Recently I decided to upgrade the front panel of my kit built QRP multiband radio. The kit is no longer in production and is the G6LBQ Multiband. I built this a few years ago. At the time I decided to drill out the front panel to incorporate some rotary controls for USB/LSB switching and AGC selection. Also for the S-Meter I used a bargraph generator IC and LED Display. Later I added the digital filter from Sota-Beams to assist with CW signal selectivity. Adding the new rotary control for the filter bunched up all the other controls, so I decided to use some Whizz3D parts to spruce it up a bit.
First step is to remove all the hardware that I wanted to shift around. Removing the controls from the radio was easy due to the use of of Leoco pin headers and connectors instead of direct soldering. After that it was a question of marking out the panel with the hole centres that I wanted to reuse.
Here you can see the panel with the Speaker cut-out enlarged, room for a moving coil s-meter. The 5 hole layout will be changed to a 3 rotary control layout with 2-switches.
A printed panel will blank off the old unused holes, giving access for the new ones.
For the display slot a Whizz3D printed LCD display panel design will be used.
More in the next blog posting.
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