Sunday soldering

Never, ever do soldering at a Sunday, instead go to the beach, the mall, the mountains, whatever!

Just broke one PIC16F84 on the aprs tracker! Why? A faulty 7805, probably a fake 7805, I am pissed of. Happened when I was rewiring the board. When I get the 7805 from the 78/9XX drawer it was different from all the others, it had a more glossy finish, I even tough that it might be broken but was the the first one I found in that mess. I already saw a lot of them in open circuit but this one was on short an powering the PIC from 11V, the voltage from my power supply; even so the circuit worked but not for long and today it came to an halt. I should have know, always measure the voltage after the regulator, it was getting to hot for the total circuit dissipation and was the only component getting hot. The interferences on the handie were also strange! Some outputs do work but not the squelch/audio part and can't read now the PIC contents.
Tomorrow will buy another 16F84 to replace this one. Everything was against me and even the handie I was using to make transmission tests lost the battery charge when I left to test the PIC on the programmer, it's now charging. Lost the patience for the day!

Anyhow... surfing the web to relax a little bit I found some "blog's" from people I previously exchanged some emails regarding homebrew; Al, GM1SXX (http://www.observations.biz/Observations_from_Scotland/index.htm), Bill, CU2JL (http://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/) and Carlos, CT4ER
(http://www.ct4er.net/index_p.htm). They are nice people and have nice web pages with interesting information.
Al was also brewing the "Speaky" transceiver, exchanged some emails with opinions, Bill made an DSB transmitter and asked him some info and I used a bfo schematic from Carlos when I was making my first, never finished, HF transceiver.

Have a nice week!