A found item
I found this board while poking through the junkbox:
But the problem is that I don't know what it is or why I built it. No date on the board - that's not good, that means no easy reference to a notebook with more info on the board. So the second step was to look at the notebook index file I have - unfortunately I don't know what to search on.
Looking at the board there are some clues though. That orange electrolytic cap is probably from that SWTP Lil' Tiger audio amp that I blew up - that means it's probably a pretty old board, before I started using the notebooks in 1990 or so. Also those white box polyester caps are from bags I purchased from Poly Paks - again an indication of an early project.
Seeing those caps around the socket gives a clue that this is some kind of analog type of a project although there is that digital part. Unfortunately that green socket is empty - but I dimly recall that this might be a 567 PLL board - probably for turning Morse code audio into digital ones and zeroes.
I had built a project for a Morse decoder - somewhat clunky it had a baseband video display of the Morse characters which was generated by a Motorola 6847 video chip. The processor was a Z-80 and I developed the code on my Exidy Sorcerer computer which was also Z-80 based. I kinda lost interest in the project after getting it to display some Morse - it was really dreary developing a program on a cassette based computer, then programming an EPROM and finally trying it out: burn and crash. But I *think* that the initial testing was done with a keyer output rather than off the air decoding. So this board might have been meant as part of that project.
OR it might have been for later Atari 400 projects - the Atari was a LOT more popular than the Exidy Sorcerer so there were more programs that could be purchased or typed in from magazine listings rather than developed by the hobbist INCLUDING ham radio applications like Morse Decoding.
Anyway, I will have to see if I can find the docs for the Z-80 Morse Decoder - maybe this board was documented there.
Moral of the story: mark all project boards with the date and then document the project in a notebook - makes for less head scratching in the future !
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm
