The 147.120 Tech Net Blog

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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