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Hugh Blemings's Blog, A Diary and Miscellaneous ramblings
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Thu, 13 Jan 2005
Pockettracker System Integration (!)
Couple of nights back Michael dropped over and we great evening chatting and doing some electronics hacking. I think we concluded it was the first time in about ten years we'd done that kinda thing so was well overdue :)
Spent a couple of hours fitting the Pockettrack PCB into the die cast enclosure I'd put a GPS receiver module in about a year ago. Bit of a squeeze but went in ok. Initial tests before closing the lid seemed encouraging, module quickly aquired the SVs and we were off and running getting good APRS signals into the local iGate.
Final checkout wasn't so promising, most transmissions sounded "dirty" like there was some RF feedback or such. Further investigation this evening confirmed that when the two boards (GPS and Pockettrack) were within a few mm of each other the RF output went noisy. Found a suitable sized piece of copper shield (plastic coated) on an old floppy drive PCB and shoehorned that in over the transmitter and soldered it to the PCB groundplane. Bingo! Clean as a whistle.
Will try it out on the trike tomorrow so hopefully you'll see me riding in to work around 8am here
Courtesy of a friend of mine - "I thought C++ was a new and improved orange soda"