FCC-1
Frequency Counter Controller
For the past several months I've attended the NorCal Qrp Club meeting at the California Burger, in Pleasanton, California. The meeting is an informal gathering, attended by a group of hams who enjoy QRP operations and building their own equipment. One of the people I see there almost every month is Bob Okas, W3CD. This spring Bob brought in one of his projects for "show and tell" and it immediately caught my attention. I was just starting to build the Taurus and needed a "digital dial" to put in it. I finished up the Taurus before Bob got the FCC-1 ready for beta testing, so I used one Steve Webber's frequency counters instead.
Doug Hendricks, one of the NorCal QRP club founders, also saw the counter and suggested that it might make an excellent club kit project. Bob explained that the counter was just the first part of what he had in mind. Bob is working on the second part now, which will be a DDS VFO that will be interfaced to the FCC-1. Doug and Bob were trying to come up with a name for the counter and decided on FCC-1, which if I remember right, stands for frequency counter, controller.
Later in the summer Bob sent me an email saying that he had the FCC-1 finished and was ordering some prototype boards and asked if I might like to build one of the beta versions. Well, of course I wanted to get my hands on one so I responded immediately with a YES. At the September 4th 2005 club meeting I was able to purchase one of only five or six beta kits available, with a promise that I would build it and provide feedback. Build it I did, that very evening and you can see a couple of pictures I took along the way. The kit is fairly simple with only a few parts. Because I was working with a beta board and was looking for mistakes in the manual, it took longer than normal to complete the kit. I would think that a person with some building experience should be able to complete this kit in an hour, two hours at the most. For a larger picture you can click on any of the pictures below.
The main circuit board measures 1.9" X 3.05"
The finished board before the PIC16F628A was installed. Notice the empty band connector label. You can guess what that might be for.
The finished board showing the un-powered LCD display. The three switches on the right are used for programming the various functions of the FCC-1.
Because this is a beta version of the kit, I don't want to publish all of it's specifications, I'll leave that up to the NorCal group. However, I have listed below the features as they are today.
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I don't really have an idea as to when the NorCal QRP Club will be offering this kit for sale but I'm hoping it will be soon, possibly at Pacificon 2005. With the addition of the DDS-VFO feature, this will make building your next QRP project a breeze.
