More RF Board Progress

More progress with the RF board. I have mounted all the crystals on the board. Next step is to wind some toroids. At this point the assembly manual explains that when windind toroid transformers, it is okay for the secondary to overlap with the turns of the primary and they need not be interleaved. That … Read more

K1 RF Board progress

I have made some further progress with the RF board. Everything went fine and both the resistance and the voltage tests are perfect. In the mean time I also had to fix my soldering iron, which had a bad connection inside the iron. Well, it is at least properly soldered now :o)  

Stop for Today

No matter how exciting it is to assemble the K1, I feel I have to stop now. I’m getting quite tired and I don’t want to make any mistakes. Not on the K1!

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K1 Front Panel Finished

Hmmm… After finishing the front panel I have three resistors left:

  • 330 ohm: This one was an option for low intensity backlight, saving a few milliamps.
  • 220 ohm: This one is sitting in the strip, thus it should be part of the standard assembly. Very fishy, since it is not even listed in the parts list. Maybe it was originally intende for the high intensity backlight?
  • 100k: THere are four 100k resistors listed in the parts list, all four of them is mounted.

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K1 LCD and Backlight

I have just finished mounting the LCD and the backlight onto the front panel. It was a little difficult because there was little space due to the already mounted potentiometers; maybe I will mount the potentiometers as last parts in my next K1 😉

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K1 Kick-Off

I can admit now that I simply couldn’t resist anymore. A week ago I ordered a K1 directly from Elecraft and today I could pick it up at our local post office. I tried to order the minimal package consisting of the K1, the LCD backlight modkit and the noise blanker module.

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New Idea for Debug Handler

I have been thinking about the performance issues I have experienced in playing with the GtkListView based debug handler. I am sure that it will not work out the way I wanted because too many messages come in too fast when the debug level is set to RIG_DEBUG_VERBOSE or RIG_DEBUG_TRACE. Still, I think the idea of some tool to browse the debug messages is good.

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The New Message Window

I have finished a protype of the new grig message window, which is part of the grig debug handler. The idea is to trap debug messages from hamlib and show them in a nice GtkListView and maybe also a GtkTreeView.

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The WM-2 QRP Wattmeter from Oak Hills Research

The WM-2 from Oak Hills Research is a cool QRP wattmeter kit, which can measure forward and reflected power in three ranges: 100mW, 1W and 10W. With an accuracy of 5% of the full scale it should be possible to measure powers down to 5mW using this instrument. The WM-2 has a big, easy to read scale and can operate either from a built-in 9V battery or an external DC source.

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