Welcome back for our next installment on building the just released Sienna transceiver kit by DZKIT. This time we will go through the assembly of the DCD and IF boards.
First a little house keeping. a couple of things I have tried to do to make assembly of the kit a little easier and nicer. I will also point out a mistake that I made so that you might try to avoid it.
1. I have tried to line up all of the components on the boards so that they are easy to read in case I ever need to work on them, i.e. when looking at the boards, I line the capacitors facing the same way so that when you look at the board to read it, they face the bottom of the board. Likewise, the resistors read from left to right.
2. When installing a number of components (like 32 resistors), I break them up into lots of 5, put them in place on the board and solder them. Then I check them with a magnifying glass that I have that is mounted on an arm with a light in it. Then I move on.
3. I learned the hard way, to make sure I completely read through the steps. You will see in the following pictures that I got ahead of myself and mounted Q1 on the wrong side of the board. After trying to remove it for 15 minutes, I finally realized it would be best to clip it off. I checked on Mouser and its cost is less them a dollar, so I contacted Brian and ordered a new one from him.
The DCD Board. I assembled the components to the board. Here you can see it laying in the tray. I haven't finished connecting it to the antenna connectors, because I decided to go ahead and order the antenna tuner module, and as you will see in the next photo, I have to fix my mistake on Q1.
In this picture, you can see the incorrect placement of Q1.
Here is a picture of the bottom of the DCD board. Note the correct placement of U8. Q1 should be right next to it.
Now on to the IF board. This was a lot of fun. I haven't counted, but there are somewhere between 200 to 300 components on this board. The one quick hint that I can pass along, is when soldering the 4 pin connectors to the board, I would just hold them in place and just barely solder one pin to the board. Then I would turn them over and straighten them out. Then I would go back and solder the rest of the pins with a final hit of solder on the original pin. I also didn't catch Brian's note on "IF Filter Package 4", the Collin's Mechanical Filter. If you are going to add that, you should do it during assembly. The rest of the filters are added easily after it is constructed, but this one would require you to do some disassembly, so I ordered it with the tuner module.
Here you can see the top side of the IF board completed.
Here is the bottom side of the IF board.
I haven't kept a full accounting of the time I have put into construction so far since I have been doing it while working on other projects for my business (pays to be the boss), but I would guess so far I have about 6 hours into it.
Next time we will cover the Assembly of the RX Board and the RXBPF Board.
