Sunday Morning Building LVB Trackers

Well, I guess blogging isn't that difficult so we will continue...

A beautiful Sunday morning... Sun is shining and its 36 degrees outside, a heat wave. Got the dog walked and yesterdays blog done.

Today is Feb 1st which means the plane need its annual inspection. Can't fly it...


DE PLANE...



My mechanic is real busy right now so we're gonna wait and push the annual into the warmer months. That way we can fly it into the private field where he does his work. Don't have much time to fly anyway... too busy building trackers and other things. First trip of the year will probably be in May to Dayton a few weeks before Hamvention for a volunteers meeting. Great Fun! But I still hate not having the plane available.

Just had another Echolink QSO with Richard W9RRB. It was the first time someone returned his call. He was concerned something wasn't working right on his end. We had a short chat... I'm glad I answered him... sometimes I'm busy and don't which seems to be a rampant problem with may stations.

It's 9:14am time for breakfast at the Grille.

Wow, it's 10:36am and we're home from breakfast and my wife didn't force me to go shopping. So we'll start on the trackers and see if we can make some progress...

11:00am and the machined IC sockets are all completely soldered on. This was after tack soldering the sockets in place last night. That takes about 20 minutes. Now we can start mounting more parts. Capacitors, the 4mhz crystal and connectors.





11:34am the 4mhz crystal and 10k trimpot are installed. See picture below.







12:39pm, 4 bypass caps and the xtal load cap installed. Plus I checked my email and ebay auctions. See pic below. Hope the pics are not too redundant.





2:10pm the picture below shows 6 signal diodes and 1 12volt zener diode installed. These are located mostly on the lower left corner of the board. I usually install these with the resistors since they have the same footprint but I temporarily misplaced them and when ahead with the ic sockets. The idea being to mount the parts that have the same height so that the board does not skate around while soldering. Someday I may build a soldering jig to place the board in then it won't make much difference. The diodes are a pain cause they come on tape and they need to be cut and bent. Need bending jigs for that too! Some day ! ! !







Here are some of the boards with the diodes ready to be soldered...





My wife Sue wants me to go shopping. So we have the first interruption of the afternoon.
2:28pm...



3:31pm back from the pet store. We snuck Rufus out of the house and took him with us. Dogs are allowed in the pet store but all three of ours are too much. But Rufus is a good boy so he gets to go...


Rufus (BOO)




Now to mount the electrolytics...



6:06pm the electrolytics and reset switch are all mounted and soldered up. BOO wanted to go on his late afternoon walk so we had a 20 minute break in the action





Well, that's it for me today. The Super Bowl is about to start and Sue has prepared a snack spread for us to enjoy. The parts from Mouser should be here tomorrow (Monday) and that will bring the 4 NPN transistors that will allow us to finish the boards built this weekend. Also arriving are the 8 conductor connector shells that will allow us to finish the four or so trackers that we wanted to ship out last month. Hopefully that will get us closer to being caught up.

73's
Mike, WB8CXO