Continuing the series on neat projects I saw at the Four Days In May, here is a litle field strength meter built onto the side of a cheap Harbor Freight DMM by Dana Browne AD5VC.
Dana’s inspiration for the little field strength meter came when he was teaching a radio class to college students and wanted to show them the pattern of a Yagi-Uda antenna. He explained that cheap digital multimeters like this Harbor Freight model were readily available in the physics lab, so he built the field-strength circuit and a little plug-in adapter using the DMM as the readout.
Though I don’t see much need for a field-strength meter in my shack, I admire Dana’s inventiveness in coming up with a solution that is cheap, convenient, and inexpensive.