After some large amount of initial interest, I quit paying attention to the Softrock. As the years trickled by, the Softrock project kept moving. Lots of projects, mods, versions, and changes.
Here in the present, I had an older Softrock v6.2 sitting on the ‘ToooDooo” batting lineup since around December. It had originally been built as a 9Mhz IF kit, to be used as a panadapter. It was a gift from W3DQ. When I saw the NorCal group had a run of kits available, I ordered a pair. Wish it had been three….
But….it seemed like a good point in time too examine the IF kit, with an eye on re-working it for one of the bands of interest. As it was built, it required only four changes to put it on 40m. The Softrock Lite II kits come with components for building any band from 160m-20m, so the needed crystal was available from one of the kits. The mods took only a few minutes. That got done first.
On a roll, it was time to sift through one of the kits to see what the build was going to take. One thing leads to another….build it! The smell of solder smoke was soon wafting about. The “most difficult” surface mount parts were the first on the plate. As it turns out, these are not the smallest of surface mount parts. An ordinary 15w RatShack iron with a fine tip was sufficient for the task. The difficult part turned ot to be simply identifying the other parts. The numbers on the capacitors were difficult to read, and the color bands on the resistors all look like brown.
Lots of light and magnification? Better, but still some confusion. Most of the issue is progressive myopia, but I had not realized that color-blindness might also be progressive. Not so Fast! In order to get a second opinion, NumberTwoSon took a second look. Even with his 17 year old eyes and 20/13 vision, he also had difficulty.  So, after rolling out the ToolTimeTim’s XL 2550Super’scope, the parts were sorted.
After sorting, building was trivial.
Ran first skimmer test on both units on night of May 10th. Its interesting to see the spots a local skimmer finds versus thoses several hundred miles away. A whole project in itself….
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