Walford 80m cw tranciever kit

Being new to kit building i was on the look out for a tranciever design that was within my limited electronic building capabilities. After looking around on the net i went for the brent cw tranciever from Walford electronics. I ordered the kit and it was with me a few days later. The kit comes with board and ALL components needed for the build along with rubber feet and control knobs. It also came with a very well written 14 page step by step build instruction sheet with tests to be performed on completion of each step. There is a grid refrence picture to help identify part location too.This kit is the 80m version but can be made to work on others by using the mixer kit available or by winding the appropriate toroids and fitting a different xtal during build. I am going to build the kit as is for now then once happy that it all works as it should i will then go on to house this in a suitable case and use conventional pots for the tuning controls.

Having read through the build instructions and test procedures and identified the parts i feel confident that i should't have any problems with this kit, even though its my first kit tranciever the instructions left me feeling confident i could pull this off.So the whole kit building experience so far gets a solid 10/10 for both customer service and product/build details included.BELOW you will see the board with some of the larger componenets fitted to aid component location. I also took it on myself to reproduce the grid reference of the parts layout diagram onto the board for further aid. The first step in the build is to fit the supply parts.This first step was a little time consuming as the board was vertually empty so i had very little parts to compare location . This was probably the most time consuming part of the build to date because getting this wrong meant nothing was going to work. NOTE if you have this kit that the grid reference of the parts layout diagram may not be exactly the same as on the board if you decide to reproduce it on your board as i did. There is only a slight difference and a little care whilst thinking about placement along with a quick check of the schematic soon sorts this out. It's easy to see where things should be going the more componenets are fitted.

Word of warning

This being my first kit build i was intent on taking my time. I built the supply and audio output stage and did the test procedure outlined in the instruction booklet. Things were not as they should be. I checked and double checked componenent values and placement and couldn't see where i had gone wrong. Cutting a long story short i had in fact fitted a transistor in the wrong place. There are two transistors close to each other on the board ( around C4 on grid ) but for different parts of the build and had simply not fitted the one needed for the part of the build i was on. A volt meter and a look at the schematic found the mistake. It's worth mentioning that even though you may not be able to fully understand a schematic like myself, that in fact it is very useful so it's well worth using this along with the build and not just relying on the grid ref and part location diagram as i set out doing.

ABOVE is the build with the supply,audio output stage and audio pre amp stages fitted.The next two stages are to fit the components for the VFO and the RX detector stages. The build so far has been quite simple and the build instructions have been clear with a full explination of the design. The next page i will go on and hopefully complete the build but have decided now that i will wind the toroids for 40m using my own xtal. There are two reasons for this, one 40m is where i seem to live and secondly i already have the antennas for this band that require no atu so i can "plug and play" while /p which was the purpose of building this rig.