What KE4GHC Has Going On

This page is supposed to give you a little bit of info as to what I have going on. I update it as I have time. I am not going to spend alot of time here. Maybe once a year is about what I plan. If I do something cool, I will post it. Otherwise I am so busy that I don't do much ham radio wise, other than talk. And there isn't much point discussing that part of it. You already know all about that.

I have a modest ham shack. I don't see alot of point of discussing the staid, standard setup that I have for a shack.
I would like to show the recent mobile setup I put in my Pontiac.
The rig is a Kenwood D-700 that has a Valor marine GPS connected to it. It is powered through a low battery / Time Delay cutoff switch that I built.
I am fairly proud of the switch. I designed the thing using what I could scrounge component wise. I then built my first one on perfboard to be sure my circuitry worked properly. I then found a website that would make some circuit boards for me. It turned out to be somewhat pricey, but it works well, and looks good.
The circuit is designed to monitor the voltage of the battery and cuts off the voltage to the radio when it drops below a certain point. I have found that 11.7 volts works best. This keeps my battery from being run down when I forget to turn the battery off. I do that all the time. It drives me nuts.
I installed the switch into the chassis of an old el-cheapo car stereo amp. I thought it was a nice touch.
I then built a plate to hold everything and installed it in the trunk of my car, under the hat rack. It does take up a good bit of space. I could have made everything a little tighter, but figured what the heck. I'm not going to be putting anything back here. If I was in the Mob I'd have a bigger trunk anyways.
The biggest trick for me was to get the voltage back to the trunk without making it look all hokey. The cutoff switch also needed an ignition signal back to it. I found an unused 50 amp fuse terminal on the Delphi fuse block. I connected some 10 Gauge MTW wire to this terminal and ran it through the firewall, under the moulding, and into the trunk. (MTW is Machine Tool Wire, thats the soft flexible wire that is lovely to use.)
For the Ignition signal I poked around in the cabin fuse blocks and found a fuse that was for the sunroof. I don't have a sunroof, it only had 12VDC when the key was on, and one side of the fuse was not connected to anything. I connected a wire to this fuse and routed it under the moulding and into the trunk.

One note here. Making the connections in the fuse block was easy, but took some doing. The biggest problem was in finding the connectors for the Delphi fuse blocks. The Chevy dealer was unable to help me out. They could give me the part numbers for the fuse blocks, but not the individual terminals. They all looked at me like I was crazy. I ended up going to Delphi.com and hunted part numbers for hours on end. I finally found the part numbers and bought the terminals from gmpartsdirect.com

Here are some pictures of the setup.

  On the ground, ready for installation.  

This picture shows all the hardware bolted onto the mounting plate. The Kenwood 700 is a radio that has a removable face plate. Well, not really removable, it has a separate head only. The microphone for some reason, connects to the radio itself. With the radio in the trunk and the head in the dash, I had to connect the head and mic with a pair of extension cables. That is what the black rectangle is to the left of the radio. The extension cables are hard wired to this. These are two jacks. Beside this is a cigarette lighter plug that the GPS connects to it. The silver box is the low battery cut off switch.

  Bolted in, only the outer cover remains.  

This shows the panel bolted into the hatrack. It isn't as tidy as I wanted it to be. I didn't want to cut the cables going to the GPS so I had to do something with them. This bites I think.

  In the trunk, all ready to go.  

This is everything bolted in and getting ready to close the trunk lid. Everything is protected and won't get broken when I throw a suit case or a body on the back. Well, just a suit case. I'm not in the mob you know.

  The shot of the trunk.  Everything fully installed.  

This is a far off shot. The light was bad and I broke the rule of proper light selection when taking pictures. It does show the unit though because it is bright yellow.

The next thing I'm going to be working on is tying the speaker output of the Kenwood into the speaker system of the automobile. I have figured out a little circuit that will monitor the Kenwood and switch the speaker connections when their is audio coming from the Kenwood. Then switch it back when it is done. I may post those pictures here when I get around to actually doing it.

Here are a couple of pictures of the circuit board I used when making the low battery cutoff switch. I was somewhat proud of this. The only problem was having the circuit board made. In order to get the most for my dollar I ended up spending a good bit on them.

  The circuit board.  This one is going in my truck.  

The components cost about $10.00 from Mouser, which isn't too bad. I do have several of the circuit boards available and if you would like to have one I'll send you one for 5 bucks or so.
Here is the schematic and explanation of the circuit. Any idiot can build it. If I did it then it has to be a peice of cake.
The schematic in PDF format, right click and save it to your PC."

Well that is about it for now. I will put more on here later. I am currently planning on getting my truck wired up with a low battery switch. I also have to do some serious RFI work on it. My alternator would be a top gun if it was into DX. It is the only thing I hear. I am proud of my antenna setup on the truck as well. I'll get some pics on it when I get it back going as a mobile station.
I'll also post the schematic and some pictures of the speaker switching circuit. It takes me forever to do anything though, so don't hold your breath.

73's de KE4GHC

Page last fooled with on 7-7-2005 by KE4GHC