I have become very interested in amateur beacons and the propagation of beacon signals.
I have virtually no electronic building experience. I am interested in hearing from anyone who can advise me as to whether building a simple beacon would be too complex of a project for a person who has little to no experience?
And, if that is the case, whether it would be possible to purchase a pre-built beacon from someone, or somewhere?
Thank you.
Edit/Update: I posted this same query on another radio-related forum and got responses, in case anyone else is wondering about the answer to this question. People recommended some of the following:
RaspberryPi, which has a variety of uses, including being able to transmit via Software Defined Radio setups:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_PiPurchasing something called a QRSS Transmitter Kit (I can supply the link, if anyone wants to see it).
And, a ready-made transmitter kit called OpenBeacon, the description of which is as follows: "an open source crystal-controlled QRPp beacon transmitter kit which can output a variety of slow-speed modes, including QRSS, DFCW, and Sequential Multi-tone Hellschreiber. It is configured via USB port, so there are no jumpers to set and you can easily adjust all of the operating parameters via command line. Once configuration is complete, OpenBeacon may be removed from the PC and operate stand-alone."
Cheers.