Cricket 40 buildathon

Last week at the meeting we discussed kit ideas, and decided the Cricket 40 would be a fun project for a buildathon. The kit is a working crystal-controlled CW transceiver for the 40m band with a direct-conversion receiver and about 700 mW output. It has about 40 components and can be assembled in an evening. Each participant gets one to take home! The club will pay for the kits for club members, though we will also accept an optional donation if you would like to help offset the cost of buying your kit (don’t worry about this if it’s a problem).
The current plan for the date/time is 6:15 PM on Thursday, November 4 (during the UTARC meeting). We will first meet at 6PM in ETC 2.132 for our usual meeting stuff, and then move to the soldering lab E1 at Texas Inventionworks at 6:15PM for the actual buildathon. Huge thanks to Roger and the other folks at TIW again for allowing us to use this excellent resource at UT! If this is your first time soldering or putting together a kit, that’s OK and part of the goal! I’ll provide some explanation on how to solder the kit together at the beginning and will try to help everyone at the buildathon.
If this time does not work for you, or you just want the kit so you can build it yourself, there’s an option for that in the form. We could schedule another time if enough people want to build kits together.
If you want to take part in the buildathon or want a kit, please sign up here before 11:59pm central time on Monday, October 18: https://forms.gle/cM3tcoFRPaGkQBT67
(open to UT students, faculty, staff only)
This is so we can order enough kits for the group on time.
We would also like to thank an anonymous donor who contributed some funds to the club during 40 for Forty. Thank you for making this event possible!

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