W.E.A.R.C.

               West Essex Amateur Radio Club, Essex Fells, NJ

                                   an ARRL Special Service Club             

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Mike, WA2QIC's Ham Blog

Page 9

The control board is another issue - there are measurements on that board that are not adding up.  Troubleshooting continues.  Meanwhile, I pace myself between tasks.  Here is the latest motherboard pic with all the 5v relays installed as well as the U1 IC socket:

  .    The 5v relays are all installed in one shot.  You position all the relays on the PCB, put a flat board on top of them and then flip it over.  I soldered only two end pins per relay at first to make sure they were all truly flat against the PCB - most were not completely flat, so I went over each relay and flattened all the them to the PCB by reheating the two soldered leads for each relay. 

25-AUG-2006:  I worked through to the first series of resistance tests.  Here I had no issues with these tests.  Here is a  pic of the RF PCB at the first resistance tests stage:     Continuing on to install a number of additional components, I have a few minor critiques of the manual:  The description of components that are not marked, or minimally marked is inconsistent.  Where-ever Elecraft describes a component, the description is dead-on, and very helpful.  However, there are not enough of these descriptions in the install steps.  At the point where a number of jacks were to be installed, you are forced to fish through the back of the manual to see an illustration of the part in the Parts Inventory Appendix.  It just seems to me that, with modern desktop publishing tools, it would be easy to put the pic of these unmarked parts right there at the install step where they would be most handy.  Stopping to page through the manual one step after another after another is rather annoying.  Also, sometimes it's not completely clear when soldering of components is supposed to occur or not.  In terms of grouping componants together and then soldering vs. soldering each component as you go.  This could be clarified.  However, to emphasize, these are minor complaints in the scope of things.

The next steps in the manual have me partially assembling the radio - installing the front panel, and control boards to the incomplete RF board and attaching to the bottom and side panels of the outer shell of the rig.  Very exciting to see the radio come together this way.   The purpose of the partial assembly step is to stage the components built thus far for some basic voltage and function tests (except for the SSB PCB, which is not installed at this point).  So I completed the assembly steps, the Front Panel and the Control Board fit perfectly on the first try, the sides and bottom fitted without adjustment.  I wired up a 13v power supply, connected everything up and...... 

IT IS ALIVE!

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   This old Radio