> At 07:40 AM 10/6/2005, Dale Boresz wrote: >>Hello Tim, >>I'm confident that the hardware issues related to the Eham review are the exception and not the rule. Remember, many early purchasers of the SDR-1000 assembled their radios in sections, probably purchasing the board stack first, with the remainder to follow. That leaves a lot of opportunity to benfit from careful assembly technique, or to suffer from poor assembly technique. > > I doubt anyone soldered their own boards, and some of the problems with early units that have been reported have been either design decisions (switching vs linear regulator; heat problems with the DDS chips), failed > components, or things like broken traces. >
You still have to plug the boards together. I bought mine fully assembled, with enclosure, to avoid all that. I did own a 3 board stack, briefly, but quickly swapped for the full monty with W0VB who, himself, upgraded the stack. No problems going fully assembled and now that the boards aren't for sale separately, hopefully we're near the end of hearing about it. > Yep, the 1/8" stereo mini-phone jack connectors are crummy, but as I understand it, that was a design decision to allow folks to get up and running quickly with cables from radio shack or best buy. Ya gotta pick something when making that first board run, and then you're stuck with it. > I was told this was also done to enable certain board manufacturing techniques in terms of placement of the plugs directly on the board. I have often advocated that, someday, we minimize/get rid of this altogether with some sort of true USB interface to a small microprocessor, possibly sending in the I and Q stream as integers or IEEE floats, depending on what works best and then have either the D44 or an ordinary D/A A/D hidden inside either the current box or some sort of "caboose" for us old timers. Well, I can dream, can't I? But, it would get rid of _all_ the cable problems once and for all. I have the USB-to-parallel and it works fine on my underpowered laptop (1.4 GHz, Celeron) even without the latest recommended fix. I personally think this would get rid of 90 per cent of the problems if Gerald and that talented Flex team could somehow make it happen. > >>Right from the beginning, I had concerns about the fact that the total radio 'system' was actually distributed between a computer and the SDR-1000 hardware, and took the precaution of assuring that both the computer and the power supply for the radio were connected to the same isolated power source via an APC brand UPS system, model # "Back-UPS XS 1500". > > That's not a static inverter type UPS (at least as far as the cutsheet shows), so it doesn't really provide an isolated power source. when not running off batteries, it's really no different than plugging everything into a standard surge protected plug strip. > > This guy has a genius for finding problems I haven't. Not discounting them -- this isn't an appliance rig. And, I haven't hooked up an external KW yet, so maybe I'll have my own problems later. But, I've used my desktop with D44 and Santa Cruz, without half the problems. Now lappy plus Extigy, and I got that working within hours (after I learned where the driver was). I'm struggling a little with the D44 and SSB, though I have the audio solution for that which I just haven't put in. Need to ensure the Extigy is OK (as the Santa Cruz was) and I'm off to Belize with this. And this here note is from a guy who made about every possible mistake, including an inferior G5RV with RF feedback issues, an inadequate 12 v supply, and being clueless about sound card setup until my friends bailed me out. Several times. But, I got going and, eventually, I got into a groove where troubles stopped happening. Hope we can still make this guy happy. Maybe he should be on Teamspeak more? I don't recognize the call right away. Larry WO0Z
