It is with some considerable trepidation that I embark on what promises to be a challenging journey. I have just received my Softrock RXTX V6.2 kit (minus a heat sink that is en route) and am looking forward to its completion. I say that I do this with trepidation since I am very much the klutz when it comes to these tiny kits. My previous experience was over 30 years ago with Heathkits and their check-off-this-step-and-move-on-to-the-next-step approach. Even then, I managed to fail more than my share of smoke tests. More recently, I "completed" the Softrock 40/30 V6 RX kit. It still is not working but I can at least take consolation in the fact that when I reached the end, there were no parts left over! I continue to work with my patient Elmer, Bill, AE5BK, on getting that kit to come to life. My plan in this blog is to work through the kit as methodically as possible, sharing my experiences and lessons learned at each point where I pause to take a breath and evaluate progress to-date. At each such point, I will upload photo(s) of the board and its progress, along with observations on what I did (or failed to do) and/or what I could have done better. Hopefully, this blog will be useful to some and, if not useful, entertaining to others. In the beginning: Upon having received the kit in a compact plain brown wrapper, I immediately sat down to inventory the contents of the 8 bags therein against the bill of materials. I began with the resistor bag. Since I am color blind and have nearly 70 years of wear and tear on eyes that started out weak, I chose to use my DMM to verify all of the resistor values and tape the resistors to a piece of stiff paper in rows corresponding to their sequence in the BOM. Next came the capacitors. The orange-drop ceramic caps were very difficult to read (those darned eyes again). I got my best results using a combination of a 10X microscope (very neat "toy" that hooks into your PC via USB - rationalized its purchase as essential to the ongoing education of the grandkids) and my DMM's limited capacitance measuring capability. I can see already how the microscope will come in handy in looking for bad solder joints/bridges, etc. All the caps were there. For each ceramic capacitor, I ensured it was taped to an appropriately sized piece of cardboard, upon which I annotated the value and the schematic label (e.g., C8). As in my previous kit, the electrolytic caps did not appear to have any markings that one could remotely construe as "+". There was, however, a silkscreened rectangle on each that could be construed as a "-". In this kit, the positive leads can readily be identified because they are the longer leads. The core bags came with the appropriate coils of magnet wire. I learned on my previous kit to have a stock of magnet wire on hand. I had to redo some windings in that one. Looking at the builder's notes, I have no doubt that I will be tapping that stock some more in this kit! I do not look forward to winding those tiny toroids and binocular cores. The rest of the bags inventoried OK. There were some issues with the heat sinks. First, being a newbie to this modern era in homebrewing, I was in a quandary as to how to recognize the TO18 vs. the TO220 heat sink. This was exacerbated by the fact that there appeared to be only one heat sink in the hardware bag. After some research, I identified the heat sink that WAS in the bag as the TO220 heatsink (by comparing its footprint to that of the TO220 Sil-Pad, which was, for some reason, in the Cores bag. The TO18 heatsink was missing. A quick trip to the Softrock group with a question and Tony came back with the response that some of the kits had inadvertently been shipped without the TO18 heatsink and mine would be shipped to me ASAP. Planning the project: From my experiences with the Softrock 40.30 RX kit, I knew that I was likely going to want to view and/or measure points on the underside of the board at various stages of the construction process. With the earlier kit, I made a couple of errors in identifying the correct (unmarked) hole on the underside and I wanted to avoid them with this new, more complex PCB layout. So the first effort – did I mention I am retired and have plenty of time to do this stuff? – was to map the components to the appropriate points on the bottom of the board. I took a digital picture of the bottom and top of the board and then hand-annotated the bottom with essentially the mirror image of the info on the top. The result is in the PDF file named rxtxv6.2_40_30m_BoardBottom_Annotated.pdf. Please note that the annotations may be in multiple colors, but there is absolutely no significance to be given to that fact. That is a result of my color blindness: because the lighting for the photo was bright in some areas and darker in others, I simply chose the “colors” that gave my colorblind view of the board the best contrast. To the color–sighted, the result may be ugly. Tough. Next installment: As one who has learned to look before he leaps, rather than start soldering and snipping right away, I will take Tony’s builder’s notes and expand them into a “Heathkit-like” step-by-step approach. This is not because I find any fault with Tony’s excellent and concise notes. Rather, it is because I work better when I can check off steps. Plus, the effort of “steppizing” the notes forces me to more thoroughly consider and understand the notes and their import. So the next entry in this rambling treatise will be the step-by-step notes. They will be liberally embellished with graphics where that could help (remember Heathkit?) For example, Tony’s instructions on the hole placement for the Transformers will be accompanied by snippets from the board silkscreen. These may result in larger than normal PDFs. Hopefully, this will not deter you from downloading and using/commenting/etc. 73, DE WB5RVZ