I attached the stepper motors for the variable vacuum capacitors in the PI-tank today. It went very well and they turn fairly easy, so it should be no problem for them at all to turn them. I will now need to put some feed-through capacitors for the cables to the motors, as well as to the vacuum relays. I also need to attach the potentiometer which will be used to give an absolute position of the capacitors.
Today I worked some on the amplifier again. I haven’t been doing that for a while, but now I will do some work on it to hopefully have it ready before the summer.
I milled some plates to hold the C2 capacitor, and also the stepper motors which will turn the capacitors. Tomorrow I will try to mount them, and start making the bracket which will hold the position pot on the C1 and C2 cap.
We had some problems this weekend with a relay which would sometimes not switch properly, so we would lose the RX. We are quite certain that it is the TX/RX relay for the amp, which I built earlier. Since its not in a warm place I suspect that moisture can be one problem, so instead of messing around with that just before CQ 160m I just built a new TX/RX relay with vacuum relays instead.
I have some soldering left, but the mechanical part is almost done, just need to add some shield wall and cover for the back of the relays.
Just did a bit more work on the electronics for in-band listening. Attached a couple of relays and the control board. Now I will make three boxes which can mute an RF signal (with a relay) and start to connect things to the control board. I will also need to make the control box, which will basically just have a few switches and connectors. Not control electronic in that one.
