[hpsdr] Is anyone doing a Hermes Mini-Circuits group buy

[David McQuate]

We now have interest expressed for 40 Hermes MiniCicruits kits, plus a 
few additional parts.
At the moment the RLP-40+ is out of stock.  I'm checking with 
MiniCircuits to see when they might be available.

When they are again available, it looks like US $45 will cover parts, 
tax, and shipping (to me and to you) per kit for US addresses.   For 
multiple kits, the cost of kits after the first one will be $40 each, 
since several kits will fit in the small USPS flat rate priority mail box.

I have yet to determine shipping cost to Canada & Australia.

----------------------------
On the VNA reflection bridge, I now have interest expressed in 9   
TC1-1-13 balun transformers for US addresses.

I have two questions--

(1)  There are several variants of this part --
TC1-1-13M+
TC1-1-13M-22+
TC1-1-13M-23+
TC1-1-13M-75+
TC1-1-13M-75X+
TC1-1-13MA+
TC1-1-13MG2+
TC1-1-13MX+

Which one do we want?

(2)  What interest is there in adding the coax, ferrite beads and 
circuit boards to the group buy?

The RG-178 coax (PTFE)  (Newark.com) is about $108 per 25m, and each 
bridge probably needs about 1 foot, so that seems like a good candidate 
to add to the MiniCircuits balun transformer.  (I'd want to do a trial 
build to make sure about the 1 foot length before I began chopping many 
lengths from  25m spool.)

The ferrite beads are only about $0.21 each from Digikey, but a group 
buy will eliminate the $5 service charge, and reduce the price by about 
a factor of 2 (yes, small potatoes!)

I've checked with Sam Wetterlin about using his ExpressPCB design & he 
has no objections to our using it.
It should be noted that he prefers the "Bridge with Balun Plus Beads" 
design over the "Three-Bead-Balun Bridge", but mostly because of better 
performance up to 1 GHz.

If there were interest, I could replicate his design to more or less 
fill an ExpressPCB mini-board so that several pairs would be on each of 
the three boards of the standard mini-board purchase.  There would be at 
least 9 pairs per order ($51 + tax & shipping)  With some slight 
reduction in board size that could go up as high as 27 pairs per order.

---------------------------------------------


73,
Dave
WA8YWQ