Several of us here in Cincinnati have been taking advantage of winter and building some ARDF Gear.  Unfortunately for kit building, it's the warmest January anyone can remember.  I was stuck in a hotel on a business trip, and I took advantage of the über-clean desk to mount my vise and build Bryan Ackerly's 80m Sniffer. (I like building on hotel room desks.  My workbench is notable in that I can only build on my vise, since my workbench is completely covered with stuff. There's normally no visible horizontal surface on my workbench.)

I'm not finished, but the kit so far has been much better than the average kit I build.  The most noticeable thing to me was how few leads I had to adjust to fit the board's hole spacing; just a few capacitors, if I remember correctly.  I stopped because I was confused about whether or not to use sockets.  Bryan recommends no sockets due to the RF frequencies involved.  I learn something every day. Here's the board as it sits today.

 The first time I ever hunted 2m AM, it was the model event for the 2004 World Championships.  Needless to say, it was the wrong place to be learning that. (If you don't know, it's a lot harder than audio morse code over a continuous FM carrier, the so-called MCW-FM.)  Since then I've hunted 2m AM once, in Raleigh, North Carolina, in July 2005.  The US ARDF Championships are in Raleigh this April, so we're hoping to get some 2m AM gear running for some practice hunts.

We found G3ZOI's TRO-2 design, and we bought 3 boards from G3ZOI with most, but not all of the components. We had some trouble locating some of the parts, and G3ZOI was able to get us the parts we needed to get them working.  Here's Bob Frey's (WA6EZV's) running:

(Bob Frey's workbench is the diametrical opposite of mine.  His workbench is the cleanest and most organized personally-owned workbench I've ever seen.)

And here's the CRT of the test monitor.  I have no idea what this means, but I know it's good:

 We're working now to modify the software to send callsign IDs, and on getting these into some woods-ready containers.