Alan,
Now I understand why you want to mill your PC boards! Those are very
nice looking engines. I have a fascination for mechanical technology,
especially engines and steam. The National Museum of American History
is my favorite Smithsonian museum. Plus, I'm something of a railfan.
I arranged to have our QRP to the Field annual operating event last
year at the Southeastern Railway Museum. It was fun operating from a
caboose!
Speaking of mechanical technology, have you seen Rich Meiss's work
with Morse keys? I have a link to his three sites on my page, and I
just received a CD from him yesterday. He's going to have his stuff
at Four Days in May this year at Dayton. With your skills and
equipment, I imagine you could turn out some darned nice stuff as
well, if you had the time.
My problem is 1) the lack of funds to put into the lathes and other
tools I'd need to do mechanical work like both you and he do (I'd have
to sell all of my ham radio gear), and 2) lack of good shop skills and
experience. The good thing about Rich's simpler designs is that they
can be done with a hacksaw and belt sander, and I've ben out pricing
belt 1" / combo belt sanders.
As far as building radio equipment, I'd like to be fully homebrew
eventually. The 15 meter SSB/CW transmitter and its peripherals like
a VFO stabilizer circuit and PIC-based counter/display is taking up my
time right now. Then, I'll get back on the 17/12 meter SSB
transceiver based on the Belthorn SSB IF board you saw on the site. I
have an SW-80+ kit to build with the local QRP club next month, and I
have a 40 meter homebrew version as separate VFO, receiver and
transmitter boards ready to build, done in Eagle.
I sold all my modern equiqment last spring when I got back into the
hobby, and I bought several old Heathkit monobanders and three AC
power supplies to restore and sell. Eventually, the HW-101 that is my
primary QRO rig will probably go, as well. I have a full set of
Heathkit HF oscillator crystals, SSB and CW filters, a power
transformer and filter choke from an SB-401, and an LMO. Eventually
that's going into a chassis as a solid state up to the driver and
finals 5-band rig.
73,
Ted
--- In Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, "Alan Marconett" <KM6VV@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Ted,
>
> OK, I found it! Quite impressive! I wish I had the time (and
knowledge)
> for advanced RF projects.
>
> I enjoy the CAD work as well. I've mostly used it for designing
parts for
> my steam engine models.
>
> http://www.hobbitengineering.com/
>
> But now it's PCB time! I do have a collection of parts for a PCB
router,
> I'd like to get that up and running.
>
> I've got DeskPCB from IMService, and I'm experimenting with
importing Gerber
> files into it. I suspect some of the parts I used (or made/altered)
have
> pads or outlines on the WRONG layer, as not everything is coming through
> correctly! More library work.
>
> I did find that by adding only a few lines (blocks) of Gcode, I
could get
> Vector CAD/CAM to backplot a Excellon file. And I got rid of the
offset,
> thanks to a reply on this list!
>
> CUL8R,
>
> Alan KM6VV
>
> >
> > Hi Alan,
> > The SKN transceiver is "A 30 meter transceiver for Straight Key Night"
> > under the "Completed Projects" setion, 1st item listed. The direct
> > link would be http://www.kx4om.com/Projects/SKNXCVR/30mxcvr.html.
> >
> > The site may have been in flux when you looked. I did some
> > considerable re-writing of that page last night, changing the wording
> > from a project description in progress, so the html code was flying
> > back and forth from my laptop to the server, and the internal links
> > were changing.
> >
> > My latest frustration with Eagle is pad design, or lack of it. I'm
> > doing an RF amplifier circuit that has two MMICs in it for
> > preamplification prior to the PA. Of course, there are no library
> > components for the Mini-Circuits MAR-6, or Agilent MSA-0386, etc,. so
> > I had to design them. The problem is, the spec for the two opposing
> > ground pad sections (think 4-bladed ceiling fan; input, output, and 2
> > grounds)are horizontally wide, rounded edges, with 8 through-holes to
> > the bottom layer of the board, to distribute the capacitance to the
> > ground plane. The best I could do for the Package was to lay down the
> > surface mount pads, and draw using the polygon tool on the outer 1/3
> > of the two ground pads. Now, after adding the part to the schematic,
> > DRC on the board tells me I have a clearance problem between the
> > ground pads and the rectangular polygons! Duh...they're suppost to be
> > connected, but as my questions from last week remain, Eagle expects
> > one and one only "pad" connected to each pin. Nothing else must
touch.
> >
> > As I told a friend in an e-mail earlier today, that's why I export my
> > Eagle boards to Photoshop, so I can do anything I want to with them!
> >
> > It's hard to imagine doing digital work without CAD, even at the DIL
> > page level. I actually do have a manual wire-wrap tool and a spool of
> > wire, but I've never used it. To tell you the truth, I'm not very
> > good at perf-boad soldered lead construction, either. I have a couple
> > of basic problems: layout visualization (I keep running off the end of
> > the board), and bending those leads and running wiring in a sane
> > manner. Doing "Ripup All" is so much easier! I've done a little bit
> > of "ugly" construction, and that's a very fast way to buid, and I've
> > done a bit of Manhattan, which is kind of tedious to me. Until I
> > recently got back into homebrewing the last couple of years, most of
> > my work involved drilling chassis and mounting tube sockets and
> > terminal strips. That's quite a gap in time from working with 6146
> > beam power tetrodes to MMIC amplifiers the size of a piece of
buckshot!
> >
> > CUL,
> > Ted
>