KA7EXM / Kanga PIC Power Meter Web-Site

KA7EXM / Kanga PIC Power Meter Web-Site

The PIC Power Meter started out as an article in QEX in the May/June 2005 edition. A companion piece was presented in QST. In conjunction with the article, KangaUS offered full kits for sale.

Since 2005, over 100 full kits were sold, and another 100+ sets of PC boards. The firmware was updated in 2007 to include some minor feature enhancements, including RS-232 interface support. The project appeared in the 2008 - 2009 handbooks as well (give or take). Bill @ Kanga has just a couple of kits remaining in his stock.

I am still providing PC boards and pre-programmed PIC CPU's for those who wish to replicate the project.

Update 10/2009:

    I ran out of PC boards a couple of months ago. Or so I thought. Another batch was ordered so I have plenty in stock now. Well guess what....I found about 25 that I didn't know I had previously. So I'm SWIMMING in PC boards right now. Firmware upgrade kits are still available as well (and I found a bunch of extra PIC CPU's as well).
    Kanga is out of stock of full kits.
    RS-232 upgrade kits are out of stock.

Update 4/2009:

    PC boards are still available via KA7EXM. Firmware upgrade kits are still available as well.
    Kanga is out of stock of full kits.
    RS-232 upgrade kits are out of stock.

Update 5/14/2007:

Version 2.0.0 Firmware Released.

Power Bar: 2nd line of the LCD display shows 0 to 16 "bars" of power on a log scale. This lightly mimic's an analog meter's respone.
Min/Max hold: Remember the strongest and weakest signal during a measurement interval. Useful for field strength measurements, tuning up a matching network, etc.
Serial Port output: All power measurements (Power, relative power, watts, VSWR) are output at 9600 bps at a regular interval. Couple this with a PC program and you have yourself a nice piece of instrumentation!

Pricing: New power meters will ship with the new firmware, as well as an RS-232 driver chip & support capacitors. Upgrades are available for $10 via KangaUS.

Availability: Software / Firmware has been posted.

Links:

More links to follow. Questions? Please send me email at ka7exm at gmail dot com