Pretty proud of myself for muddling through and building my first ever kit radio this afternoon.
Problem is, it doesn’t seem to be working. I followed the instructions and everything… 
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Heh Heh… Gotta love these Chinese instructions. I’m still trying to understand my G-90 manual.
K6YK
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I think i fried the thing already, which is nice. No matter though, the kit came with enough spares to start a new Radio Shack franchise.
I’ll dig out the DMM at some point next week and see what I fried. No huge loss, it was about €5 for the kit and was fun to build anyway!
Hopefully going to finish off the Adiemod Turbo 6000 Executive Edition Ghia tomorrow as the last parts arrived today and the 14th revision of my 3D print design finally works.
Fingers crossed…
Here’s the finished build of my 40m Pixie, prior to me frying it in lard:
What was it supposed to be? I don’t recognize it. (All circuit boards look the same to me).
Too bad it got fried because now it’s not “preminilarily normal” (?) I’m still lost in the translation of that sheet.
JL
40m CW transceiver for 7.023. In fairness the RX on these things is atrocious as the ‘filter’ (or lack of one) is so wide it spans about 6 different time zones. I’d have looked to add some sort of external filter to it, not sure what but anyways these kits are so cheap I might just get another if I can’t fix whatever I fried.
The instructions are baffling. Apparently the radio works well ‘in conjunction with the use of Simple Barron’.
No. I haven’t a clue either.
Have you wired the leads to the power plug the correct orientation. From the picture it looks like the black is going to the centre pin. Normally the standard wiring is pin is +ve and outer is -ve.
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You’re right. Faux pas! Nothing on the centre, I just had them wrong way round. Explains why when I tried 9v DC there was an odd smell. Oh dear.
No idea what fried. Guess I will have to test each component. Might not be worth the hassle.
Still, it was fun to build my first kit. I might try another one, or perhaps a little Kanga kit maybe. Something simple but with better instructions. The ones that came with this kit were atrocious.
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…and maybe take a night course in welding? I dunno, I always used to “solder” my kits, but Chinese kits seem to demand a higher level of mechanical security?
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A bit too secure when the leather shoes generating a 7mHz tone are essentially airgapped.
Maybe I need a pair of leather shoes, not just a solitary shoe to RX the 7mHz tone? Like a shoe doublet. Encrypted comms? 
This is all too funny! The G-90 service manual also mentions “welding” or places that
the welded terminals might have some loose. And many other strange statements that are hard to make any sense of. They really need a translator to edit their documentation…
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Some of the kits have a bridge rectifier to avoid smoke release, dosen’t seem that one does though.
You should have dug it out before applying power. After building something I always check that there isn’t a short across the power connection and that ground is consistent between boards or connectors to check I haven’t got the polarity wrong somewhere.
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