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Archer Beacon ON THE AIR!

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IRONARCHER:
Hello everyone-
I've been a lurker here on HFU for a while now and I finally have something to post about. I'm proud to announce that after a month of prototyping I have finally come up with simple little beacon design that works. Listed below are the specs of the Archer Beacon.

Run Time- 24/7
Circuit design- Simple BD-139 crystal oscillator with an IRF-510 amplifier and 7th order Chebyshev low pass filter.
Battery- Lithium 2 cell pack totaling 8400mah that's charged by 2 small 2.5W solar panels.
Charge Control- I'm using an off the shelf TC4056 charge controller and voltage step up to bring it to 12v for the transmitter.
IC controller- ATtiny85 keys the crystal oscillator.
Power output- About 2 Watts.
Enclosure- Gasket sealed waterproof project box with all connectors sealed with silicone. Added some desiccant packs just to be safe.
Antenna- 64' end fed half wave in a sloper configuration matched with a mini 49:1 impedance transformer.
Beacon Info- Sends "ABK" once every ~55 seconds in slow CW on 6998.73Khz just under the 40m band.
Beacon QTH- North western part of the US.

When the beacon is transmitting the frequency tends to be a bit drifty so it sounds kinda whoopy.
I plan on making a few improvements like a better solar panel and improving the frequency stability.

I would love some feedback on the design good or bad. Just so everyone knows, I'm very much an electronics amateur. The first time I picked up a soldering iron in any serious capacity was the toward the end of 2020 when I went down the rabbit hole homebrewing simple CW radios. I started out building small kit radios and became fascinated with the idea of building a pirate beacon after discovering HFU. The first beacon I actually heard while scanning around was the "Desert Whooper" and I was hooked. After countless hours of research, designing, prototyping, failing miserably, then finally succeeding, I'm proud to present the Archer Beacon.

Please send QSLs to
ARCHERBEACON at GMAIL dot COM
and I will send you a brand new shiny E-QSL card.
If you are interested in the design or would like a copy of the schematic just let me know.
Images attached below.
Enjoy!

outhouse radio:
i was hearing something way down in the noise but it's high noise level tonight .
give it some time , i'm sure some of these guys on here will get on it soon .

IRONARCHER:
Yeah it is pretty noisy tonight so I'm not too worried.
I checked out some web SDRs earlier and I could hear it in AZ about 1000mi away so I know it at least works.

Rob.:
Nice job! Good to see some more HF beacons coming online. :)

mark-n-nut:
Doing well here this morning at 1500 utc =/-

73, Mark

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