[hpsdr] Alex

[Jeroen Bastemeijer]

Dear Scotty,

How are you? Very busy with the HPSDR-project, I guess. ;-) I don't want 
to consume too much of your time, but I have one burning question (or 
maybe it is more a remark).

Alexiares will only be offered as a ready build board. For some reason, 
this doesn't seem right to me. Once we started the project, the general 
idea was to build the boards ourselves. However, some people had 
problems soldering the big FPGA's with small pins and other tiny 
components. Therefore the assembled versions were offered as well.

At this moment we have a nice board (Alexiares), which could be fairly 
easy assembled. There are just a few 'easy' SMD components and a lot of 
through hole components. Through hole components are easy to assemble 
for hams and a nightmare for contract manufacturers. Therefore it is not 
clear to me why Alexiares is not even offered as a bare PCB and or as a 
partial-kit. If  The kitting would be easy, because, if I remember 
correctly, the cores are already wound.

The other advantage is that we could save money by assembling our own 
board. The contract manufacturer did a good job on the last boards, so 
that's not the reason for not using his services this time. But at this 
moment there is no real need for a manufacturer to build the boards.

We could have some real ham-spirit in the project again by assembling 
our own boards, and we could save some dollars by building the boards 
ourselves. These saved dollars could be used for other exciting parts of 
the HPSDR project, for example for the very neat Pandora enclosure.

I know there was some discussion about it on the list, but no real 
answers were given (at least I couldn't find any). Hopefully you have 
some time to answer this question. Or, even better, give an opportunity 
to order Alexiares as a (partial) kit. ;-)

73 Jeroen PE1RGE
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