ARC active projects

This is a list of currently active projects by the Amateur Radio Club.

For a project to be considered active, either we currently have (some?) parts available to build the project at the next meeting, or some club member has expressed interest in the project this semester either in a meeting or in discord.

Some projects may be at design stage, parts acquisition, or build stage.

Personal projects

These are projects intended for an individual to complete and take the result home. Some of these are completed designs for which we have parts and can build at any meeting. IF you want to build one of these, please notify us ahead of time (in discord or in previous meeting) so we can make sure we have enough parts for everyone who wants to build one.

If you would like to build one of the antennas that we don't have a selected complete design, bring it up at the meeting and we can discuss options and refine the selection.

Easy antennas

See Easy antenna projects:

• HF antennas
• UHF/VHF antennas
• Directional antennas

Special antennas

We may have some parts for these, research to select or model a specific design is needed.

quadrafiliar helical for 136Mhz weather sattelites

antenna built, working on software setup

flat patch antennas

pick a design; we have some FR4 that can be milled

cylindrical patch antenna

needs research, fabricate (we have papers on this, needs to be modeled)

magnetically shielded small loop

can build for any frequency, use a section of coax and a connector. Used for direction finding

Group projects

These are group projects that could result in a hardware or software result that the club will retain.

If you want to participate in any of these, please let us know at a meeting or in discord!!

Active projects

Partially complete projects

• analog to digital rotor controller interface, headed by KightSat group (design phase, see discord)
  • Yaesu G-5500 AE rotors controller
  • similar project: https://github.com/k3ng/k3ng_rotator_controller
• Passive satellite ground station project
  • build QFH antenna
  • buy Raspberry Pi 3 (and another SDR?)
  • Install and configure raspi-noaa2
  • test and tune QFH antenna for weather sats

major projects

• Brainstorming ideas for portable HF antennas that don't involve trees
  • HF loaded vertical monopole
• Meshtastic projects
  • currently testing coverage and picking installation locations
  • possible future mqtt or igate gateway
  • selecting nodes and building BOM for group purchase
  • possible interface to telemetry projects (FM repeater, weather station, SAME relay, TDoA, listed separately here)
• SDR base software for future projects
  • SDR repeater monitoring (and control?)
  • SDR distributed direction finding
  • other SDR projects (listed below)
• Weather projects
  • wefax reception
  • weather satellite reception
  • weather station (brainstorming still, and looking for sponsors)

minor projects

• Put a banner in the atrium
• Create a new slide for the CECS tvs
• Advertise on the engineering TVs
• Catalog all club owned antennas (move this to its own page)
  • metadata: name, frequency range, typical SWR, location, feed line, picture(s)
  • portable and loose antennas
    • Diamond monopole
    • Diamond discone
    • Eagle
    • Iron horse + outbacker
    • hamsticks
    • windom(s)
    • B&W?
  • Roof antennas
    • Super J
    • windom
    • tower: 70cm yagi, 2m yagi, 900mhz yagi??

proposed projects

• roof yagi repair
• replacement advanced repeater controller
• SDR TDoA direction finding project (code partially available)
• SDR repeater enhancements (recording, detection), Deep SDR
• HF SSTV receiver (sdr? web?) (Note: if you want xmit, do it in person)
• Quadrifilar helical 136MHz weather satellite antenna and constant recording base station (images to website)
  • calculator
  • complete project tutorial
  • https://www.rtl-sdr.com/moving-on-from-wxtoimg-for-noaa-apt-weather-satellite-decoding/
  • https://www.rtl-sdr.com/receiving-weather-images-from-noaa-weather-satellites-with-an-rtl-sdr-blog-v4-and-multipurpose-dipole-antenna-kit/
  • https://github.com/jekhokie/raspberry-noaa-v2?tab=readme-ov-file
  • Orbitron
• SSTV constant recording base station (images to website)
• Build a mount, AE rotor and controller, and feed antenna for a 5ft dish
• Build a smaller AE rotor and controller and a small dish
• Collaborate with the Astronomy club on a Radio Astronomy project
  • might need a small dish and a AE rotor and controller