Hi all
Recently it came to our attention via a couple of customer complaints, that there were some defective PCBs in some of the LPF kits. The problem is that the holes for the toroid wire appear to have been changed to a smaller diameter and treated as vias by the PCB manufacturing, therefore they are filled in and there is no solder mask, they appear as covered vias. The attached photos should make it clear.?
It's annoying because normally we check everything carefully and in many cases of the various kits, build one kit of a new batch to validate; but when it's a PCB so simple as the LPF that's been in production for 10+ years, you can get complacent! Anyway my team now?checked all our packed LPF kits and removed all the defective boards. We still have LPF kits in some bands that have the previous boards and are fine.?
1) If anyone received the incorrect PCBs please let me know offlist and we'll send you proper replacements.?
2) If anyone can imagine a use for the defective PCBs we have, panels of LPF PCBs, the recent batch of 2,000 boards is ALL defective... will send a 2x6 panel free to a good home (NOT free postage). Well my stockroom colleague and I were joking just now, some enterprising ham could round the edges a bit, put in a suitable hook and make a pair of defective PCBs into ear-rings for the fashion-conscious YL ham or devoted ham-XYL. Hi hi. Or prepare a bit of (necessarily trifilar) wire and make a pendant. Think big, think QRP Labs.
Of course I started a complaint with the PCB factory. First response: "you must have changed the gerber files and made a mistake!". I pointed out that the LPF kit debuted in 2013, the Rev 2 PCB currently in use dates back to 2015, and in total we sold over 62,000 LPF kits without incident, from this file, which has not changed since 2015... (check the file date)... so...?
Eventually it transpired that the PCB factory had recently hired a new production engineer who turned out to be even greener than the PCB soldermask, and he somehow changed something for reasons best known only to himself. They promptly made and shipped another 2,000 (correct) LPF PCBs; there's no gap in our kit shipments because we still have boards from the previous batch too. I'm just saying this in case anyone was affected and needs replacements, and in case anyone wants to go into a sideline of ear-ring manufacturing.?
