All: I send this separate note to advise you of some major developments with Eagle. Many of you are already aware of them, but in case I missed someone, I send this separate update.
Two nights ago, I authorized expenditure of funds for purchase of components and construction of four prototypes of the UHF receiver designed by John Stephenson, KD6OZH. The boards will be distributed as follows: one to Juan Rivera, WA6HTP, for Acceptance Testing followed by limited vacuum and thermal testing one to be demonstrated at Dayton one to the SDX folks for their development one to be put through the ATP either here by me, or wherever anyone else wants to evaluate. This will then become available as needed for demonstrations or SDX development
Events leading to this decision: Design by John and Peer review Development of ATP by Juan and peer review Assembly of a procurement, construction, and test team of Project Oscar members under Juan's leadership PCBoard layout by John. Peer review of schematic to board correlation in progress Development of costed Bill of Materials (BOM) by the Project Oscar team. This was a LOT of work, and actually resulted in some tweaks to design and component selection Peer review of the BOM in progress
I have authorized $4100 for this effort. A small fraction of this cost includes consumables for surface mount construction and some assembly tools which will become AMSAT property and will be used again. AMSAT costs were reduced by a significant amount of "scrounging."
I submitted some of this information for publication in ANS, but don't yet know if I was ahead of the deadline or not.. If I was late, I hope it will appear next week.
This seems to me a huge step. We have completed one design cycle on one component and are now about to transition, for that one component, from the concept exploration/definition phase into construction of hardware. Prototype hardware, yes, but we will soon have some real test results and something real to show. The short list above belies a whole lot of work by a whole lot of folks, alll of whom I thank. Many of you participated in the earlier reviews of John's design and Juan's ATP. The near-frantic effort over the last few weeks by John and the Project Oscar folks (many of whom I'm just getting to know through various emails and echolink conferences) has been intense.
As we progress with procurement and construction, I will receive and share progress updates as major milestones are met.
The documents mentioned above are not all on EaglePedia yet, but will be. In particular, one unexpected fallout of the recent efforts is a BOM which may be a good template for other teams to use. It certainly made it easy for me to see and understand, "how many, how much?"
Thank you all.
Very 73, Jim [email protected]