Much to my surprise, a Pi arrived on Christmas day. Here you can see it after I mated it with the TNC-Pi, completed the voltage checks and inserted the ICs.

I was planning to get it up and running yesterday, given the weather we had yesterday, but I don’t actually have a USB keyboard to use with it, so I parked that until I get to borrow one.

Looking around, I found another kit that was sitting, unappreciated, on the shelf. An Elecraft XG2 (3 band Receiver Test Oscillator/S-Meter Calibrator). Purely for my own amusement, I took a few pictures while putting it together.

And, surprisingly enough (as I have not done any soldering in quite a while), it works. Though, if you can look carefully, you can see below that my venerable Icom R8500 is slightly generous, but not as bad as some other receivers.

That is not the end of the story though. There is a fault with it on 40m.  Either the crystal is weak, a capacitor is dodgy, or I messed something up (highly possible), either way, it will have to wait until the new year to sort out.  Anyone have a spare 33 pF Capacitor they aren’t using?