(SNIP)
If I hit the lottery, I will come across a stash of Miller slug tuned coils, crystal filters, and dual gate MOSFETs that everyone else has somehow missed. Well that plus hoping the Elecraft is running a sale so I can give in on my newly re-energized K2 envy...
eBay auction: #273843736218Wanders off stage-left, whistling innocently...
Are these "Oh, fu-u-u-u..." type bodges or "We've been using this design for 2 decades, but still haven't gotten around to updating the board for modern components..." type bodges?
There are no really oh fuck ones. Nothing that scares me anyway. So far there are two TH capacitors that need to be soldered across pins on the rear of the board to shape the keying waveform. That really should have been done with a board respin. The other things are parts availability so the MC1350 IF amps and SA602 mixers are now only available in SOIC rather than the DIP footprints. Rather than them respin the boards (I assume they bought a fuck ton of these years ago) they actually provide each IC in a little antistatic bag pre-mounted carrier board neatly packed with an A4 sheet of paper explaining how to mount it and some 22 AWG solid wire or header pins for mounting it. They do this because you can sub your own DIP MC1350/SA612 in if you want (I might do this as I have enough of both of them).
Well, no... when I said
" 'Oh, fu-u-u-u...' type bodges" I meant the self-inflicted kind, not manufacturer-created.
There's lots of good reasons to NOT respin a board; I find it hard to believe they're still selling from a load of boards they bought 18 years ago.
Could be for simple conformity: so you can sell replacement boards for repair parts and not have to worry about which revision you send out, because none of your "production" boards have any significant differences. If you have to make that happen with a SOIC breakout board, I feel that is a legitimate reason. I find a lot of this in hobbyist and laboratory stuff.
Another reason could be that the guy who actually designed the board and has the files to respin it left the company and didn't leave anything but the Gerbers, etc. or worse, went silent key a decade ago, and
nobody actually has the originals.
I don't know many engineers possessed of the sheer perversity to re-create an editable version of somebody else's project so they can "continue that person's work". Most will simply design "rework kits" to keep that project afloat until they can get paid for the next major revision, which they plan to do from scratch. Job security, baby.
Yes, I know you can import Gerbers and work with the resultant project file to some extent; but even in modern stuff like Altium it's still a PITA and you don't KNOW it got every circuit RIGHT unless you compare/draw them yourself.
Or maybe it's as I originally surmised: You have an established product, the people who want it like the fact it's stayed essentially the same for decades, and you can't be arsed. Especially now that you have the K3+ to sell to the touchscreen crowd.
mnem