BITX 40

Spent a pleasant afternoon yesterday working on the Bitx 40 with two other hams. Sort of a mini buildathon I suppose. Dave, VE3EAC, offered up his terrific shack/workshop for our get together. 

Dave not only has all the usual electronic test equipment you would ever need, but has all the tools needed to work on your cases as well. This makes things go so much smoother.  No need to mess around with inappropriate tools to accomplish what would be a simple task.  I need to re-think that end of my shack.  Another thing that came to light is the use of a 3d printer.  Dave printed up bezels for the lcd screens. Makes for a nice finished front panel that would not have been possible in my hands. 

I got no further than mounting the lcd, circuit board and the various controls and jacks. I did manage 2 connections as well but I decided that the layouts and mounting the hardware was time better spent first. Paul, VA3LX however, went with wire up the whole thing first and put it into a case later. It wasn’t too long before while filing out the square hole for my lcd, that we heard the hiss of 40 meters. Connecting up an antenna we were able to hear some strong ssb signals and we were pleased with the initial tests.  It was very encouraging to hear this. 

Since I’ve built transceivers before, kits and from scratch, I'm looking forward to putting most of my energies into other aspects of building transceivers with the Bitx. Software improvements and other hardware modifications. Possibly the move to 60 meters comes to mind but maybe a multiband would be a better proposition. Playing around with enhancements and not just getting the rig to work does have some appeal. Maybe not all the time but this time anyway.

Incomplete projects on the bench is growing again and I really need to start finishing some of them. The shack is in a little bit of disarray as I work on repairing my spectrum analyzer and SNA. The SA is so big that the other equipment that lived on top of it are now on the floor. The SNA is in pieces and the SA covers and various brackets spread out. In the middle of all that mess is the current project. It’s getting a little hard to move around.