New England QRP Club : The Excitement is Building....

It's past time for an update on the New England QRP Club's NEScaf kit.

To date, NEQRP has sold over 800 of these. We have been out of stock for some time as the SCAF chip we were using, National's LMF100, was discontinued in DIP format. We made a preliminary decision to redesign the board to accept the SMT version of the chip.

During that process, one of the club's members pointed us to Linear Technology's LTC1060. It is a drop-in replacement for the LMF100. I obtained some samples, and have tried it in my NEScaf. It appears to offer performance comparable to the LMF100. Please don't ask me for hard numbers- I haven't done THAT kind of analysis. To my ears, it sounds comparable.

So, to avoid an additional prototyping phase and it's inherent delay, we are going to prepare another run of the NEScaf filter using the existing board design. This next run of kits will use the LTC1060 chip in DIP format.

I will be ordering boards and parts hopefully this weekend, and then we will arrange a club kitting party. I can't say for certain when we will begin taking orders again. I expect it will be another 3-4 weeks before we are there. I will promise to make postings to the various lists, and on the club's website at www.newenglandqrp.org once we are ready to again accept orders.

Thanks very much for the overwhelming interest in this kit.

For the New England QRP Club,

Bruce Beford, N1RX