[hpsdr] Penelope: what do I need to built my own?

[Rob Frohne]

Hi Henk,

Take heart.  It is not as difficult as you think.  There are several 
options.  My favorite is to use solder paste and a toaster oven.  It 
takes a little effort to get geared up for that, but you can build the 
board a lot faster than the old fashioned soldering methods, especially 
if you can get a solder paste stencil.  You need to get the chip aligned 
properly, and that is a bit difficult, but care and persistence pay off.

Other methods for one time use that work but are more difficult are 
solder paste with a heat gun (clean up with soldering iron and solder 
wick), and the old fashioned method of soldering the corner pins under 
the microscope and then running a bead of solder down the pins.  The 
solder mask helps keep bridges to a minimum and then you clean up with 
solder wick and the iron. 

A few years back I thought that surface mount components would take my 
hobby away, but they have actually made it much easier due to less 
parasitics and with the toaster oven, much faster build times.

73,

Rob, KL7NA

Henk Remijn PA5KT wrote:
> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
>
> As the Penelope prebuilt is not available and I want a working 
> transceiver I consider building myself.
>
> It looks like all components are available.
>
> Only issue is how I can solder the FPGA on the board. Anybody 
> experience with that? Spacing between pins looks really small.
>
> Henk
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-- 
Rob Frohne, Ph.D., P.E.
E.F. Cross School of Engineering
Walla Walla University
100 SW 4th Street
College Place, WA 99324
(509) 527-2075			 http://people.walllawalla.edu/~rob.frohne

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