Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Home Stretch

I spent a couple of days just enjoying listening to 40 meters, and had to push myself to disassemble the K2! At that point, I decided to try to push through to finish assembly; there were only a few pages of RF board construction left to go to arrive at Integration Test 3. So, I've put in a lot more daily hours in the past few days and am now close to finishing the RF board.

Having documented my stuffing the first resistor on the Control Board, I thought I would amuse myself by also documenting stuffing the last resistor as well. R44 is the last small component to be stuffed, as well as the last component (except for the PA transistors) to be mounted on the bottom of the board.
So, here's the whole RF board. All that remains to be mounted are 4 transformers, that I still need to wind, and the 2 PA transistors. Although it may not look like that many in the photograph, there were a lot of capacitors to be stuffed, many of which were the tiny ones that needed to have their leads formed to fit the solder pads. The last step in today's construction was really speeded by my having already wound L16 through L24 a week or so ago.

Two or three more hours should see me through to Integration Test and Alignment 3.

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