What do 500 dongles look like?

Folks,

I now have received all the parts for over 500 dongles. In addition I am seeing a new assembler tomorrow who I believe will be able to help us.

Howard

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10 Responses to What do 500 dongles look like?

  1. Bruce says:

    That sure is pretty.
    But I’d hate to see the bill!
    🙂
    Bruce
    kf1z

  2. Mark N8MH says:

    THAT is awesome!

  3. Mike says:

    That is quite an investment – and a lot of soldering.

  4. Rob says:

    Good luck with the assemblers, I’ve lost faith with assemblers after reading about your past experiences with the FCD,years ago they would of been fighting to get the job, and you would of got a 99% yield.

    • admin says:

      I will know early next week… fingers crossed. Nothing like pressing the flesh. Sure, they cost a fair bit more than I have been paying, but I have a lot more faith after the meeting. Had a tour of the facility, and I even met the guy who’ll be pushing the buttons on the pick and place machine. We went over the inventory, not too much sharp intaking of breath, so hopefully….

      Howard

      • Augusto says:

        Well Howard,
        I hope all will be OK with them, and the next batch will be fine, and about 500 pieces… and no hardware problems when testing them before packing. I, like many others, will wait for the next sale; hopefully 500 pieces will last 3 or 4 minutes, so maybe I’ll endly get one . What about the user reported problems, was that an hardware relate item ?
        Keep the fine job Howard! 73 de Augusto hb9tza / 9h3jr

  5. Paul Knox says:

    Brilliant Howard!

    I have done lot of surface mount repairs on my electric bike controllers and I know just how tough it can be, great to see you are upping production, this should help things greatly and give you some of your spare time back!!

    Looking forward to the next batch going on sale and think I will jump in and get one!!

    Paul Knox

    G7LNK

  6. admin says:

    Oh, the 550 SMAs were rather daintily individually packed. The other half and I spent some time cozily in front of the TV a couple of nights back liberating them.

  7. Mike says:

    Hi Howard,

    About the HPF, what is the lowest limit on it and also what is the insertion loss?
    Can we order the FCD without the HPF mod?
    Thanks!
    Mike

    • admin says:

      Hi Mike

      I can certainly supply one without the HPF mod, it will add five minutes to my leisure time!

      I haven’t measured it precisely but empirically I’d say SINAD drops by about half a dB at 2m: I test the sensitivity of all units both before and after the HPF is added because very occasionally I switch out an LNA due to bad sensitivity or the tuner image rejection isn’t good enough so I have to switch out the tuner chip. It’s easier to do that without the HPF rework getting in the way.

      The reason it went in there was to alleviate some of the strong signal intermod issues at VHF: strong HF signals were adding to to mix too. The 3dB point is about 60MHz.

      Howard