Emergency Radio Build

Emergency Radio Build

In the winter of 2021, my colleague Scott Rosenfeld and I received an Amateur Radio digital communication (ARDC) grant to help fund radio equipment. This was for a new HAM radio club that we were starting on the UO campus.  The grant provided the funds to create a pair of portable HAM Radio stations that could be power by solar panels and/or batteries if needed. In the parlance of the amateur radio community this is called a “Go Box”. These were also the main radios for the club. Now, what is exciting for a project like this is that the Go Boxes needed to built and wired.  This gave the students a very cool project. The systems would need to be wired such that they could use line voltage, and switch over to battery or solar panels when needed.  The Go Boxes also contained two radio units at different frequencies, and we had to add a very durable power supply to manage the shift from AC current to DC current and for the current draw of the radios.  Most consumer oriented electronic resources today use very little current. This is not true for radio communication where the equipment is drawing upon tens of amps and not milliamps to transmit a signal.  We used 12-14-gauge wires to supply this current.  The students needed to put all the parts together, add wires, secure the radio to the box frame and make sure it all worked in the end.

Wiring radios in a “Go Box”

Here is one of our intrepid builders putting a station together