February AI6YM Project Updates

In my last update I said I’d send one of these updates “once a month by the 10th”. Today is, of course, the 21st. To quote Douglas Adams (probably), “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

Lots has happened since my last update – one of my three planned blog posts was published, the first batch of FoxSniffers went to production, and I remembered that Lunar New Year is a really big deal in a particular corner of the world that happens to be nearly 100% of the electronics supply chain.

T42 Mini Update

tl;dr – Progress has been made, filter prototypes are in production, the name changed.

About an hour after I sent my last update I discovered another person in the T41 community had published the start of a design for a “T41 Mini”. Since the projects are unrelated I decided to rebrand a bit, this is still a T41 based radio but having a unique name for my projects seems like a good idea. “T42” made me laugh and nothing else did so it stuck.

As for actual progress on making this thing exist:

• Mechanical designs are done. Probably. We’ll see how well reality lines up with CAD.
• Filter designs have been simulated and work well so they’re off to production for a prototype run. Many of you will be happy to learn that the BPFs are entirely surface mount so there’s around a quarter as many toroids to wind compared to my previous kits.
• The amplifier design needs some work. The core design works but I’ve never been happy with the bias network most QRP / homebrew amplifiers use. Chips warm up and drift, there’s no feedback and often no foldback mechanism. Thats a whole blog post on its own – the T42 Mini will ship with a solid bias network, I just have to make one first.

Preorders will open up once I have working prototypes for every component, likely in April. Stay tuned.

FoxSniffer Update

tl;dr – I’m going to ship this thing or die trying. Ya’ll get to see which soon.

It pains me to delay my shipping estimate again but unfortunately I must. My last estimate – March 1st – was a bit ambitious considering that most of southeast Asia takes a two week vacation in February. The first batch will ship by the end of March, unless something goes drastically wrong between now and then. The second batch will ship in May. Any orders placed now will be in that second batch. Existing orders will receive delivery estimates shortly.

As always my pre-orders are 100% refundable if anyone is unhappy with the delays. My policy has always been to only open preorders when I’m confident in delivery timelines. Prototypes working, parts ordered, logistics and timeframes known. That didn’t happen this time and it’s something I’ll be reviewing so I can learn from it. I deeply appreciate everyone who sticks with me on this journey but understand anyone who decides not to.

Administrivia

tl;dr – The store moved to Shopify so I can focus on making cool stuff. The blog will move to another platform soon for the same reason.

I am 100% stealing “Administrivia” from Steve Stroh (N8GNJ) of Zero Retries without shame. Thanks Steve!

My storefront has moved to Shopify. The details on why are complicated, and very boring. Let’s just say I didn’t have the time and energy to deal with all the little things needed to keep an effective online storefront running myself. This business exists to make cool products and fund making more cool products, pleasing bureaucrats can be outsourced. From my analytics it seems ya’ll like the new store – traffic and orders are up, pages load faster, seems like I made the right call.

The blog is still running on Wordpress but will be migrating to a self-hosted static site soon. You can see a work-in-progress demo at staging.ai6ym.radio. It’s a lot faster and a lot easier for me create quality content on. I hope everyone will like that too.

73, AI6YM