Once again, I have run out of or run low on some of the tiny circuit boards we sell. The only economical way to buy them is combined on one larger circuit board, to cut them apart later.
So here is this year's restock.
Some of them will look familiar from our fleabay listings, others won't. I'll only bore you with one of them for now.
This idea served to cure the loose mike-socket problem we kept seeing caused by 3-inch long rigid mike-socket adapters. The owners of base radios with a 6-pin mike socket would prefer to use a 4-pin mike that can be interchanged with other radios. The 3-inch long rigid adapters you can buy have a hidden drawback.
Leverage.
Just a gentle pull on the mike cord gets "leveraged" into enough force to loosen the nut holding the mike socket to its bracket. Fixing this involves removing the front panel tightening the loose stuff then putting it (and all the knobs) back. This gets repetitive after the third or fourth time it happens.
So we started copying the factory filtering/bypassing setup onto the back of a 4-pin mike socket. All very well and good, but a bit labor intensive.
The drawback is no more up/down buttons on the mike. The advantage is that the mike socket stops coming loose from the radio.
So the trick got moved to a printed circuit board. Saves labor, pure and simple. Made a dozen and a half of them, and they lasted almost a year. Made another batch that size and they lasted six months. Time to go for a larger quantity. Our circuit-board vendor has a discount at fifty units, so that's what we bought. With four of this pattern on one corner, we'll see how long it takes to actually built two hundred of them, let alone sell them all. It starts with soldering a chassis-ground wire to the mike socket. A real factory would use a fat ring lug under the socket, but this is cheaper.
Takes three RF chokes and three disc capacitors, since only three pins are connected. The RCI-made radios don't require a receive function on the mike.
And if you want to solder some custom feature to pin 4 you can do that, of course.
And this is the biggest selling point for this toy. No soldering required. The pins you see will match up with the two-pin audio plug and the one-pin transmit plug just as they unplugged from the factory mike socket's pc board.
Plug and pray, no soldering iron needed.
Now it's time to see how many of the parts it uses are here on hand. Probably don't have enough to build all 200 of them. Just the same, I'd like to have enough stock to put them on fleabay.
Time will tell.
73
So here is this year's restock.
Some of them will look familiar from our fleabay listings, others won't. I'll only bore you with one of them for now.
This idea served to cure the loose mike-socket problem we kept seeing caused by 3-inch long rigid mike-socket adapters. The owners of base radios with a 6-pin mike socket would prefer to use a 4-pin mike that can be interchanged with other radios. The 3-inch long rigid adapters you can buy have a hidden drawback.
Leverage.
Just a gentle pull on the mike cord gets "leveraged" into enough force to loosen the nut holding the mike socket to its bracket. Fixing this involves removing the front panel tightening the loose stuff then putting it (and all the knobs) back. This gets repetitive after the third or fourth time it happens.
So we started copying the factory filtering/bypassing setup onto the back of a 4-pin mike socket. All very well and good, but a bit labor intensive.
The drawback is no more up/down buttons on the mike. The advantage is that the mike socket stops coming loose from the radio.
So the trick got moved to a printed circuit board. Saves labor, pure and simple. Made a dozen and a half of them, and they lasted almost a year. Made another batch that size and they lasted six months. Time to go for a larger quantity. Our circuit-board vendor has a discount at fifty units, so that's what we bought. With four of this pattern on one corner, we'll see how long it takes to actually built two hundred of them, let alone sell them all. It starts with soldering a chassis-ground wire to the mike socket. A real factory would use a fat ring lug under the socket, but this is cheaper.
Takes three RF chokes and three disc capacitors, since only three pins are connected. The RCI-made radios don't require a receive function on the mike.
And if you want to solder some custom feature to pin 4 you can do that, of course.
And this is the biggest selling point for this toy. No soldering required. The pins you see will match up with the two-pin audio plug and the one-pin transmit plug just as they unplugged from the factory mike socket's pc board.
Plug and pray, no soldering iron needed.
Now it's time to see how many of the parts it uses are here on hand. Probably don't have enough to build all 200 of them. Just the same, I'd like to have enough stock to put them on fleabay.
Time will tell.
73
