Looking for project tins recently I found some for sale on Etsy, however they were a bit expensive and on searching a bit further I came across a cheaper and more tasty solution…

After my latest adventures with my Auto ATU and adding a jumper wire I was having some odd behaviour so a club member Dave G8KBB offered to take a look and give me a second (and far more experienced) opinion.

It turns out I somehow jumpered the wrong trace and there was also a soldered end of wire which wasn’t cut short enough and was therefore prone to short out, silly things as usual! Dave has jumpered the other trace, cut short the wire and advised that I box it up ASAP and add a fuse to the power cable.

Many thanks to Dave for the assistance and advice!

As I’ve documented on this website I have recently put together an Auto ATU 100 kit. The ATU works well and I’ve bought a metal case but the buttons that came with the kit aren’t great and I’ve not put the time in to cut out the case. For the time being I have been using the ATU on a plastic tupperware lid, however I’ve also been using Dupont wires and croc clips to connect to my power supply which has led to some unfortunate incidents with disconnected wires shorting to ground, in the latest incident I have unfortunately fried a small region of trace.

Everything seems to work fine, however I’m going to add a small jumper wire to replace this trace as it looks fairly dodgy. I’m hoping that I haven’t fried any components but I think I’ll have to add the two optional extra buttons to allow me to use some of the debugging features.

Quite a while a go I undertook a small project to build the Colpitts oscillator found in the RSGB intermediate book (purchased as a kit from Jab Electronic Components), despite putting it together as per the schematic I couldn’t get it to work. With help over email and zoom from Jack G3JIR and some other club members and after eventually replacing pretty much all of the parts with spares (many posted from helpful club members) and reassembling on a breadboard, hurrah I got it working!

I think that in the end it was the transistor being incorrectly wired which was the issue, despite having checked and double checked…or so I thought, but it was a long and painful process to debug, quite a learning curve as a newbie in electronics.