uBitx - Home Brewed enclosure

uBitx -   Home Brewed enclosure 

From the first experience of making the case for Bitx40, I thought of having a simple tool for folding the aluminium sheet. Made one with Ply wood and hinges. See the picture below.

This tool did a decent job of folding sheet with less effort and fast. All we need is to fix the sheet well aligned and clamped tightly before folding. Here as well, used same 1.6mm Aluminium sheet.

Height reduction

I felt that the height of case can be reduced further as lots of space available.  Soldered a separate connector below the PCB and also straightened the leads on Raduino board. 

SO239 Socket

Replaced the BNC connector with SO-239 since all the antenna connectors in my shack are the same.

Speaker Grill

Front Panel

 

On the Air indicator

Though LCD display shows the TX, felt it looks good to add a LED indicator for “on Air”. Connected a LED from digital pin 13 of Arduino through a resistor

And the completed Case

 Next thing to do is to fix a face plate with an acrylic sheet and replace with a better looking knobs.

Bitx40 and uBitx

73s

Sajeesh Pilakkat

vu3Psz

HF Antenna Analyser

HF Antenna Analyser

Getting the antenna well tuned was a tedious task so far.

Just made a low cost, but much useful HF antenna analyser from the design by K6BEZ.
Many thanks to Beric Dunn for providing this design.

This is now one of the most useful tool in my shack.

Details can be found from
http://www.hamstack.com/hs_projects/k6bez_antenna_analyzer.pdf

I choose AD9850 DDS module with Arduino Nano. I used 1N34 instead of AA143 -  unable to source it yet. Even then it works well for HF range.

Below is the readings of 20m meter range ( of my multi band fan dipole )

And the home brewed 50 Ohms Dummy load

Best Regards,
VU3PSZ






 

Bitx40 Enclosure - measurement and more details

Here is the Bitx40 enclosure measurements and construction tips.

Now have some inside views.  Note that the speaker is mounted with Plexiglas - didn't occur any better idea to me.

 

 

The front plate is again a piece of Plexiglas,  etched with black paint.

 

Bitx40 V3 Radio Page

Bitx40 V3  -   Home Brewed enclosure and DDS VFO

BitX40 V3 -  A wonderful design with excellent performance.  Thanks a lot to Farhan for providing this to HAM fraternity.

This assembled board gives no further scope to do much for an average home brewer.  A suitable enclosure is some thing needed - one with a compact size.
 
I tried in SP Road, Bangalore for it but nothing was available that suites well.  I was not ready to give up and finally returned home with 4 square feet of 1.6mm Aluminium sheet.  Idea was to give a try to make an enclosure of size similar to that of FT817.

I realized soon that sheet metal work is not that easy, without any proper tools. I just had a few usual tools  - drill, callipers, file and some sand paper. That's it. 
 
First, I cut the sheet to the required sizes after careful measurements. Used the callipers to measure and marked the lines to cut.  Fixed the steel scale and tightened with small wises. Then started making groove along the line where I want to cut it. When the groove became bit deeper, I placed the sheet along with a sharp edge ( used the edge of the drawer ) and carefully bend the sheet both directions. The sheet was able to cut and did a little bit of filing to smoothen the edge.

 

Aluminium sheet bending was one of the big challenge. This also done with making a groove - but if the groove is more deeper then the sheet may start breaking. If the groove is less then it will be difficult to get the bend properly.  After carefully bend to close to 90 degrees, then used a flat wooden piece, tap slowly to bring the bend to 90 degree.

Added  DDS VFO with Arduino nano and AD9850 module.

Look at now..

 73s
Sajeesh Pilakkat
VU3PSZ