Thomas Does Radio or Something

Last left off in the preview "teardown" despairing over the potting was my failed MEAN WELL HLG-320H. Then came a great need for mindless stimulation after a day of work and I tried cracking the case again. After the successful prying came picking and cutting away at the potting material to see what's what. Here's what's inside! Image warning: there's a lot to get through this whole device. Click on the photo for the full Blogger resolution. There you go, just a bit more force and the top plate comes off.

My MEAN WELL HLG-320H -12A power supply recently died. As in just didn't click on with AC power applied. Twiddling the voltage and current limit potentiometers did about nothing. So, what's inside? Wait, it's an IP65 rated device. . .

I picked up the Antennas4Less HF-319 (archived) on a savings deal a couple weeks ago to give me a better option over the MJF-1899T for compact HF operating. With weather outside being excellent this weekend in Wisconsin and wanting to get a little practice in for the Wisconsin QSO party coming up next weekend, I went out with the antenna and my FT-818nd. Operating position in Hoyt Park, Madison, WI

A quick shoutout to a couple of other blogs that have been particularly useful in my pursuit of basic microphone modding and implementations http://audioimprov.com/AudioImprov/Mics/Mics.html with info on both BM-800 designs and general background on condenser microphone implementations. https://tombenedict.wordpress.com/2016/10/09/bm-800-microphone-conversion-part-1/ and other posts relating to things that you can do with microphones.

With today being Bandcamp Friday again, it was time to dive in and support some artists in a nice big burst of music purchasing. As a quick link dump, here's what I got. This is absolutely not all that I could have wanted, but is what I got.

A less great Newegg find: trying to get the slightly improved capsule from a TH901 over the BM800 with mediocre capsule. A seller was essentially (based on the shipping/returns) selling from an Amazon warehouse to a Newegg storefront. In this case, the wires were terrible torn-up ribbon cables and the XLR was totally scrambled with relation to the board pads. TH901 Surface Mount Side