An evening building projects co-operatively.
February 2025
February 2025 saw us run our first “buildathon” for inexperienced builders to put a project together. Those of us with more construction & soldering experience offered guidance. The club bought two cheap VHF FM Band II receiver kits and two low power 50 ohm dummy loads. Other members brought their own projects. Most people completed the projects in an evening.
Comments from those building the FM radio Rx.
“I found the construction night to be great fun. Although I’m not bad at soldering it was nice to share the discussion with other fellow builders – and at the end of the evening my radio worked!!”
“I’m very pleased that the FM radio kit I put together works really well. The soldering evening was great practice, and has improved my soldering skills. It was the first time I have soldered a surface mount component. I’m now inspired to tackle construction projects at home.”
The FM radios ran off 2xAA batteries and used the headphone lead as the aerial. The sound quality was judged as excellent. The FM radio kit was obtained from Ali Express. https://www.aliexpress.com/
Comments from those building the dummy load Dummy load.
“Building this proved that every day is a learning day. I chose to do the dummy load and had my first surprise, £10 is all you need to spend to be up and running. On the night I assembled the kit, some good advice on mounting components and soldering correctly happily taken on board. To my utter astonishment everything worked as it should, as did everyone else’s!! I went home feeling rather pleased with the whole experience.”
“The soldering evening was brilliant. I hadn’t done much soldering before and felt a great sense of achievement. It will definitely encourage me to construct more in the future. “ The QRP dummy load and Power Checker came from QRP dummy load and Power Checker
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January 2026
It was a bad day, in more ways than one. It was a cold, windy and rainy January. 7 members had chosen a kit to build on the evening. 6 digital clocks and one Band 2 FM radio. At the meeting prior to this one, 3 members revealed that they would be on holiday (that’s bad timing folks), so that left 4 people. On the morning of the club meeting, one member phoned to say that he had the “sniffles” and would not be there, so that left 3. I arrived at the club’s venue to a cold club room, with two members ready to go to assemble their kits. (The third member never arrived.) I had previously translated the Chinese instructions and emailed the PDF to all members. So, soldering commenced for 2 out of 7!
90 minutes later, one clock was fully boxed and working.
The other was working outside of its case, needing a bit of attention to make it fit the case.
We await to see the remainder up and running in the individuals own time.