Sad news, but some good news

First, the sad news:

Ron, a.k.a. "Thinking Brain Dog", passed away a few months ago. Not only was he my friend, but he was the fingers - and at least half the brain - behind this blog.

To explain that last bit: Ron and I first met a few years ago when he'd had been retired for a while, I had just been made redundant and decided to return to study, and we bumped into each other online. A little later we started catching up occasionally in real life, and I was welcomed into his group of retired friends - for the most part, ex-government techs or radio/TV servicemen. Eventually our semi-regular meetups became a sort of group 'show and tell' where we'd get together every few weeks, bounce ideas off each other, show off whatever we'd built, and argue about some of the absolute rubbish seen on the internet or in "Australia's Only Electronics Magazine"…

Then a couple of years ago I decided to dig out my old FRG-7700 & build a few projects around it. Ron had the idea to blog about it, and I was happy to mostly leave it to him. Together we designed them; I built them; and Ron blogged our mutual & group discussions in an odd sort of first-person narrative.

Unfortunately, just as we were finishing off the the memory unit late last year Ron fell ill again. By mid-January he was in and out of hospital, and he passed away at home a couple of months later aged … ahem, "80-something" ;).

Ron, you were a good, kind, and interesting friend, a fine mentor, and excellent company for a bunch of 'cranky old men' (and one middle-aged one!). You will always be remembered, and missed.

Some better news:

One of the things nobody tells you when you start blogging about ongoing projects is that sometimes you have to finish them yourself - even if you're not entirely happy with the result. I mean, of course, I'm aware of the concept of "finished" - you can't work, or even study, without bumping up against it somewhere - but it's usually something hard and external like "your assignment's due on the 21st" (or even "your degree ends in March; you need to get that second paper submitted and your thesis finished now!"), or "you've got 30 minutes to drive there & fix it before the shit hits the fan".

But none of that involves you having to decide whether something is good enough to call 'done' and walk away from. I'm also very sensitive to even mild criticism (I blame my parents), so I've got an unnatural aversion to leaving things not perfect. So I keep having to force myself to draw a line under things and call them "done".

So to help with that I've started a new section called "The Farm" as a place to put completed projects (and where I can pretend to myself that they're not quite finished and I'll get back to them later). You'll find it near the top of the sidebar menu.

Since it actually works to spec (although there's things I'd do differently now) it's time for the memory unit to go and live on The Farm. Currently there's schematics, board overlays, and gerbers for both boards, and the parts list and assembly instructions for the interface board. The remaining bits, including the main board parts list/assembly instructions, source code & libraries, etc. will follow soon.

Future stuff:

Apart from that, Ron's last post was about an IF buffer / IF strip we'd thought of adapting to provide a 455kHz IF output for SDR purposes. I've made a quick prototype of that and it works well - but, after looking at the FRG-7700 schematics the other week, I had an idea which might work just as well but involves next to no modifications to the radio. I need to investigate that before charging ahead with a full-blown project.

I'm also in the process of a reworking & updating an old analogue RF signal generator design - ~400kHz to 110MHz, separate AM & FM modulation, calibrated output, etc. Nothing particularly special, but it'll fill a couple of particular holes in my test gear lineup.

Beyond that? Well, a 12kHz IF downconverter, obviously, to go with the IF output. Somewhere too I've got a design for a small spectrum analyser/panadaptor add-on that'll use the IF out. I want like to revisit the power supply with an eye to minimising noise & heat. I'd like to do something about the BFO oscillators for U/LSB, which in my set at least are the drifty-est part of the whole thing. There's a couple of loop antenna projects I really should get around to trying. I'd really like to try building a replacement for that unobtanium display IC. And I've been itching for years to build a receiver from scratch - a Tayloe switched-mixer SDR looks like just the thing I'm after.

Let's see what the future brings…