This week I've been working on an antenna that can be used with OpenBeacon2 on multiple bands without the need for an antenna tuner. After a few failed attempts, I settled on an antenna which seems to work well and fit the bill. It is a trap vertical for 40 m, 30 m, 20 m, and 17 m, with elevated quarter wave counterpoises for each band. There's a bifilar 1:1 transformer in the center support of the antenna.

I have been running OpenBeacon 2 on it transmitting WSPR on each of those four bands in succession on random frequencies within the WSPR sub-band. The antenna seems to be working fairly well, as I've been getting spots on all bands (although 17 meters is sparse, I assume because of the lack of sunspots and lack of listeners).

There's a decent chance I'll make PCBs for the band traps and offer them for sale, along with the plans. If you might be interested in testing such an antenna, shoot me an email/message.

I've published my QRP antenna components for 3D printing on Thingiverse and I also have the FreeCAD files on a GitHub repo. I'll probably do a little more refinement on them, but they are perfectly usable as they are now.

The USB PIDs for Empyrean Alpha and Beta were accepted into the pid.codes database, so now that's official! Would love to have my own VID some day, but they are very expensive. Would be nice if the price of those came down about an order of magnitude at least.

Latest (and hopefully last) PCB spin has arrived from China, along with a nice stencil in a frame. Waiting for some more parts to arrive before I can assemble this latest version. In the mean time I've got a tricky firmware bug to fault find.

You may recall that not very long ago, I had a Patreon account. It started to gain some traction, but I ended up terminating my account with them because I didn't agree with some of their policies and business decisions. Now that I've found a similar platform, I've decided that I'd try to build up that network again. This is just going to be a soft launch, since I haven't even put out any content or much open source work in general in the last few months, but once I get back in the saddle and feel like I've actually done work worthy of asking for support, I will do so.