The simple things can take so long to create sometimes….
I basically had the home-brew D-Star repeater built, just little clean up things left and then it can be moved off the bench to the machine room. One of the little clean up things left was making a the cable harness to go from the dv-node adaptor board mounted inside the PC to the back of the PC case. Then make a second cable to go from the back of the PC case to the repeater itself. Sounds simple, right?
Well it took basically all week to get these two cables made. First problem was coming up with how to mount the bulkhead 6pin mini-DIN. After digging through the junk box I found a old video hard with bracket that almost had the right size hole. After drilling and lots of filing, I managed to make the bulk head connector fit. From there I wired up the DB-9, which connects to the dv-node adaptor.
The remaining cable was nasty one. I basically re-used the wired molex connector that was already wired to a piece of CAT6. I just cleaned things up a little bit, adding some shrink tubing. This took about 10 minutes. But then I had to attach a male mini-DIN, which I now remember why I hate.
I burned through two of them, before finally getting one cleanly wired up. Just a little to much heat and the plastic will melt which holds the whole thing together. I started out with one connector, so there was a whole day wasted until I could get to Fry’s and buy some more. But finally this evening I finished it up, made sure all the wires were connected end to end correctly and re-connected the dv-node adaptor and repeater.
Everything worked perfectly and W7RNK-B is now back on the air. I even spent the 10 minutes to crank the output power back up, so it is now putting a full 10watts out to a dummy load. Tomorrow I’ll start moving things to the machine room (i.e. the laundry room) and hook it up to the real antenna.
Very happy!!!