Michigan Mighty Mite

Listening to the SolderSmoke podcast has convinced me that I need to experience the Joy of Oscillation.  To that end, I decided to build a Michigan Mighty Mite.

This is a simple CW transmitter circuit - basically a crystal oscillator circuit that can put a bit of power out on an antenna.  You can see how to build it here.  It only has a couple of parts.  I am using a pill bottle to build the transformer.  The transistor got a bit hot, so I'm using a soldering tool heat sink.  You can build it for many different frequencies.  I am using a 3.579545 MHz crystal, so perhaps I've joined the Color-Burst Liberation Army?

As you can see, the output is really ugly.  If I weren't doing this into a dummy load, I would definitely want to have a low pass filter on it.  Also, not sure how much the capacitance in the breadboard is contributing to matters.

I'm not 100% sure how much power it was putting out.  It looked like a paltry amount on the oscilloscope, but then I realized later that the probe was set on 10x and the machine was at 1x.  (I just got this, and I'm still learning the ins and outs.)  The coil got messed up in the interim, and think I'd rather move on to the next thing for now rather than play with it more.

Still, I got to experience the Joy of Oscillation, and I got to test out my new scope.  Good times!