We have some pretty talented designers, builders and tinkerers among the membership ranks and it would be nice to see what the group as a whole could come up with in regards to usable radio equipment.
So...let's plug the irons and scopes in then get busy. But with one twist:
Each Island member designs ONE section of the project, which will be in modular format. It shall also use readily obtainable parts - as an example, filters from popular OEMs or easily obtainable surplus...or variants which the homebrewer can easily and cheaply duplicate .
A complete HF transceiver or separate receiver/transmitter might make for an interesting start.
Two requirements to start the ball rolling: Should be synthesized -or- tuned by a very stable PTO/VFO arrangement and use frequency mixing.
You folks can design either (or both) frequency generation schemes. If the forum members built one of each type, they could be swapped in and out of the parent circuit at will. Same with the other sub-assemblies.
To that end, standardize a construction and connector scheme which will allow for "plug and play" with well-defined I/O and power requirements for each board. Will you folks follow the lead of Drake (a la TR7, R7) and Yaesu (FT-90x) and Collins (KWM-380) with their plug-in, motherboard-style cards or will you emulate Kenwood's 820 line designs, which made extensive usage of header-style interconnects to the various modules...and therefore required a complex main harness? A mix of both - emulating construction techniques used in Signal's CX-11 and Milspec 1030 series? Something of our own creation?
Opening the floor for discussion of the design particulars...