Obviously, I have been slow in posting my progress and that is mostly because there hasn’t been very much progress. During the last few months with the help of information from Mark Scott, K4MV, I have been able to make faster progress. I believe I now have all the parts that I will need to finish the go-box and have begun to assemble things.
I did run into a few problems that required some imagination and patience. Mounting the power supply, the amplifier, and the USB SignaLink, were not as straight forward as I had imagined they would be. I had to obtain some rack mount brackets for the power supply which allowed me to attach the power supply to the faceplate. The length of the power supply does not allow much room inside the Pelican case so I needed to be able to adjust the mounting to get the unit as deep inside as I could. There may still be some adjustment to be done but I won’t know until I actually mount the entire radio pack into the case.
I made custom brackets for connecting the faceplate to the amplifier, which took me a couple days to figure out and make. I started out using readily available “L” brackets from the hardware store. They didn’t work to well as the metal was about an eighth of an inch thick and was hardened metal and difficult to get the screw hole accurately placed. After I gave up on the “L” brackets, I found a piece of lightweight aluminum and tried that. It turned out to be too flimsy and not strong enough. I finally found some 28-gauge sheet metal left over from duct work done on my house and that worked rather well.
I cut some strips, drilled the screw hole (4-40 size), tapped the hole and made the appropriate bend in the strip, then custom fit each one in place. They worked real well and the amplifier is now mounted securely to the faceplate.
The next hurdle was mounting the USB SignaLink to the faceplate. The SignaLink is a bit of a special case in that this build could probably have been made without it, but I chose to use one. Rather than make any holes or changes to the SignaLink box I wrapped some galvanizing tape around the case on the inside of the faceplate. The tape is about four times thicker than electrical tape and by wrapping around the case two to three times it built up sticky barrier up against the bottom of the faceplate. The case does not move now and can easily be removed if necessary. No damage either.
I’ll start adding pictures to this as soon as I can figure out how to do that. Needless to say, this is just the start of a HUGE project, and I will post as I can. If you have read this far, thanks for visiting.