01 MAY 2022 - Beacon decommissioned and license cancelled
(Note that the call sign ZL1SIX may still be periodically active on 6m WSPR mode)
Historical information for reference only: ZL1SIX - 50.011 MHz - Bay of Islands - New Zealand
A 25W ERP 6m CW beacon running into a 3 element vertically polarised Yagi pointing west.
The beacon was built on a plain PC board material base in "dead-bug" style with more PCB used to form compartments. The circuit is very similar to the E51WL/b beacon except with one less amplifier stage and running on 12V. It was built inside a die-cast Eddystone box which is an adequate heatsink. Although there is a Low Pass Filter in the beacon, there is also an additional 7-pole LPF following the beacon as a precaution.
The RF stages line up is:
J310 FET crystal oscillator operating at 8V
J310 + 2N2222A cascode buffer operating at 12V
2N3866 Class-A amplifier and keying stage operating at 12V
2N3553 Class-C driver amplifier operating at 12V
BAM20 Class-C output stage power amplifier operating at 12V
The Morse ident is generated by a PICAXE 08-M and program code similar to that used in the 28MHz 6m beacon by VK6HV
The keying sequence consists of the beacon callsign (ZL1SIX) and grid locator (RF64VT) then a 3 second pause.
This beacon was decommissioned in May 2022.
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