Holy Cow! Get a load of this:
I hadn’t looked at any information on current “space weather” for some time now. So imagine my surprise and pleasure at seeing the figures for today: sunspot count (SN): 84, and solar-flux index (SFI): 115!!!!!
It really has been a crappy year, but with Solar Cycle 25 now clearly underway, and with that other felicitous development in November, I’ve been humming this song all day long. A real ear-worm:
Historically fitting, don’t you think?
No, I’m not referring to the horror novel by Justin Cronin, nor do I mean the twelve days of Christmas, the twelve disciples, or the Reginald Rose film “Twelve Angry Men.” I’m not talking about the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, Darryl F. Zanuck’s “Twelve O’Clock High,” Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” or Robert Aldrich’s “Dirty Dozen.” What I have in mind may be related obliquely to the twelve signs of the Zodiac because those represent the twelve months.
My “The Twelve” will be a year-long campaign to build a ham rig–a receiver, a transmitter, or a transceiver–each month beginning November (my birth month) 2020. I prefer not to think of this undertaking as particularly “ambitious,” “aspiring,” or “hopeful.” Perhaps “industrious” might be apt, inasmuch as I have long believed that humans are more industrious than they are intelligent.
My purposes here are manifold. One is to so fill the life of my mind with enough planning, designing, and “noodling,” that sloth, ennui, and disgust over the state of national affairs can find no roosting place. Another is to climb above the plateau I’ve rested on for some years now in order to turbocharge my knowledge and experience in the design and construction of RF electronics. In the process, I expect to become fluent in the use of the KiCad suite of design tools, Spice and other simulation packages, and the full use of my Rigol oscilloscope and other test gear. I also expect to resurrect some skills in metal work, PCB fabrication, and silk screening, to name a few atrophied faculties.
As I’ve already mentioned, some will be receivers, some transceivers, and at least one will be a stand-alone transmitter. Some will be CW, others SSB, and one will be a good ol’ AM phone. Some will be Manhattan-style construction, some will be built on home-designed and etched PC boards, some with all through-hole parts, and some with SMD components when needed. One of the receivers will be a regen, probably Charles Kitchin’s high-performance design. For reasons I can’t explain, I’ve also been hankering to build a super VXO something or other–probably for CW and maybe for a band that has a short CW segment such as 12 or 17 meters. One of the rigs will be entirely discrete components, including voltage regulation. One of the rigs will use as many ICs as possible, including regulation, audio, IF amps, PLL, etc. And lastly, one rig will use vacuum tubes as the active components.
I’ll be building one of the Twelve for 60 meters SSB. To ease what will be, by then, my overtaxed design burdens, I might just make it a BitX60, with an Si5351-based VFO/BFO, Hayward-Kopski TIA (termination-insensitive amps) IF amplifiers, and with recalculated values for the 5.5 MHz low-pass and band-pass filters. I might just use this rig to experiment with using the Si5351 and a second rotary encoder to allow for adjusting the phase of the BFO to better match that of the suppressed carrier of an incoming SSB signal. This may improve the fidelity and clarity of voice reproduction.
I’ll include a third encoder to allow for on-the-fly BFO frequency adjustments as well. Why not use a single encoder for the VFO, the BFO, and the BFO phase and just use a menu or the encoder button to step through the functions? The answer is: because I don’t want to, and I don’t need to, either. I hate multi-function controls like that. I can tolerate them when front-panel space must be conserved (as with a small field rig), but this BitX60 will stay in my shack and there will enough space for a few more knobs (for crying out loud!). I put rotary encoders on the I2C bus anyway, so I’m not “wasting” Arduino pins, either.
In November 2021, I’ll bring this break-neck and bust-ass campaign to a close with a real stretch: a QRP two-meter SSB transceiver. I’ve long been fascinated by VHF SSB, and I have in mind to use this rig mostly for mountain topping with many-element yagis. Except for some high-end all-band/all-mode commercial rigs, there’s very little out there for two-meter “weak signal” (VHF-speak for QRP) SSB. Rather than generate the USB at HF and then upconvert, I will attempt to make a phasing exciter native to two-meters and add a five-watt power amp. In addition to SSB, the rig will also operate in true CW mode (not MCW). If I’m reasonably successful with this, others might improve on what I do and build their own.
Sometime in the next few days, I’ll finalize the list of twelve rigs to build. Then will begin the intense research, design, and noodling as I bring together the information and intelligence to make all this happen. I’m not so optimistic to think I can come up with all the design details and logistics of each month’s build within that same month, so I’ll be weaving some of that in with each-month’s construction. They’ll be opportunity for doing so when I set the rig I’m working on aside (in lieu of drop-kicking it off my back deck) when I get stuck or stymied on some phase of the construction.
Of course I’ll post updates here about the steps along the way. Each post in the series will have “The Twelve” in the title. I’m also resurrecting the DIY RF YouTube channel and I’ll show some mileposts along the way. QSL?
Have you ever been bored out of your mind even when you had plenty of things to do and little time to do them? The child’s whine, “I’m bored. There’s nothing to do!” has never been my problem. My whine has always been, “Damn-it-to-hell-and-back, there’s too much to do!” It’s a much bigger problem when most of the things to do are perfect storms of complexity, uncertainty, frustration, struggle, disappointment, discouragement, bafflement, and unrealistic expectations. Sometimes, I freeze up, or experience a kind of mental vapor lock. Over the decades, I’ve found in such a funk that what I need is an injection of accomplishment feedback to my non-inverting inputs–my eyes, ears, tongue, and sense of touch (I’ll leave what my single inverting input is to your imagination). So I need to get something done and working (or cooked and eaten, written and mailed, laundered and folded, etc.), and I need it quickly.
So in such a mental state the other day, as I was rather aimlessly browsing YouTube hoping to find a video on yet-one-more piece of esoteric knowledge I couldn’t live without, Alan W2AEW’s video on the Michigan Mighty Mite (hereafter M3) came up–a one-transistor, crystal-controlled “transmitter” built up on a piece of copper-clad using five discrete components, hand-wound coils, and a variable capacitor. I knew I had all the needed parts on hand, and in a previous funk I had organized them in such a way that I could gather everything in just a few minutes. I had an already-cut piece of copper-clad board just the right size, and I had just purchased new soldering-iron tips which needed to be baptized in tin and lead. “By hell! The M3 is just the thing!,” I exclaimed. In addition to helping to break my vapor lock, I could once again experience what Bill N2CQR and Pete N6QW call the “Joy of Oscillation” (hereafter JO2). I found a circuit for the M3 from George KC6WDK’s website, and I proceeded to round up the parts.
I had a number of variable capacitors in my Junque Box I could use. From the M3s I’d seen, and from the value called out on the schematic, I supposed I would need either an air variable or a polyvaricon. I had several of each type I could use, though in the back of my head was the dim thought, “Why do I need a variable with such a wide range? To get the nominal frequency of the crystal, only a single as-yet-unknown capacitance is needed, and if pushing or pulling the frequency a bit is desired, putting in a 365pF air-variable or even a 200pF polyvaricon would be gross overkill.” As I said, though, it was a dim thought, and not in the forefront of my stream of consciousness.
I wound the coil primary and secondary using the instructions on the webpage. For the coil form, I used one of the dozens of pill bottles I’d been saving for years (along with any other plausible coil form of paper, plastic, or ceramic that fell into my hands). For wire, I used 20 AWG copper wire from–wait for it–Michael’s Crafts. They’ve got lots of different gauges of enameled copper and aluminum wire in their beading department. The enamel is not quite as durable as genuine magnet wire, but in ordinary handling it works well, and it’s almost as tough to scrape or sand off as the real stuff. As I usually dope my coils with two coats of clear nail polish, I don’t worry about durability.
The primary winding of the finished-and-doped coil measured 32μH from top to bottom, and the tap was 7.7μH up from the bottom. At this point, that dim thought I had earlier came to the front of my mind. Looking at the schematic, I confirmed that the variable capacitor sits across the entire 32μH. “It’s a tank,” I said to myself, pleased to be fluently conversant with RF slang. It has to be resonant at the crystal frequency (or, within narrow limits, the crystal can be made to resonate with it). Whipping out my laminated reference sheet, I found the formula for a parallel LC circuit:
with f = 3.5795, L and C in Henries and Farads. I needed to rearrange the formula to solve for C and plug-in 0.000032H for L and then . . . instead I pulled out my cell phone, brought up my EverythingRF app, entered the L of 32μH, and the answer for C was 62pF. As it turned out, I had several old 60pF mica-ceramic compression caps on hand, so I wired one across the primary coil with a 33pF disk in parallel to give me 30pF up and down from the calculated resonant capacitance. So in reality, a variable cap isn’t needed at all if the purpose is simply to experience JO2. A combination of disk caps (NP0 type for S&Gs) in parallel and/or series would get the thing working, and there’d be no hand-wringing over the need for a hard-to-find variable (even though they’re not really hard to find at all).
Instead of the 2N3904 transistor usually called out for this circuit, I used a 2SC710. I have a few hundred of them, and they were developed for RF use while the 3904 was not (but works well anyway). This was actually my first use from the big bag I bought several years ago. The 2SC710 is a Japanese part number, and there have been several manufacturers, most of them not indicated on the part itself, and with some variety of pin-outs among the various versions. You don’t need to ask how I know, I will tell you.
Again pulling out my smartphone, I googled for a datasheet. Still not thinking at maximum gain, I clicked on the first promising link, and I found the pin-out for the 710’s TO-39 case is E-C-B, with the flat facing the viewer. Naturally, I wired it accordingly, but no JO2. Now a bit more alert, I confirmed all connections were correct and sound. I was about to lookup other versions of the schematic to make sure the fault wasn’t from that source, when I realized I hadn’t tested the transistor or the crystal. I don’t usually test passive components, but I think it’s a good idea to test active ones when practical. Pulling the 710 out of the circuit, my cheap-as-dirt (hereafter CAD) transistor tester confirmed the device was okay, with a β of 90, a Vbe of 754mV, and a pinout of B-C-E. “Okay, there’s nothing wrong with the transi . . . . wait, B-C-E?!” So I soldered it back in place, with the base lead on the left this time. The circuit oscillated, but still no joy. My CAD Sanjian frequency counter indicated a frequency at the third overtone of the colorburst crystal:
After tightening down the compression cap as far as I could, I got it to jump down to the second overtone:
It’s important to note the frequency was not by pulled continuously down to the second overtone. It actually pulled only a few-hundred Hz before it jumped down. Many crystals can operate (stably) only at their fundamental frequency. This one was stable at the second and third overtones. I wonder if it would be at the higher ones?
Okay, that was a very interesting diversion, but I still needed to get it to work at 3.579545 MHz. I wasn’t long finding the problem: I had left one end of the 33pF capacitor I wanted parallel to the trimmer unsoldered. A puff of rosin smoke later and proper JO2 was achieved! A little tweaking of the trimmer got it dead stable on the nominal frequency. All I could say at that point was SOSINTS! (“The Smell of Success is Never Too Sweet”–pronounced sō-sǐntz).
At the risk of splitting hairs (another of my hobbies), it’s worthwhile noting that overtone I isn’t exactly the same thing as harmonic. A harmonic is an exact integer multiple of the fundamental frequency. So for this particular crystal as trimmed to its nominal, that would be 7.159090 MHz for the second harmonic and 10.738635 MHz for the third. What the counter actually read, though, was 7.158627 (a difference of only 463Hz down) and 10.555258 MHz (a whopping 183.377 KHz greater!), respectively. The second overtone as counted was within the probable pulling range to the second-harmonic figure, but the thing is I couldn’t get it to trim to that before it jumped abruptly to the fundamental. That is, I could not get the oscillator to run at the second harmonic, only the second overtone. With regard to the third overtone, there’s no way any amount of trimming could account for a 183KHz increase in frequency. As soon as I tried to move it more than a few KHz downward, it jumped down to the second overtone. Apparently, the main cause of this behavior and the reason for a distinction between harmonic and overtone is that the motional capacitance (“Cm”)—the effective series capacitance of the crystal itself—is not the same when operated in overtone mode as in fundamental mode, and the Cm plays an unavoidable part in the resonance characteristics of the crystal. See http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Music/otone.html and https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/electronic_components/quartz-crystal-xtal/overtone-operation.php.
You’ll see from the photos that since my purpose here was to get something done and working with a minimum of fuss, I didn’t spend a lot of time on non-essentials. You’ll also see I had to resort to some infelicitous wire routing. I ended up running the capacitor-side connection to the crystal across the board and under the capacitor itself. It’s only two inches (50mm) long, so it won’t matter at this frequency, but it looks a little goofy. Additional awkward connections were made unavoidable by the way I wound the coil, dressed its leads, and super-glued and coil-doped everything solid. I fed the lead from the top of the primary coil back down through the form, perpendicular to the windings, to emerge from a tiny hole at the foot of the form. I had started the winding by threading the wire through two closely-spaced holes, also at the foot, to keep the wire from pulling out as I wound. I left an inch sticking out for connections. Without thinking carefully enough, I made the lead from the top of the coil emerge to the right of the bottom lead when it would have made for much easier circuit connections had it emerged on the left. It proved to be less of a problem when I decided to abandon an air variable or polyvaricon in favor of a compression trimmer. For a while, though, I thought my version of the Mighty Mite was going to have to play a game of Twister.
In the end, it came out nicely enough. I put some memorial inscriptions on it because someday it will end up in the K7TFC museum (a battered U-Haul box in the attic). As pleased as I am with my M3, the real success here was that I managed to cure both by boredom and my vapor lock with a little accomplishment feedback that took only about an hour and a half to complete. Give it a try sometime if you find yourself in a funk.
QSL?
Back in 2014, when I was living in Medford, Oregon, I visited Portland and wrote a post about sources for electronic components in the “big” city (http://mostlydiyrf.com/2014/10/not-exactly-heaven-but/). Compared to sources down-state where only Radio Shack was living out its last year of brick-and-mortar existence, Portland was awash in parts sources. Alas, six years later, most of what I found then is gone. Surely this has to do with consumer habits and the rapid rise in online buying, because the three-county Portland metro area is alive with high-tech and electronics activity.
I now live in Portland, the epicenter of the “Silicon Forest”–Oregon’s answer to Silicon Valley. Within a ten-mile radius of my QTH are the Tektronix headquarters, Intel (the largest private employer in the state), Lattice Semiconductor headquarters, FLIR Systems, a big Quorvo campus, a major Maxim Integrated plant, dozens of lesser-known tech firms, Linus Torvalds (the mercurial and irascible inventor of Linux), Jason Milldrum (NT7S, the developer of the widely-used Si5351 library), and all the authors and contributors of Experimental Methods of Radio Frequency Design. Every once in a while, I feel a tingling of RF in my lymph nodes coming from the energy of this technology vortex.
What is almost completely missing from all this now are retail sources for components, even popcorn types such as 2N2222 transistors, 741 op amps, and 4148 diodes. Back in 2014, Fry’s Electronics was the place to go for almost anything one might need except for special-purpose parts. It had the full NTE line, the complete line of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and the sensors that are part of those ecosystems. There were aisles of Molex, Amphenol, and JST connectors, still more aisles of every sort of cable you’d ever want, another aisle for wire, including several gauges of magnet wire, an aisle of test equipment including digital oscilloscopes, half an aisle of soldering gear and supplies, a five-foot rack of shrink tubing of every size and color, and the largest supply of PC gaming and build-your-own computer components (motherboards, disk drives, power supplies, graphics cards, etc.) in the entire state of Oregon. Batteries? Every kind you can think of and many you didn’t know existed. There was a big long shelf of various sizes of gel cells and LIPO packs, and a charger suitable for each one. There was another few shelves of plastic and metal enclosures from Bud, Hammond, and others. There was lots more, but this was the best-stocked and largest array of electronic components, materials, and supplies I had ever seen and had the pleasure of patronizing.
And now? Gone. All gone. If you go into a Fry’s today, you’ll find mostly-empty shelves and displays. Imagine a Walmart with ninety percent of the merchandise missing, and that’s what a Fry’s looks like now. I have no idea how it’s possible they stay in business at all. They still have a few big-screen TVs for sale, but even their inventory of consumer-grade PCs and laptops is down to almost nothing. There’s some conjecture they’re just waiting out their leases before they close for good. Officially, the company says nothing about the transformation that’s taken place over the past year and a half. To my utter disgust, they’ve instructed their employees to lie when asked about it. “Oh, we’re having trouble with our vendors,” they’d say. “The boss says they’ll be pallets and pallets of stuff any day now.” I heard that line from several check-out clerks when I was still bothered to drive the ten miles just to leave empty handed. It’s possible the employees and even their boss believed that insulting twaddle coming from higher-ups, but it was the same well-practiced answer every time. Pobrecitos y pobrecitas!
Also gone now is Oregon Electronics. They were a much-smaller outfit, but they still had ten or twenty times more than a typical Radio Shack would have. Like Fry’s, they also carried the full NTE line and had a respectable assortment of cables, connectors, hardware, supplies, and micro-controller (Arduino and RPi) paraphernalia. Their location was a bit out of the way in a business and light-industry park, and the company had the feel of one started and run by enthusiasts rather than experienced business people. In spite of a useful inventory, they may have been under-capitalized and couldn’t hold out long enough to reach profitability equilibrium. Just as likely, they couldn’t compete with eBay, Amazon, Digikey, Sparkfun, and Adafruit for the hobbyist dollar. But for cryin’ out loud! The population of the Portland metropolitan area is almost two-and-a-half million people. One would think it could support at least one establishment like Oregon Electronics.
That brings us to the one bright spot on the electronics-supply landscape: Surplus Gizmos. They have some of the NTE line and some Arduino stuff, but what they mostly have is about 8,800 square feet of customer-accessible space filled with nearly-every kind of surplus electronic parts you could want, some of them decades old and otherwise unobtainium. There’s at least three times that floor space in the back stacked with stuff to be sorted and put out for sale. Here is where the still-valuable offscourings of the Silicon Forest come to wait their turn to once-again have electrons pumped through them in the workshops, Ham shacks, and laboratories of techno-geeks and electronics enthusiasts.
Surplus Gizmos is located in Hillsboro on the western side of the Portland metro area, and home to Intel and several-dozen other tech firms. It’s about five or six miles from Tektronix in Beaverton, and not surprisingly much of the stock at Gizmos is from that source. Here are some highlights:
That should give you an idea of just how useful Surplus Gizmos is to the electronics enthusiast or radio amateur. One of the things this means is that they know the value of their merchandise and it’s mostly priced accordingly. This is a surplus store, not a flea market. It’s mostly a place to go to get items you can’t get elsewhere, or that you need (or want) faster than it can be shipped to you. Frankly, it’s also a place to patronize frequently so that it remains profitable enough to stay in business. Here in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington, we’re pretty fortunate to have a source like Surplus Gizmos. The Silicon Forest isn’t exactly Heaven for DIY electronics and radio, but it’s a long way from Hell.
Postscript: I guess I should have acknowledged that there’s a Ham Radio Outlet “appliance” store in Tigard, on the south-central side of the Portland metro area. For me, their raison d’etre is that they have RF coax and antenna wire that you can’t count on Gizmos having. A few times a year, I get a bug up my cathode (conventional current) and I pay HRO a visit. I buy a CQ Magazine or two, and maybe some coax if I need it. I mean no offense, but I just don’t like factory-made, store-bought Ham gear. It’s not fun for me–unless it’s more than fifty-years old and features vacuum tubes.
Santa Claus brought me a very nice gift this year. He used his excellent connections with eBay and got me a Rigol DS1102E oscilloscope for Christmas! In my letter to him, I told him of the great reviews I’ve found on it; in particular several videos by Dave Jones of EEVblog and also the personal experience of Bill N2CQR as described in his SolderSmoke podcasts. Bill also has a video showing the DS1102 in action displaying a frequency sweep of a bandpass IF filter: “Sweeping a Filter with a FeelTech Sig Gen and a Rigol ‘scope.”
In a few SolderSmoke podcasts, Bill also talked about using the FFT (“fast-fourier transform”) feature on the Rigol’s math menu as a “good-enough” spectrum analyzer. That’s what sold me on the DS1102E.
After a quick trip to the local Fry’s Electronics to pick up a 10x scope probe (Santa forgot that), I gave my Rigol a little test using the built-in 1KHz square-wave generator that’s used to adjust the compensation capacitor in the probe. After adjusting the probe for nice sharp corners on the square wave with no over or under shoot, I turned on the FFT function.
I was delighted to find just what I expected in the spectral content of the square wave: pronounced peaks on each of the odd harmonics (1st, 3rd, 5th, etc.) and only a gradual decline in the amplitude of each. Here’s the screenshot made with another nice feature of the DS1102E: screen capture as a bmp file and savable to a USB drive.
You can see Cursor A on the fundamental 1KHz wave, with Cursor B on the 7th harmonic at 7KHz. The vertical scale of the FFT portion of the screen is 20dB per division. Notice that by the 25th harmonic (!!) at the far right of the display that it’s down by only about 20dB (for more on the harmonic content of square waves see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_wave and www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/alternating-current/chpt-7/square-wave-signals/).
Here’s an especially-cool simulation that shows a series of sine waves at odd harmonics adding up to a square wave: Sine Wave to Square Wave using Fourier Series. This one is even more cool: Fourier Series Animation (Square Wave).
Tomorrow, I hope to pump some RF into the Rigol and see how it likes it. I’m very eager to know how well the FFT function works on the HF-bands frequencies.
QSL?
Recently, there was a bit of traffic on the EMRFD* Yahoo group about a new IF amp chip from Linear Technology: the LTC6431 ( https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/emrfd/conversations/topics/11168). The main interest in this device is its low intermodulation distortion (IM) as expressed by its third-order intercept point–in this case on the output (abbreviated as OIP3**): 47dBm OIP3 at 240MHz into a 50? Load. Its specified bandwidth is 20 to 1700MHz and it provides 15.5dB of power gain.
Thomas Knutsen, LA3PNA, quickly designed up a breakout board for the LTC6431 and made it available at OSH Park for anyone to order (https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/5qq6sXUX). I ordered a set of three for a mere $10.30USD. They were so cheap because OSH Park waits to fill a pcb panel with enough other boards to share the production costs. Once a panel is full, they run it and then distribute the boards to those who ordered them. It’s a great idea, and in this case it only took about ten days for the finished pcbs to show up in my mail. Their quality is excellent. This was my first experience with OSH Park, and I’m pretty pleased.
I haven’t populated the boards yet with LTC6431s, but once I do and play around with them, I’ll post an update.
73!
*EMRFD stands for the title of Wes Hayward’s popular book, Experimental Methods for Radio Frequency Design, published by the ARRL. The Yahoo group is devoted to discussions based on the book and its design examples.
**See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-order_intercept_point. For a not-too-difficult discussion of IM, see Doug Smith, KF6DX, “Improved Dynamic-Range Testing” QEX July/August 2002 (http://www.arrl.org/files/file/Technology/tis/info/pdf/020708qex046.pdf).
Over on the QRP-Tech Yahoo group, Ed Edwards, AE7TE, posted a link to an article (http://www.w7ekb.com/glowbugs/VFOs/vackar_vfo.html) by Kenneth Gordon, W7EKB, on Vackar-design VFOs designed in the 1950s for vacuum-tube applications. The Czech engineer Jiri Vackar introduced the design in 1949*. The schematic example Kenneth shows uses a 12AT7 dual triode in common-cathode mode with both plates at 255VDC. The driver is cathode-keyed. The output triode is arranged as a cathode follower. The VFO is series-tuned.
According to W7EKB, Vackar VFOs have three important design characteristics: they have a 2.5:1 tuning range, they have a constant signal-level output across that range, and they’re “rock solid” in their frequency output. It so happens I have a bag of 12AT7s just waiting for me to play with. I’ve been wanting to design and build a single-band tube transceiver just for the fun of watching the little buggers glow in the dark. Someday soon I hope to test this Vackar design as part of that longer-term project. I’ll let you know how it comes out. 73.
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*For more on Vackar and his design, see https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ji%C5%99%C3%AD_Vack%C3%A1%C5%99 (copy and paste text into Google Translate) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vack%C3%A1%C5%99_oscillator. For a solid-state version of the Vackar VFO, see Floyd Carter, K6BSU, “Meet the Remarkable but Little-Known Vackar VFO,” QST September 1978: 15.
I hate haywire. I can’t stand jumpers and cables and cords strewn everywhere when I’m working on a project. Psycho-optically, I’m driven nuts by the rat’s nest that results from power and test leads when the project is in full swing.
I’m especially put out by stiff cables knocking the usually-small items I’m working on all over the bench. An Arduino, being small and pretty light, is nothing to a springy USB cable. Coax, even the relatively-thin type such as RG-8x, will be happier straight than bent, and it will likewise toss the thing I’m working on back and forth. Arrrggg!
My solution is to get as much anchored and tied down as I can and I’ve found what I’m calling a development base to be invaluable. Here you see an Arduino Uno with an Adafruit Proto Shield on which is mounted a small breadboard, an Adafruit breakout board for the Si5351 clock-generator chip, and a rotary encoder. It’s a project I’m working on for a simple antenna analyzer.
You also see a 2×16 LCD display, and both it and the Arduino assembly are mounted on standoffs. The white base is a piece of expanded PVC I had on hand, but it could just as well be anything of a suitable size and heftincluding a real breadboard. You’ll also notice I’ve affixed (with repositionable glue stick) a chart of pinouts for easy reference. Other important notes can be placed on the base as well, perhaps even with fine-tipped dry-erase marker
s or a grease pencil.
Instead of haywire jumpers, I’ve used ribbon cable to the display, and even the jumpers I do use on the Arduino assembly are routed, folded, zip-tied, or even loosely knotted to keep them in check. Neat and tidy.
There’s plenty of real estate left on the base to mount other boards or circuit components, perhaps with nothing more permanent than double-stick tape (not the semi-permanent foam type!), Bostik’s Blu-Tack®, or Elmer’s Poster Tack®.
I took the trouble to mount the Arduino and the LCD display with screwed-down standoffs since I’ll be using the same footprints for other development projects. They might even stay there more-or-less permanently, to be replaced by other ones in the finished projects.
The size of the development base is not important except that it be adequate. One other advantage to using a base of this sort is that it can be picked up and moved intact, to be replaced on the bench by another suddenly-more pressing project, or moved out of the way of dinner dishes if it’s on the kitchen table.
As I write this I’m upstate in Portland (Oregon). I’ve been here for more than a week, so I’ve had a chance to window shop at some local radio-related suppliers.
For component-level stuff, there’s Fry’s. It’s a chain similar to BestBuy except it caters to both the consumer as well as the professional repair and amateur electronics markets. They carry the full NTE line and *lots* of other components and materials (including enclosures).
Except for hollowstate projects, one could pretty much be supplied for serious work just from there. Back home, Medford is growing big enough that Fry’s ought to open a store there.
Focusing entirely at the component level is Oregon Electronics, a reincarnation of Norvac. They have a store in Eugene, too. The full NTE line can be found here, too, along with the best selection of connectors of all types one could imagine.
They have a better selection of Arduino and other microcontroller-related items than Fry’s, including a huge array of break-out boards for devices available only in surface mount. These include sensors of various sorts such as temp and humidity, gas ionization, ultrasonic range finding, multi-axis accelerometers, and WiFi connectivity.
OE stands out by having their full inventory (i.e., what they actually have in stock) searchable online. There are enough goose chases in life already so this is great.
http://www.yelp.com/biz/oregonelectronics-beaverton.
The most fun supplier up here is Surplus Gizmos. It’s a warehouse-sized wonderland of almost anything having to do with electricity. Some is surplus and some is salvage. I’d say some was obtained by dumpster diving, but I don’t have smoking-gun evidence for it.
If you can’t find something elsewhere in town, the chance is SG will have it. They had the RG-174 I was looking for! The guys at HRO (see below) sent me there. Much of what Surplus Gizmos has is also available from their online store.
http:// www.surplusgizmos.com/
Though useful for lots of ham-related paraphernalia, Ham Radio Outlet on Hwy 99W does not cater to the DIY or homebrew community. They do carry a good selection of the latest and greatest rigs; they’re all set up along one wall and one of several antennas on the roof can be used for a test drive. They also have a good stock of MFJ accessories, a nice selection of antennas and antenna-related gear by several manufacturers, the full Heil line of mics and boom sets, and a decent stock of coax and ladder line. 
HRO is definitely the place to go for “plug n’ play” or “turn-key” ham radio. The folks behind the counter are real Hams, and they’re easy to deal with, too.
http://www.hamradio.com/ locations.cfm?storeid=11.
There are more suppliers up here that I’ve not visited yet. I’ll give you a report on those on the club reflector. If you’re going to be up this way, plan some time to check-out these suppliers. I’ll leave it to you whether or not you leave your wallet back at the hotel.