I was going to post a huge rant about what the deluded man children, self indulged and narcissists are doing over on qrz. But you know what, you deserve more, I deserve more and they really just are not worth it. I am taking a sabbatical from qrz lest i tell a whole bunch of people to go fuck themselves with pineapples.
So this is just a quicky, DHL somehow managed to lose the contents of a delivery satchel and only deliver an empty bag to Brisbane. Shit happens, nothing we can do about it, but its delayed a lot of what I had hoped to be doing this week. In actual fact i have really done not much at all. But I needed a low pass filter that could handle 50w or there abouts. The board is one that I have used for all the lower power filters I have built.
So i do not have any high voltage through hole caps, so i soldered KV rated SMD caps to the through hole pads, wound up some T68 size toriods and boom, i have a filter that will cope with 50W from the amp I built a few weeks back. I got a bit of experimenting to do with it this weekend and see how i can go matching that with the CW transmitter and an SDR receiver to do a WWFF activation maybe next weekend. More on that later.
There are lots of places on the internet that we benefit from sabbaticals from. These include but are not limited to):
QRZ
Reddit
Twitter
Facebook
I am in the process of completing one of your LPF boards (thanks BTW) that I have used 250v 1206 SMD capacitors. Cheaper & more available than their through-hole components.
/ Gerry
Yeah the footprints are just big enough that you can easily solder bridge in a 1206 size cap. I have new boards coming soon that have SMD footprints for the caps. I am slowly moving everything I do over to SMD, the bigger parts are no more difficult to work with than through hole and like you pointed out, they are cheaper and easier to access. Going SMD is the best thing I ever did Gerry. Keep an eye out, I will be updating and releasing some board files soon.
I am a moderator on 2 homebrew groups on facebook, they are ok because they are heavily moderated and all off topic crap is deleted. But other than those couple of groups, i would not want to be on any of the general ham discussion groups, they are nightmares of people yelling at each other over nothing.