The 147.120 Tech Net Blog

Last nights build meeting was great! We’re officially batting 1000 on the FLL kits! Jims took some rework on the solder connections to the chip socket, but we were all functional before we left.

We were amazed at the accuracy of these little buggers. One of the units was within 3 Hz at 10 MHz! We were able to accurately read frequencies up to 60 MHz. It was fairly sensitive from 20 MHz and down but we needed to pump up the output of the signal generator as we went up in frequency. But it was very accurate right up to the point where it couldn’t lock any longer.

Cool!!

The next part of the build is the bandpass filter and amplifier for the receiver. Some of us have elected to start on the Power Supply section of the PA so that we have a source of 12v for testing. Since there are provisions on the PA board for ac operation most of us are taking advantage of that.

Anyone is welcome at the build party! We have a couple extra ‘seats’ and truly enjoy sharing at this meeting. I would have to say we’ve had the most pleasant and productive build sessions I’ve been to in decades.

Each week we share sources of parts, play ‘show n tell’ with ‘stuff’ we’ve acquired, and generally just chat away in between questions comments and statements about the project. We discuss the circuit, the nuances of the mechanical construction and even ponder programming code.

All in all, it’s a great meeting and I can’t wait ’till the next one. See you all then!!

Tracy N4LGH

I want to apologize to everyone who expected a Tech Net tonight. I had a series of personal incidents that prevented me from getting on the air tonight. I’m just now getting in and still, I have no antenna!!

This WILL be solved before next weeks net!

I WILL be at the build meeting tomorrow!

Thanks for your patience,

Tracy N4LGH

Well, the BiTX Builder Group is moving along just fine! Most in the group have identified the parts inventory, some have begun soldering the FLL kit.

Tonight we discovered how important a good soldering iron is. We also discovered several unique ways to put together this little project!

We decided at the onset of this project that the Frequency Counter portion of the FLL (Frequency Locked Loop) would be where we start with this project. That leaves us with a nice little piece of test equipment to use on the other parts of the project. Nice!

We discovered that all the kits were short one 10K resistor in the FLL parts pile. We also discovered that the header supplied to go on the FLL board does not fit.

Patrick discovered one can simply solder the header on the LCD instead of the FLL board and put the wires directly on the FLL. (It was intended to go the other way around …) I decided to do away with the header and connector altogether.

Here are a couple of pictures of my Frequency Counter. It powers up, but I haven’t tried to get it to display a frequency yet.

my FLL (up side down)

Looking from the back

I had been saving the clipped leads of the Capacitors and it dawned on me that they would cumulatively have quite a bit of sturdiness even though each in its own was easily bent. It turned out much nicer than I thought.

Top view showing rigid wiring

Alive! (need to clean the lense ...)

It’s time to go ahead and see if this thing is able to count a frequency! Then I need to settle in on how to mount it into my RCA CB Co-Pilot chassis I recently gutted.

So much fun – I’ll report more as I progress!

Tracy N4LGH

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