Charlie Bures, WA3ITR, writes in the Wellesley ARS Spark Gap newsletter, June 2020:
Derek, AK1WI started a NEST group in January to work on a 20-meter WSPR beacon project he is leading. Foolish me signed up to write the construction manual.
The goal was for the group to eventually build it for around $25 per kit – – Stu, W1SHS; Bruce, N9JBT; Mark Seltser; Nicole Deshone; Mindy, KM1DY and others from New England Sci-Tech were part of it, but then it all kinda shutdown in March due to COVID-19. Derek is up to revision 1.6 on his custom PC board and software and supplied me with some parts to try building the older version 1.5 board. He put together a small kit, and last week and this, I soldered the parts, sockets, LED, etc.
Derek designed the board from scratch and wrote the software, which gets loaded into the Espressif ESP microcontroller.
Search for WA3ITR on 20m then click UPDATE. You’ll see where 3 watts in Natick reaches.Tuesday afternoon, I went to Derek’s house and he made the last mod and at 17:45 PM, we turned it loose with his dipole strung around his study area. It has been running ever since, using my callsign, WA3ITR.