AR2
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being “imposed” on the VCO. It also provides some amplification to give the
VCO 0-12V of tuning from a 5V PLL part.
Block K.
The microcontroller is the “brains” of the entire project. This device
programs the PLL to get the frequencies desired, handles the jog dial by
interpreting it’s pulses, and then writes the data to the displays. Quite a bit of
coding is required to handle the scanning functions and the user interface, so
don’t underestimate what goes on inside this little device!
Block L.
This is the display and the user control devices.
Block M.
Power supply section.
A NEW ADDITION TO RAMSEY MANUALS
We’ve added a little something to our kit manuals starting with the one
in your hands. When you see the little guy holding the light bulb to the
left of this text you’ll know that a Ramsey Kit Building Tip is right beside
him. This idea came about as I was building the first prototype of the
current revision PC board. Before a Ramsey kit ever makes it to you
we’ve already built several prototypes and then we build the actual revision
board that you have, proofing the manual and the parts/board/etc. all at the
same time. We have different people build the kits and we take input from
every builder, always striving to make your kit building experience as easy and
pleasant as possible. During the construction process I noticed a few things
that might prove to be helpful to a newcomer, things experienced kit builders
might take for granted, and decided to write them down. These ideas or tips
have been popped into the text as you build and marked with this little guy
holding the light bulb. Get the idea?
Since a lot of the tips will be common to any kit building experience we’ll be
repeating them in subsequent manuals, however, if our kit customers keep
coming across the same or similar text in the Assembly Steps they’ll begin to
gloss over them and stop reading all the text in each step. And that can prove
to be fatal to your kit! We want to give you tips but we don’t want anyone
missing something important in the Assembly text and that’s where the Idea
Man symbol comes in. Once you’ve built a few dozen of our kits and you’re
an old hand at building you won’t necessarily need every hint all the time but
since they’re clearly marked you can simply skip over them. You might miss
some good jokes but that’s up to you. We hope you find something useful,
some ’back at the shop’ wisdom as you read the hints and that they help you
get to our goal of a well built kit that works the first time, every time.
