Inventory
The bench
Every entry in the notebook was made with something. This is that something: what is on the bench now, and what is going on it next.
5 on the bench, 10 still on the list — 15 in all
SDR & RF
- HackRF OneOpen-source software-defined radio covering 1 MHz to 6 GHz, half duplex, streaming 8-bit samples at up to 20 Msps over USB.
- NanoVNAOn the listPocket vector network analyser, roughly 50 kHz to 3 GHz. Measures SWR, return loss and impedance, which is how an antenna gets tuned instead of guessed at.
- Antenna setOn the listWhips cut for the bands actually listened to, plus a discone for everything else. The telescopic that ships in an SDR box is a compromise at every frequency.
- External LNAOn the listLow-noise preamplifier that mounts at the antenna, where it sets the noise figure of the whole receive chain rather than amplifying what the cable already lost.
Boards & modules
- ESP32Dual-core 240 MHz microcontroller with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the die, and the usual GPIO, ADC, SPI, I²C and UART brought out to pins.
- EBYTE E32-900T20D868 MHz LoRa transceiver module built around an SX1276, 20 dBm out, driven over a plain UART so there is no radio stack to write.
Test & measurement
- Digital oscilloscopeOn the listFour channels and at least 100 MHz of bandwidth, with decoding for SPI, I²C and UART — the instrument that shows what a signal is doing rather than what it should be doing.
- Bench power supplyOn the listProgrammable supply, around 0–30 V and 0–5 A a channel, with a current limit that turns a wiring mistake into a beep instead of smoke.
- Bench multimeterOn the listA 6½-digit meter for the measurements a handheld cannot resolve: microamps of standby current, millivolts of drop across a shunt.
Workshop
- Soldering stationOn the listTemperature-controlled iron with interchangeable tips and fast thermal recovery, so the tip is still at temperature on the second joint.
- Hot air rework stationOn the listHot-air handpiece for surface-mount work — lifting and placing QFN, QFP and 0402 parts that an iron cannot get under.
- Soldering microscopeOn the listStereo microscope on a boom arm, roughly 7–45×, with enough working distance underneath it to fit a hand and an iron.
- FDM 3D printerOn the listFused-filament printer for enclosures, brackets and jigs — the parts a project otherwise holds together with tape.
Compute
- NVIDIA RTX 4080Ada Lovelace desktop GPU: 16 GB of GDDR6X, 9,728 CUDA cores and fourth-generation tensor cores.
Desk
- Ulanzi TC001Desktop pixel clock: a 32 × 8 RGB LED matrix driven by an ESP32, with a light sensor, a buzzer and a battery, and open to custom firmware.