[hpsdr] Atlas orientation in Pandora...

[Isaac Weksler]

I have purchased from TAPR the PANDORA enclosure with the intention to
assemble a complete HPSDR. And I wish to share with you the difficulties
I've had to install the boards I've got from Gerd DJ8AY. The Gerd's boards -
HERCULES, the Antenna Switch and the Display Unit - are top quality. But
PANDORA enclosure design seems to ignore them completely. At least the
version I've got.

I wished to install HERCULES in place reserved for ALEX, as it seemed
optimal. And then I discovered the following:

   1. The height of the enclosure is about 1mm short for accommodating the
   HERCULES heatsink and, actually, the PC board itself. I had to cut off a
   portion of the upper part of the enclosure to fit the HERCULES height.
   2. The BNC connector holes for ALEX: only one of them (the 2nd from the
   bottom up, leftmost) *approximately *fitted the HERCULES' BNC connector.
   And that only if HERCULES is installed with the heatsink toward the inside
   of the enclosure. 'Approximately' means that I had to widen the hole to the
   right, otherwise the ATLAS board edge didn't let the heatsink fit.
   3. There is no provision for securing HERCULES to the enclosure by a
   couple of screws in addition to nut fastening the BNC connector to the
   backpanel provided by Gerd.
   4. Not mentioning the trouble of cutting out the opening for Gerd's
   Display Unit in the front of PANDORA. The tools needed for that are not
   readily available and most of the hams do not have them.

In my opinion it would be worthwhile to make the effort (what with the
e-mail and Internet available to all) to correlate the PANDORA, ALEX and
HERCULES designs to save this pain.

73
Isaac 4Z1AO
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openhpsdr.org/pipermail/hpsdr-openhpsdr.org/attachments/20100825/7938e632/attachment-0002.htm>