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Having been thoroughly concerned about soldering SMD’s it’s apparaent that they aren’t all that bad!

Last night I finished the preliminary build and completed the checks on the build notes. There were a few odd voltages across some of the pins of a U6 and U8 but it seemed to fire up ok and was recognised as a USB device. I was able to change frequencies and connected up the audio. There was a reassuring hiss of the noise I’d expected but slap bang in the centre of every tuned band was an enormous band of noise. None of the band pass filters were installed so this may be a cause but after checking things again and removing the HF Lite altogether the noise was still there. Maybe it doesn’t like my machine, but I’ll check again later and if it’s still there with some filters installed. Below is the screenshot

Last night i tried out my SMD sodlering skills on a very generously donated board and few surplus components, thanks Kevin, and I’m happy to say that it wasn’t as hard as I forst thought. I managed a few without any magnification and as long as there is good light then I’m not sure that its actually that hard on the 1206 type components. A couple of the smaller ones presented a bit of a problem so i tried firstly under a 2x magnification and that seemed to do the trick and used the 4x microscope to check against Kevins soldered joints.

A few were ‘over soldered’ but the technique developed and after 20 or so attempts they weren’t looking too bad. So this evening I will start on the power supply part of the softrock

I spent an hour or so with Kevin, MOKHZ last saturday getting a brief lesson on SMD soldering and I’m a bit more confident now about how to put the softrock together. Now all but the iron tip has arrived so as soon as that turns up I’ll be starting the project properly.

So far I’ve borrowed a very nice microscope from a friend who’s into beekeeping and he used it for a bit of bee pathology. It’s way more than I need but useful none the less to use this is much better than to struggle with nothing. New flux pen, solder 3rd hand (although Kevin did suggest that blu tack works just as well and judging by the quality of the boards he showed me it works very well). Kevin also introduced me to some best practice and it was a really useful time. So thanks kevin and I’ll be on S22 when I hit a problem!

Hopefully the rest of the Farnell order will turn up today so i can start putting things together

Whilst I was there Kevin showed me his HPSDR and his Quicksilver receiver and they are simply amazing. maybe one day I’ll be building one myself. First things first lets do the softrock!

The CMOS chip is due to arrive soon so i’ll have a complete kit ready for my blundering soldering skills to knacker up. I’ve done a bit of research as to the best way to solder some of these tiny little monsters and I think it’ll be a bit of achallenge to get them all to work as intended and look pretty.

So the goal for this kit is to solder it so it works and not to make it look pretty!

Now that I’m back into the land of semi normality and that sleep is now a thing of the past my HF Lite arrived a few days ago and I’ve had a good look through the parts and I think that I may have bitten quite a big chunk for my first home brew project

After seeking a bit of advice on how to solder the SMD’s I’ve got a few choice as to how I get the components on the board and get them soldered. One thing for sure is that it ain’t going to be a pretty build. I’ll be starting on the build at the weekend and I’ll be posting the progress and without sounding too negatives some of the problems that I encounter.

A few useful links though

SDR official website

Softrock Yahoo Group

Build instructions