Greetings from a new list member in Switzerland! Many years ago, in a different phase of my life, I discovered the NixiSat and fell in love with the design.
I contacted Jeff Thomas and bought a full kit, including the enclosure and the cherry wood base. I also bought 6x Z5680M from Jan Philipp Wuesten for 22 EUR each, I guess I have had better ROI on those nixies than on any bank account, and some stock too! All of this happened in October 2003. Of course everything remained in their boxes, and lived thru different relocations, from Brussels to Rome to Milan, and finally Switzerland, close to Lausanne, where I have been living for 5 years now. Lately I felt the urge to go back to some activity in electronics and radio (I am also a licensed ham with callsign HB9FGJ) and I dug out of the attic the boxes with the NixiSat kit and tubes. Now it’s time to build it, and I’d like to ask for any specific advice from other who have completed this kit, to know if there is any specific pitfall I should be aware of. I have noticed that the building of the columns where the dots of the colons are looks a little complicated, so I might required some help there. One of the things that I would like to do is to substitute the Motorola Oncore GPS boards with an ESP8266 with NTP, and have already seen two designs to achieve this. None of the two supports the PPS signal which is required by the firmware, according to an email exchange I had with Jeff when I bought the kit back in 2003. I have also seen that a different firmware for the PIC was produced by Jeff, to support the $GPRMC NMEA strings and disregard the missing PPS, am I correct in this assumption? Does anyone here have the possibility to program a new PIC with the latest firmware created by the late Jeff Thomas? Finally, I have seen the PIR modification to extend the life of the tubes, seems a reasonable thing to implement. I need to look into implementing it once the clock is built. I look forward to any feedback you might have, and I will update you on the building as it progresses. Best regards and 73 to all the hams out there! Luca Bertagnolio HB9FGJ close to Lausanne, Switzerland -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/etPan.58c6db35.5d58c577.1481%40lucaberta.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
