After 3 long days of waiting for my softrock to arrive, it finally did! Now I won't be waiting at the mailbox to meet the mailman!
Took me much longer than 3 hours to build, but I made some errors that had to be corrected:>:
For anyone about to go through this, I suggest the following:
Don't do like I did....and put the tanatlum caps in backwards! Even with a lighted magnifying lamp, I didn't see the little X on the component indicating the polarity. Had to remove 3 of them and reinstall them, fortunately I caught this before I applied power.
Software install went without a problem. I'm a little concerned that I didn't get prompted to install some other utility programs like the directions said I would....but it fired up without errors on the first try.
The moment of truth came.......time to plug it in and look for smoke.
No smoke, but the LED is very dim....oooopppssss, must be a problem. Turns out that's not a problem, they are all pretty dim,! The 2.2 K series resistor limits the LED current to 1.3 ma. No doubt, this was intentional due to the nature of the beast in that it draws power from the USB port.
My Dell laptop has no stereo input on the sound card and my antenna was a 6 foot clip lead laying on the bench. So, I haven't adjusted the null for the opposite sideband yet.
Even with the bad antenna, I heard a few signals, enough to know it works! Most of the signals I heard were noise coming from the computer though, but I dido manage to hear some CW. My computer is 59, much louder than the few signals I was able to hear with the limited antenna.
So, it looks real good so far.
At some point, my softrock will probably be installed in a box! So I attached both cables to the same side of the PCB, leaving one mounting hole available for the day when I want to install it in a box (both cables anchored to the same mounting hole).
Took me awhile to figure out how to adjust the frequency on the flexradio software.....but that was the hardest part of the software aspect of the testing.
Fired it up with SDRadio, it works with SDRadio software too.
I have a problem with occasional (very brief) dropout of the audio every 3 to 4 seconds for 100 msec's or so. It also pops when the audio drops out. It does this whether the softrock is plugged in or not though. Tried setting the soundcard to use mime instead of the windoze driver, but had the same results.
I can make a recording of it (I think). Will probably have time to work on it tonight after the house gets quiet.
So far so good.
Hope everyone's assembly goes as well as mine.
Regards,
Art
