A Tale of
Poor Engineering
Or,
“One More Improvement to the Improved SWA !”
Jeff
, VE1ZAC
Yesterday was a blowout weather wise for a planned dive, so I spent the
day in the shop and performed a complete rebuild of the control unit for the SWA.
I admit the MK1 unit got pretty ratty. Embarrassing actually. I might actually want to show this thing to
other prospective low band aficionados, and that unit just wouldn’t cut the
mustard. It worked fine, but my normally solid building methods deserted me
towards the end. What convinced me to start over, however, was a paint failure ! I had sprayed the box with a gloss lacquer I had
lying around, and it was just to shiny for my
shack. So, I ran up to my local hardware
store ( yes,
I had another
slightly larger case and lots more copper clad circuit board. Normally I would
have made one board with this technique, but the L&C switch assembly really
seemed fine the way it was, so I re-used it. Everything else started over.
This is more of a
picture story, so I will let the photographs tell the story. Needless to say,
this was a big improvement. The unit
even performs better, probably due to a lack of pesky cross coupling and
interaction. I added a preamp off-on switch as well.