As was mentioned, construction may be impractical for many hams. In my case, I have been soldering since around age 13 or so with my first crystal radio kit and later many kits and dozens of projects over the years, so it is not too difficult to make a simple interface.
Today, because of my age, it is increasingly difficult to do close work without special help. I normally wear trifocals and the close-in distance is for book reading at around a foot, but it is very much at the bottom of the glasses and difficult to use so I sometimes use magnifying googles. Due to an error in having some bifocal "computer" glasses made, with computer on the main portion and the full lower portion for reading, it turned out that they cut the lower part so that the focus was more like 8 inches. This actually slightly magnifies things but the downside is that I have to work extremely close to the work which also means that I need to be careful with any solder splashes, etc. Speaking from personal experience, one should never solder without eye protection as I have had splatter several times, which would have been catastrophic without glasses or some shield. I might mention that for about 25 years I built and ran an electronic/AV/computer repair shop, so exposure was significant. The largest project I ever built was the Heath HERO robot, which was a very large undertaking for educational use through my employer. Realistically, most new hams do not do construction of electronic projects and many no longer own soldering equipment, so it is actually quite rare to find those who are both interested in such things and also interested in the communication aspects (much less the digital communication aspects) of ham radio. If you don't need full rig control, and can build the simplest possible kit, I recommend the Unified Microsystems SCI-6 Sound Card Interface at just over $30 delivered price here in the U.S. It would be difficult to build it from your own separately purchased parts at that price point. It includes both audio lines transformer isolated, which is not always true of other products, and it has a socketed optoisolator for PTT hard keying. It does require a COM or USB to COM port, however that may be preferable to VOX keying. The most difficult part is making up your own cables, and that may not be easy for some to do. 73, Rick, KV9U
