[hpsdr] Atlas orientation in Pandora...

[Jeremy McDermond]

Isaac --

AFAIK Pandora was designed well before Hercules was, and was never envisioned to fit one.  I know that Ron has fit one into a Pandora enclosure with some work, but Pandora was certainly not designed with Hercules in mind.

I'm not sure really how to put this, but keep in mind that Hercules isn't really a "sanctioned" OpenHPSDR project.  It was developed by Gerd on his own as his own project to be compatible with Penelope and sold to the public when the designs were ready for production.  AFAIK it went through none of the normal community processes that the other projects have.  I'm not saying it's not a nice amp, and I'm not saying that it's bad to have around, and I'm not bagging on Gerd in any way, I'm just saying that it's unusual because it's never been TAPR sponsored and produced like Penelope, Mercury, etc.

I'm sure if there's a Pandora II that folks would be more than willing to take input from the community on how to make it so that a Hercules fits better in the box.  I'm sorry if the wiki may have been misleading on the ease with which you can put a Hercules in a Pandora enclosure.  You may want to chat with Ron, W9KFB, about how he's made things work.

On Aug 25, 2010, at 12:36 AM, Isaac Weksler wrote:

> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
> 
> 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:
> 	• 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.
> 	• 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.
> 	• 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.
> 	• 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

--
Jeremy McDermond (NH6Z)
Xenotropic Systems
mcdermj at xenotropic.com




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