WEEKEND ! ! It's Saturday! Building LVB Trackers

08:30am

Saturday morning... man the weeks seem to fly by but not as fast as the weekends. IT'S WARMING UP ! ! ! 45 degrees outside. Walked Rufus and took Mork and Mindy out front. The snow is still piled up about two feet or so. MELTING but still too high for the doxies. So they roam the sidewalks which I keep clean with the snow blower. Sue has already left for the Crooked River Grill... Something about having trouble sending them an email so she wanted to try the connection at the restaurant. She needs to send out the next coupon for Valentines day so she might get that started too. As it turned out Road Runner Business Class email servers were down this morning.


This weekend I hafta work on LVBTrackers. The boards started last Saturday are still not done. The 7805 5 volt regulator needs to be soldered in and heatsink installed. The flux needs cleaned off the bottom of the boards. 7805 voltage checks. Yes, I had one put 12v on the output one time costing a pic and a lcd display. So just after cleaning and before pic loading I check for 5 volts. Then the pics are installed and flashed. Then they are ready for installation. I was hoping to get 5 or 6 ready for shipping by last weeks end but discovered I only had 2 boards ready to go so hopefully we can ship the beginning of the next week and will probably still be behind the demand. Be careful what you wish for !!! Gould tried to warn me.

Other than that the middle bedroom needs to be accessed so I can get into the attic. There is a critter up there just making all kind of racket and who knows how much damage. Hopefully the warm weather will flush the critter out, probably a squirrel, and I can discover how they are getting in and block it. I use to like squirrels but after the first time a few years ago they invaded the attic I hate them.... We even stopped feeding the birds cause the squirrels horned in on their feed.

Also need to goto the hangar to get the plane ready for inspection... So it will be another busy weekend.

9:23am Off to breakfast!

Spent a bunch of time at breakfast this morning. Sue could not log into the road runner business email server from home so she took off for the restaurant about an hour early to see if it would work on their business connection... it didn't. So after breakfast I tried to set up the account on my laptop and it failed too. Tried to use Sues laptop and it failed when attempting to login. So we called the RR Business Class tech support number and guess what... they are having server problems and have no idea when they will get them fixed.

11:15am

So we finally got home... Let the dogs out, fed the dogs & cats, took the scrap papers to the school, cleaned the snow out of the bed of my truck.

1:04pm Now I am stuck on the computer.

Doing email! Matrix Orbital replied to yesterdays email so we have that issue in work. Replied to them.

Skip, WB6YMH set up an AR Newsline server on IRLP where all you need to do is connect (node 0016) to it and it spills out the current AR Newsline recording. Neet... but it wouldn't work on my node 4710. Seems there is an environmental file that need some editing. The email message gave the wrong location for the file. But I found the file, edited it and still no go. Searched the IRLP Yahoo Groups for the fix.

1:33pm
Well I give up on the AR Newsline server node... made the changes called for and it doesn't work. Nothing I do is easy.

Hungry...


2:58pm
Got the AR Newsline server node working. For some reason I added "ALLOW_EXPERIMENTAL_SERVERS=YES" to the /home/irlp/custom/environment file instead of "ALLOW_EXPERIMENTAL_NODES=YES" and guess what... IT WORKS ! ! ! All a repeater user needs to do is enter dtmf "0016" and when connected to node 0016 Amateur Radio Newsline will be heard. Included are breaks to keep the repeater timeout timers reset. Pretty neet. This is provided by Skip, WB6YMH.

3:08pm Now onto building trackers... It's so easy to get distracted...

3:38pm
7805 regulators are mounted and soldered in. Now to install their heat sinks!

4:10pm
7805 regulator heat sinks are attached. The compressor is running storing air for the flux cleaning step. The picture below shows the pcb with all the parts mounted and soldered. All that's left is flux removel, pic installation and flash and usb board installation.





4:22pm Begin board cleaning.

5:16pm Board cleaning pretty much complete. This is also a time for me to give the solder side of the boards a good look over. It amazes me what I miss. Rufus wants his afternoon walk so I gotta go anyway. Before and after boards pics to follow.

5:37pm Dog is walked. Now dinner.

11:03pm Well the evening when to hell. Got into one of them internet research tyrades where you get stuck looking stuff up. Then K8CNN called me on Skype so we've been there. But I did get the boards cleaned and inspected. See the b4 and after pics below:

Some folks probably think it's a waste of time, effort and material cleaning the flux off of pcb's. Well I don't and clean them... The one to the right is uncleaned -------------------------->













<--- Here's a close-up of the upper right corner. You can see the flux puddled around each connection. Just looks nasty!













To the right ------->
is the cleaned board. The glare is bad so look at the close-up picture below of the top right corner.








<-----Top right corner. Looks much better. Enough said!









11:19pm