FT 857D Manpack - revisited, ep.1

So...
A few years ago, I made a manpack based on a FT857D. This days, a friend of mine, YO3IPC, amazed by the versatility of the IC-703 I use, ask me if I can help him with some ideeas for a FT857D manpack.
Therefore, I draw some plans for a "powerfull" 25W manpack.

The plan was to use a 12V, 12Ah SLA and a Harris foldable antenna, a 9:1 BALUN and a Z11 PRO ATU. All around a FT857D from Yaesu,  so a (very) solid frame will be needed.
We choose a 1/2 inch plumbing pipe (copper) and some aluminium 2mm thick tape.

Today we made the frame.We'll do the rest tomorrow!

 

 The first lateral frame (The Saxophone):

 

The bottom section:

 

The full frame after soldering:

 

 The same frame after some polishing:

 

... and after the first paint job...

 

... ready for mounting the radio, the ATU and other stuff!

 

HELLO WORLD with PIC24 and TFT

I just received a few days ago my Easypic Fusion 7 board with a PIC24 microcontroller. It's just beautiful!
Well, it's a giant step from PIC16F but my friend and mentor said that it's just no reason to continue to learn about microcontrollers on an old one. So, I follow his words and jumped to 24 and DSPic... First, PIC24.
This is my first piece of program written in C, reading the value from the ADC, translated from binary to decimal and then sent it to the TFT display.
Here I found the knowledge.

YO3KSR

We "redesign" YO3KSR as a place where hi-tech projects can be worked out.
We already have a few projects. More to come in near future!

We already put some toys there and we have RFID controlled access.