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Friday, 10 January 2014

The CAT is back in the bag!

Well,

You may recall the problems I had whilst making a CAT interface for my FT-1000D - basically I blew up the MAX232 chip:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-cat-is-out-of-bag.html

Well, I got a replacement chip, de-soldered the old one and then replaced it. Still it didn't work - I was able to command the radio i.e. P.C to radio comms was fine, I just couldn't read anything back. So after some head scratching, some thinking, more head scratching, a curry and yet more pondering, I remembered something in the back of my mind about needing a resistor inside the plug on the back of the radio when I interfaced the MicroKeyer to the radio (remembering things like that is the main reason I keep a blog - but didn't record that anywhere!).

Anyhow, I modified my interface and added a 470 ohm resistor between the TX line from the radio and ground, thus:


and lo and indeed behold, it now works perfectly.

Here's the actual thing itself:


You can probably see the 470R resistor added as an afterthought at the top of the board.

Cat's found a new spot to curl up:


and Freddie Cat made it into the shack for the first time today:


Good, egh?

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