Finally the kit has arrived, but it had to wait as I was still in the process of finishing off the Rockmite and the Texas Topper (see posts below). Over the past few days I have started to build the kit after taking a further two days checking the inventory and reading over the manual.
The first and I can only say dumb mistake I made was winding the T1 Torroid, It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the winding's, in fact it was perfect. Four different winds on a small torroid, eight connections, as I said perfect. I'd even fitted it to the circuit board as instructed and begun adding some capacitors when I realised I had some capacitors missing and saw the bag marked 20m LPF! It suddenly dawned on me I had been in auto mode and for some stupid reason thinking I was building the 40m version (as per the Rockmite) instead of the 20m version!
Believe me, there was a lot of swearing when it dawned on me what I had done. Bloody typical that torriod was regarded by the manual as very tricky and I had just completed and fitted the 40m version perfectly, I was livid.
Now came the awful task of removing 4 capacitors and the 8 connections of the torriod, then reducing one of the winding's from 38 to 30 and three sets of 5 winds to 3. I honestly thought that's it, I ruined the kit before I had even got going! Miraculously, and I really don't know how, somehow, with much patience, I managed to remove and then fix and reset the torroid.
The PCB doesn't look too bad from the top, but underneath I had some scary moments where the tracking began to loosen through me heating and wiping off some solder to reopen the holes.
You can see the mess on the three triangular holes and the center track looks pretty beaten up, but I've checked and rechecked and the connections look OK. Somehow I got away with that stupid mistake.
The morale being the usual, read and read again the instructions and don't confuse your 40m Rockmite with your 20m QCX+
................More to follow over the next few days!
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