Last month, I caved and bought a pre-built Corsair transmitter on eBay (after a few failed attempts at building my own). I love it! I've done a few test broadcasts with it, deploying an inverted-vee antenna into the tallest oak tree I could find out by the lake and catching a few bass for an hour or so while I piss my music all over the ionosphere using my little Corsair.
Last week, I added an FT-243 socket to it so I can change frequencies. It works great! I tested it with my two 69xx Khz xtals that I have and it works perfectly on both of them in addition to the 6945 one it came with. But it got me thinking... if this transmitter works fine on the common pirate band just below the 40 meter ham band, why not just drop a crystal for the phone section of the 40m band in it, add a mic and use it to make contacts? I'm going to take the General license exam in a few months, and I could save a few hundred bucks on buying a QRP rig if I just bought a 40m xtal and used my Corsair instead. Granted, I'd need a decent receiver too, but I've talked to elderly hams whose first rig was a separate transmitter and receiver. AM enthusiasts still do this kind of thing, though they're usually old farts with a vacuum tube fetish.
The issue is, coming from VHF as the only place I've used a phone mode in ham-land, I really have no goddamn clue about audio. The eBay Corsair has a mono RCA input for audio. So far, I've been running audio from a cheap Walmart MP3 player into my Corsair using a 3.5mm to RCA cable (with a ferrite to prevent RF screwiness running down the audio cable). I tried a few mics I had laying around, kind of expecting them to not work, and (surprise surprise) they did not, in fact, work. What exactly am I missing here? What kind of mic would I need to feed this thing? The audio equipment world is foreign to me. I've always focused my tinkering more on the RF side of things. I can build a CW only transmitter in my sleep at this point, but audio eludes me.
Topic: Microphone for my eBay-purchased Corsair. (Read 844 times)