Dancing a jig..

The great thing about the NorCal 40A project is the stack of boards I accumulated through misuse of the PCB house's weird website. Having a passel of 'em, I figured the little rig is a great tutorial on building and electronics in general. Also, being the obsessive person I am, I scored Rutledge's Electronics of Radio, the test that Rutledge uses for his Cal Tech class based on the NorCal 40A.

Anyway, it became apparent to me that if I was going to delve into this and slam together variants of this little beast, a means of testing these without tacking on the controls making each project look like some electronic Medusa.

So, as Tim Allen famously said, "I rewired it!"

So I built a test jig (introduced in the previous pose below) that would support "plug and play" by incorporating headers and plug/connectors to the controls. (Thanks to Tom, N8TPN, for the lowdown on the connectors that led me to Pololu. A few minutes of browsing there yielded a moderately inexpensive method of implementing the re-usable setup.)

Anyway, the pictures below of my step-by-step construction of a 40 meter version are pretty self-explanatory. If you have questions, leave a comment and I will get back to you.

First, the labelled shots..

..and now the rest.

Entire test setup for K7QO's Phase 3 testing.

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This was one of K7QO's crystal checkers used in generating the 4.915 MHz signal to test the BFO.

And here's a little added bonus. When not in use, the soldering station wand cord used to get in my way and drive me nuts. So, I ran the cord through a used toilet paper tube and use that -- as shown -- as a means of gathering it up neatly.