Tag: Etherkit

Made it up to the mixer stage of CRX1 tonight. The bandpass filter is the next section and has a couple of inductors, so I thought that would be a good stopping point.

Also soldered on header pins for attaching the external bits. How I’m going to attach the external bits to the header pins, I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to try to find some header pin connectors from somewhere.

Applied 12V power to the board, and there was no smoke or flames, so I’ll take that as a good sign. Saw 11.8V – 11.9V at a few places on the board. so hopefully that’s another good sign.

Want to try your hand at building an Etherkit CRX1? They’re now available over in NT7S’s Etherkit store!

Since it’s a kit using almost all surface mount components, assembling can seem a little daunting if all you’ve done so far is through-hole stuff. Jason offers up a good surface mount tutorial for beginners, and there are plenty of videos on YouTube to watch that will show you how to do surface mount work. It’s easier than it seems, but does require a little more care and attention to detail. Many people I’ve talked to seem to end up preferring it to through-hole stuff after a while.

I’m enjoying building mine so far. Don’t know if it works yet, but hopefully I haven’t done anything to mess it up.

Made it up to the IF amplifier stage of the CRX1 build. Got a helpful critique of my soldering technique from Thomas/LA3PNA before I started working on it today, so hopefully the parts I did today look a little better. Made it up to the point where T1 gets attached before I decided to call it a day. Figured it was a good stopping point.

Still haven’t applied power yet so I don’t actually know how the assembly is going. I think once I get T1 put on, I’ll work on attaching the header pins so I can attach some of the external components. Then I can run through some of the tests.

Ahh, the smell of melting solder.

Started soldering the bits onto the CRX1 circuit board. After going through and taking inventory of everything and noting where everything goes, it was time to heat up the soldering iron.

Here, the power conditioner (middle right) and audio amp (upper left) stages have been completed. Haven’t applied power to the board yet. One of the people assembling a beta kit used header pins and connectors for the external parts (like the power connector, pots, etc) so I think I’ll do the same. Then I won’t have to worry about soldering temporary wires when I get around to testing things.

I made it half way through the sidetone oscillator stage (lower middle) before I decided to call it quits for the night.

Having everything on one side of the board definitely makes things a little easier. I don’t need to flip the board over, and the board lays flat on the table. The pieces are still pretty small, but with some more experience under my belt now, it’s not so bad. I’m starting to like working with SMT, although I haven’t quite decided if I prefer it over through hole.

While I was working, the lens from my magnifier light fell out. One of the clips had broken and the lens ended up falling out. Fortunately I wasn’t soldering at the time so it just fell into my lap and onto the ground. No breakage fortunately, but now I’ll have to figure out how to secure the lens with one of the clips missing.

Back at it tomorrow.

Thanks to Jason/NT7S, I now have a new kit to work on: the Etherkit CRX1. I have to admit that getting it was a bit of a surprise. When I pulled the box out of the mailbox, I thought it was the CC1 I had to send back for fixing.

The CRX1 is the little brother receive only version of Jason’s CC1 kit. Like the CC1, it’s almost all SMD components with a few through hole pieces. Everything is on one side of the board though, which should make assembly easier.

According to Jason, this is production kit #1. I’m looking forward to putting this one together. Hopefully I don’t mess anything up this time. As with the CC1, I’ll be documenting my build progress here.