[hpsdr] Bare Boards

[Bill Tracey]

I'll admit to being surprised at the amount of interest in bare boards, 
turns out to be running a bit higher than I'd expected it would be.

I'd be interested to hear from the folks looking at the bare board option 
their reason for going that route.  Is it a cost issue?  Or really want to 
know the technology and figure building the board helps in getting to know 
how it works?   The ship building feeling one gets putting something like 
this together?

I'll admit I like building these things.  Having built two sets of these 
and done major repair work (FPGA replacement) on one, I'll happily go the 
built and tested route on this round of boards.    As others have pointed 
out, these are not beginner SMT boards.   The first set I did,  I did w/o a 
microscope using a fine tipped iron.  Doable but right at the margin of my 
skills w/o a microscope.   The 2nd set I did with a microscope and a mix of 
fine tipped iron and hot air and paste technique - this one was much easier 
with the microscope - I'll never consider doing 100+ pin 0.5mm pitch parts 
w/o a microscope ever again.     The other parts on the board that are 
somewhat troublesome to hand assemble are some of the resistor packs which 
are a leadless package (Personally, I do hope there's a special place in 
hell for the geniuses that came up with leadless packages)

I don't mean to discourage anyone from going the bare board route if that 
is what they want to do.  Just interested in folks reasons for building 
their own and want to make sure folks are aware how small/tight pitched 
some of the parts are.     Actually I'd hope to recruit some of the folks 
with the skills and tools to build this kind stuff by hand to get involved 
in some of the future projects.

Cheers,

Bill  (kd5tfd)




 1171604244.0