Ozark 80 "Ham Radio"

This is an 80 meter CW transceiver I built into a ham tin.  I built it as kind of a tongue-in-cheek reference to the phrase "ham radio."  The tin came from one of those cheap holiday gift packs found in a local department store. The ham inside this tin was particularly nasty and must have been processed ham made from all the scraps left over from the "good"  ham products.   I managed to choke down a couple pieces of it but fed the rest to my dogs. The radio is an Ozark 80 kit, which is based on the Pixie design, and is built Manhattan style. It is a two frequency transceiver that operates around 3.580. It is crystal controlled, but the crystal is mounted into a socket so a different 80 meter crystal can be used to operate on two other frequencies. The radio has an output of about 600 mW and is powered by a 9V battery. Audio output is via a 3.5 mm  jack in the front of the radio, antenna connection is via a BNC connector on the left side, and a Morse key jack is on the right. The switch on the left side is an on/off switch, while the switch on the right is the A/B channel switch. I added a power indicator LED above the headphone jack. The board is mounted with double-sided foam tape.

Ozark 80 internal view

This radio is a neat little QRP transceiver but is limited in many ways by lack of a VFO and low power output. But I mainly built it for show rather than actual use.  I wanted to build an actual working ham transceiver into the ham tin.  At first I was going to put a Small Wonder Labs Rock-Mite into it, but was given the Ozark 80 kit so I put that in instead. In May of 2003 the original Ozark 80 suffered severe tornado damage.  It wasn't actually in the tornado, but one night when an F4 tornado came very close to town, my wife was rushing around when the sirens were going off.  She accidentally knocked the radio off my desk and stepped on it.  Luckily, the PC board or circuitry wasn't damaged and I got another ham tin from Gene Sailsbury, N0MQ, and put the radio into it.  Gene opened the tin with a can opener that cut through the seal, so I was able to put the back of the can back on.

Before

After

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