This morning I was grabbed on QRSS. Let me explain: QRSS is CW sent REALLY slow (hence QRSs) using automated low power transmitters. I built one of the Hans Summers MEPT kits for 30m and have had it running when I’m around the shack:

My QRSS MEPT for 30m, puts out an astounding 100mw

“Grabbers” are stations that are listening using programs like Argo or QRSS viewer or MultiPSK to analyze a very tiny sub-band (like 200 Herz or so) and do a screen-capture, or ‘screen-GRAB’ of the waterfall at regular intervals. A ‘grab’ is someone seeing your callsign in their grabber archive.

W4HBK, who runs the ‘Pensacola Snapper‘, sent me an email this morning with this attached:

K6JEB received at W4HBK

My QRSS ‘beacon’ puts out a ‘whopping’ 100milliwatts.  It is connected to an Inverted-L cut for 160m but tuned with an antenna tuner for 30m.

Here’s a close-up of my signal from the W4HBK 10-minute archives:

K6JEB received at W4HBK, my signal is at 10.140050-10.140055

I finally had time, and (Nitto) awesome double-sided tape to run the G-code for the BLTuner pcb I had written about earlier.

Excellent results! And I was being a total chicken$hit with the feed rate, I could have run it easily at 4 inches per minute.

There were actually two toolpaths: the first was the actual pad isolation and the second was cutting the small board out. I did the first with the 3mm V-bit sold by Zen Toolworks and the profile cut-out with a 1/8 ballnose.

After all, we are QRP DIYers, right?  Pulled the oblique angle image from the instructions into Photoshop and re-created it, hopefully fairly close to scale.  Then I exported the JPEG into Vectric V-Carve Pro to create toolpaths (G-Code) for my CNC.  On the left you see the original and on the right is a preview image of the toolpaths.

A while back, I bought the kit, which had been originally purchased by K6ZAN but after he became a Silent Key, it wound up back in circulation.  The pcb that was with the kit wasn’t etched.  So this is my first time using isolation routing to make a pcb.