[Elecraft] Customer responsiveness

[Roelof Bakker]

Hello Don,

"Those pin 1 places have round solder pads while the other pins are
rectangular pads and it is easy to miss the pin 1 solder connection and
not notice it."

This happened to me as well, when I build K2 #6177 in July.
The resistance check for the control board did not fit and an unsoldered pin
1 was the culprit. Just like you wrote the other day, I found that the pin
could be soldered from the top of the board. I used a small size (PT-K)
Weller tip and the damage to the IC socket was minimal and hardly
noticeable.
I made a few other mistakes; a cap with the wrong value in the VCO circuit
and a wrong cap across the IF transformer L34.
The biggest mistake was soldering a NE612 in the location of the MC1350 IF
amplifier.
Cutting the legs and removing them one by one was easy to do.
Fortunately I had a few NE612's lying around for some home brew projects, so
eventually no damage was done.

Though this might seem to be a kind of horror scenario, it was not. This
experience has largely improved my feeling that this is a rig I can fix
myself, when the need arises.
This was the main reason I bought it in the first place.

73,
Roelof, pa0rdt
Middelburg, Netherlands


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