First, thanks to all those list members who replied to my calls for help.
Over the weekend, I visited Alex, AI2Q, who has considerable experience in
debugging equipment. In fact, he spent a while working for Heathkit in the
repair department and has seen his share of nonfunctional boards. He's also
got some nice test gear, as well. If you're reading this, Alex, thanks again.
And because my 8-yr old Jenna was so involved in the project, she's taking
the board into class for "sharing" on Monday.
It didn't take too long to spot the problem -- a bad connection to the pc
board from one of the leads on transformer T1, so no signals were getting in
and hence no receive. I thought I did a thorough job of preparing the leads,
but obviously not good enough. Alex also worked at one time for a coil
manufacturer and mentioned that they used a kind of wire on which a hot iron
would remove the insulation, so these types of problems rarely arose. It
would be nice if the 38S kit and any others with toroids used that same kind
of wire!
So now I'm on to packaging and mods. Here I have several questions.
First, does anybody have any good suggestions for miniature pots for the rig,
something that's not overly expensive? Have any vendor part numbers I can
refer to?
I want to adjust the tuning range for the rig (get the low end with the
DXers), and I've read the posts concerning it. However, would it make sense
to simply replace D3 with a varactor? Anyway, can anybody tell me how much
capacitance a 1N4004 is spec'd for?
Thanks,
Paul, AA1MI
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