Figure 1: An almost forty year old Alda 103A amateur band transceiver. Click to enlarge.
The Alda 103 has a very interesting history. It was manufactured (IIRC) in 1977 and 1978, which means it has a nice complement of the discrete bipolar transistors that are fairly common (now, almost 40 years later) – and thus replaceable. Readers of some of my other articles may have observed that I like to have the ability to fix …
For the curious, my Alda 103A rig is on youtube:
Figure 1: Status and printDetail() screen of the pingpair_dyn sample app (click to enlarge).
Finally, the unlicensed band nRF24 devices are talking to each other! It was a bit of a road trip. One thing to note is the importance of the status byte, and the other status data. While a hex 0x0e is normal, a hex 0x00 in the status byte, and/or lots of zeros in the printDetail() output are pretty good indicators that your SPI is not operational, and you’re not talking to the transceiver. More on this issue follows …
A younger me, as part of a collage pic made a number of years ago. This is WB8LZR / CW aficionado extreme.
This WP blog is dedicated to the author’s amateur radio hobby, and related pursuits.
WB8LZR 