Hi.

Well, I got a surprise this morning. Yes, the samples arrived, a week before the week after the month later than the two weeks they quoted me originally. It even seems to be the same size as the mechanical drawings claim (always a pleasant shock), and actually fits the box. Barely.

That's the good news.

Yesterday evening I had an email from the distributor, about the availability of the module I now have a sample of. They had finally extracted delivery times from Microtune in Germany, which turn out to be 4 months!

That's the bad news.

However, they say that the weather band version is available from stock, and have offered me quite a good price on it. I'll have to double check the software compatibility, but It may well be a viable alternative.

And that's the ugly news.

I will now throw the session open to questions from the floor.

What, no secret messages sandwiched between the layers?

It's only a double sided board, hence between layers is a little difficult to achieve. However, by careful use of fractal track patterns, I have managed to impose a message on the 11-dimensional N-space contained within the volume of the PCB. Reading it is your problem...

If he's blind, does it really matter that much how many eyes he has?

Of course! Otherwise he wouldn't have anywhere to keep his marble.

Do you have dimensions for the box? I'm cramped for space inside my home enclosure, but there's a space of about 8x6x8cm if I can move leads out of the way. Otherwise I'll have to mount it externally or swap with the one in the car.

The box is externally 82mm x 80mm x 55mm.

If space is an issue, can they be mounted side-by-side (in a different enclosure, obviously)? Or are there connectors which depend on the alignment?

The PCBs will connect together via a pin header. This could be replaced with a flat cable if necessary.

Is it possible to distinguish the new tuners from the original, in software? I'd like to be sure that any software that uses your new features won't break a standard tuner (and vice-versa). You said earlier that you were reducing the tuner ID to two bits; does this mean that the other two bits on a standard tuner will appear as inputs?

From the point of view of the player, the tuners will be completely interchangeable. The two vs four bits of ID merely means that my tuner can only have one of 4 different ID's, rather than 16.

Is it possible to extend the connector on the tuner so that I can mount it elsewhere?

As the player and antenna inputs will be on flying leads anyway, you can always just make them the length you require (within reason, 10m is probably a bit much) at the time of construction.

Improper use of the subjunctive case.

As always, a bad idea. Always use the subjunctive case for storing subjunctives ONLY, or your warranty will be void.

Patrick