Cutting-edge diy projects
Whitepaper: Prutchi 2026 – Modeling and Experimenting with the Shockley Four-Layer Diode My interest in early heart pacemaker technology often leads me into forgotten corners of mid-century electronics. Recently, while analyzing an RF pacemaker circuit, I encountered a part I hadn’t seen since my youth in the 1970s: the Shockley four-layer diode. A Shockley four-layer […]
I updated and greatly expanded my October 2020 whitepaper “Amateur DSN Lessons Learned (so far…).” The new version is available at: Amateur_DSN_Prutchi_2023. It is meant to supplement my presentation at the 2023 Hackaday Superconference.
My talk on Amateur DSN at Hackaday Supercon has been scheduled for Sunday, November 5 from 11am to 11:40am. See you there!
Dear Friends and Colleagues, On October 7, 2023, Hamas perpetrated horrific acts of pure evil against innocent civilians in the south of Israel. Hamas continues to launch rockets against population centers with the sole purpose of causing terror, destruction, and indiscriminate death. These crimes cannot be justified under any circumstances. Now, a week after the […]
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be presenting “Receiving Microwave Signals from Deep-Space Probes: Amateur DSN and the Ultimate DX” at the 2023 Hackaday Superconference (Nov 3 – 5, 2023).
I got fed up with my prior hosting service, which was always slow, their servers were massively overloaded, and I could never get a straight answer from support. The new hosting provides really fast service, so I plan to post new content after completing the website migrations. 73 David, N2QG
For a detailed writeup in pdf format please CLICK HERE I’ve been planning some experiments with single-photon and ultra-low light levels. For these experiments I want the collection area to be large and for the detector to have very broad spectral response, so my preference is to use a photomultiplier tube (PMT) instead of a […]
I have kept on making space in my lab for new projects, and came across 3 new-old-stock Marx generator modules that were made for the Fexitron and Febetron flash X-ray sources and electron accelerators. The Fexitron and Febetron devices were made in the 1970s by the Field Emission Corporation, a division of HP, which is […]
After some time of not looking at S-band, today I used the 1.5m dish to receive some S-band spacecraft. My receptions for today: Wind, Chandra, SOHO, and Queqiao.
I caught the last transmission of OSIRIS-REx with its high-gain antenna pointing towards Earth before it started to slew to its burn attitude. A few minutes later Goldstone reacquired it but at -154 dBm, which is much too feeble for my amateur DSN system. The system is running automatically at home with me monitoring it […]