Economy Size Geek

Ok it was a geek weekend – I managed to get two geek projects completed
this weekend. The first was building an FM Transmitter. I did almost
all of the soldering – I’m still new at this part of the process – I
tend to live on the software side a lot more than the hardware side –
mostly because I usually end up breaking something.
In this case, I had 326 solder points. The kit was missing a part, and I
managed to put one piece in the wrong place. In the process of
correcting the problem I ended up breaking the capacitor. A quick trip
to Radio Shack got the missing part. The part I broke was a 10pF disc
capacitor. Unfortunately Radio Shack doesn’t sell that small a
capacitor. They did have a box of 100 mixed capacitors. Brett spotted a
“10″ on a couple of them. We bought the pack with the hope that it would
all work out…
In the end sometimes a 10 is a 10 – the part worked. You can see me in
the car enjoying the fruits of the labor – the transmitter only reaches
about two houses down – but it sounds great – so far…