Sure seems to me that it would be a lot easier to make several littler boards to provide better shield ing between stages. ? Put the amplifier off by itself as a module. ? Try to deal with the skinny/longer trace issues. ? There might be a way to use more than one SI 5351 so you could avoid some of the cross talk. ? ?Add in a physical mode switch so you can solve the thorny CW offset issues, by knowing for certain which mode is requested BEFORE The key is pressed. ?
By adding in a duplicate receiver portion, and some diode switching, you might make a full break in CW Station.?
I¡¯m just talking out of my head but I bet some people know how to do all of this easily.?
toggle quoted message
Show quoted text
On Nov 13, 2020, at 18:13, Jerry Gaffke via groups.io <jgaffke@...> wrote:
?Fritzing is apparently easy for a beginner to get started, but limited.
For example, a max of 2 layers.? It does create gerbers.
If you prefer a standard C tool chain over the Arduino IDE,?
you may not like Fritzing.
gEDA is worth a look, it's a powerful set of tools.
I've concluded that for my needs, it's either Kicad or gEDA.
Kicad is moving forward with new releases, gEDA is not.
Though if gEDA is good enough, that might be a good thing.
I'm not impressed by the 3D models some packages offer.
Perhaps if I was designing something really tight and complex
in all three dimensions, like a cell phone.? But otherwise that 3D stuff
is mostly just eye candy, and a huge waste of disk space.
Creating netlists can be done with any schematic editor, that's
a separate process from laying out a board.? Creating a netlist by hand
in a text editor can be faster than doing it in a schematic editor.
A python script to reduce a hierarchical circuit description in?ASCII text
to a netlist would be fun and easy to create.
A visual representation can be helpful, especially with analog circuits.
But ASCII text is a lot more malleable, a couple decades of writing VHDL
for FPGA firmware has made me quite comfortable with just text as a way
of describing a hardware design.
Jerry, KE7ER
