up with.
Front view |
The receiver is using a 90mm diameter fresnel lens with a 50mm focal point that I found on EBay, I've also seen them on Amazon. These dimensions are almost perfect for the BPW34 IR detector. The receiver is the KA7OEI v3.10 on a circuit board designed by K7RJ.
The housing for the transmitter and receiver are designed by me and are 3D printed. More on that below.
View from behind |
First contact was made with Donn, WA2VOI a couple of weeks ago after Tuesday night coffee with the Northern Lights Radio Society at Nokomis Beach Coffee near Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis.
We worked out the narrow beamwidth and then made our contact. After that we played around a bit bouncing our signals off of parked cars, houses, and piles of snow. I logged the contact in Log Book of the World. Just for information, it will take frequencies at lightwaves, I entered it as 3.52e+08 and LOTW resolved it.
3D Printing
I have uploaded my transmitter and receiver designs to Thingiverse.com. I am making them free to anyone who wants them.
The Transmitter is at: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2751923
The Receiver is at: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2765972
Each of these prints used less than $1.50 in filament to print.
There are probably improvements that I could make to each of these. If I develop any into a working example, I will post them here. If you create any improvements please let me know.
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