Rich, Chris, and I have had a number of private emails, so this is a quick summary:

1) We have all been able to "talk to" the Pi 5043 board over SPI from the LaunchPad, although one of the boards had a short that required fixing.

2) Chris has managed to get it to transmit.

3) Rich and Burns (mainly Rich) determined that L8 on Pi 5043 board is actually a 0-ohm resistor.  That's ok for 70cm.  But for 2m, an inductor is needed.  Rich has made a hand wound air core coil that seems to work.  Burns tried one that did not work. I probably screwed up soldering the big coil to the tiny pad.  In fact I probably lifted the foil.  I recommend if we are going to continue with the Pi board we get the actual SM 0603 or 0402 or whatever inductors.

4) Eric made up 3 MRAM-on-DIP adapter boards for me to check out, but we think Chris has successfully done that too.  I will write the s/w to test more thoroughly and to allow multiple MRAMs to work and to sleep when not in use.

5) The I2c temperature chip on the Pi board works fine with the Launchpad.

In summary, I think we are convinced that the chips are all usable with the Launchpad.  I'd recommend going ahead with a board that contains a couple of MRAMs and a couple of 5043s.  Jumpers are REAL easy to make mistakes with, and jumpers to 4 different boards (2 mrams, 2 5043s) would be a real bear to use.

I'm most likely not going to be available on Thursday unless my monthly 6:30 in-person meeting gets out early!