Bose USB-C conversion QC-35 Challenges

There's nothing more satisfying than having just about every one of my electronics components fitted with a USB-C connector.  It's the legacy electronics that still have the mini and micro connectors that drive me crazy, and I try really hard to try to migrate away from those and standardize on USB-C as much as I can.

Every once in awhile I come across a piece of technology that I just can't part with, kind of like my Bose QC35 headsets which my wife and I both have, and it irks me to no end that I have to keep carrying around a USB micro connector just to charge these things.

One day while I was on a flight to Los Angeles, I found a website that was selling a conversion kit. Wow, I think I need to get a couple of these things, so I placed an order with these folks - https://starkdrive.bike/accessories/bose-usb-c-board/

The boards came in, and I decided to do my headset first. Everything went really great, instructions were perfect, except when I tried to attach the ribbon cable to the new board. Something seemed off, it didn't click in place, then I figured something was awry so I ended up pulling out the microscope to dig into more detail.

This is the new board that I couldn't get the ribbon cable to attach to.

 

In the picture below you will see that the board on the left is the original board in my Bose QC35 and the board in the right is the replacement board with the USB-C connector in it.  There is a ribbon cable that comes from another part of the ear cup that connects to this board (See above) and as you can see below, the connectors are quite different.

Replacement board zoom in

Original board zoom in

So, what to do?  Well, I first reached out to the company that provided the board and they couldn't believe that there was a problem and they hadn't seen this ever before.  Thinking that there was really no hope, I decided to take a chance and swap out the connector with the one that matches my ribbon cable and see what happens.  There was a chance that the pins might not be exactly correct, or line up improperly, but it was worth the $3.21 to get a new connector on DigiKey - for those technically inclined here is the part number: AXE520127A

I did do a video but it ended up being focused on the floor so everything was blurred out...  But I took my hot air rework machine and removed the part, then cleaned up the PCB with some solder wick. 

I was able to get the new connector on the board and zooming in on the board with the microscope revealed a nice solder job.  I used solder paste, a dental explorer to apply to the PCB traces and my hot air rework station. 

Since I ordered two boards - one for mine and one for my wife, I was able to compare the two now with my new connector on it.

Time for the big test - installation into my headset.  This is the replacement board with the new connector. 

AND IT WORKED!

Now, you would think this is the end of the story, but I was really concerned that the company that I bought these boards from was very convinced that they have never seen this before - and after literally hundreds of sales.  I started to recall that I purchased my headset "refurbished" and wonder if that had anything to do with it.  Since I did buy my wife's headset new from Bose, I was sure this was 100% original, and once I opened her headset to look at the board, I found that the original board had the SAME connector as the new board I received from the company. I did a simple board swap - as I should have been able to do with mine - and the whole thing took only 10 mins.  

Here is a side by side showing MY original board on the bottom, and my wife's original board on the top.  Clearly two different connectors. 

I have to say that I need to send an email back to the company - StarkDrive - that supplied me with these boards and let them know that this looks like I purchased a counterfit Bose Headset, or the refurb process replaced a lot of components.  I am sure they are wondering what in the world happened, but they were very nice.  I guess this is a lesson learned from me - if you buy a "refurbished" piece of electronic equipment, you can never be sure what you are going to get.  As you can see in the above picture, the PCB for my headset doesn't even have the Bose logo on it.

EME - Receiving Signals - The easier(?) part

So, admittedly, this is a little bit of an intimidating project. There are a lot of elements to what goes into generating RF energy, and I guess I'm pretty lucky that I've simplified a lot of it by by purchasing the Icom 905. I don't have to worry about a transmitter, and then a transverter. Everything's all in one, and I also have the RF unit of the 905 able to be mounted remotely, or really close to the antenna feed point.

With that out of the way, there is still some complication to what I consider two paths for RF to flow. We've got the receive side, and the transmit side. Affectionately known as RX and TX. 

Just brainstorming what I have, I felt like the easiest path to test will be the RX side of things. 

If you think about it working backwards from the antenna (or I should say the septum feed point - oooohhh that sounded really cool to say) you have a connection to the low noise amplifier (LNA) then a connection back to the radio. So if I just want to test the receive side, I think I should be able to set up my antenna/dish, and hook up the LNA, and 905 and should be able to make sure everything works by trying to receive some of these signals that are being bounced off to the Moon by some of my soon-to-be friends all around the world. (Yes I'm talking to you guys on the groups.io and Facebook sites!)

The first thing I felt I needed to do is create a mount for the LNA pre-amp to attach to the Septum feed.  I also needed a relay up there to ground the line when the TX line was active.  These LNAs are super sensitive and blasting 250W into them is a sure way to generate magic smoke.  

Here is my first prototype that I came up with:

All thats left to do is connect power and the IC-905 to the LNA and I should be in business.

Looks like everything might be working - When I turn on the LNA, the noise floor comes up considerably.  Looks like it might be time for some rotator fun since that would be important to make sure I am actually pointing at the moon!

EME - Is it raining? Antenna Time!

The one thing that I've been dreading is figuring out what to do for an antenna. I had a good time playing around with building my own 1.2 GHz Yagi antenna. But the reality is, if it's less than 40 elements, I don't think it's going to do much in terms of getting any signal to the Moon, or even receiving for that matter.

Here are a couple of pictures of what I was doing, and frankly I really wanted to put this together so I could do some testing at a smaller scale without the antenna that I'm eventually going to be using. 

I tried a couple of different matches, and had the most trouble with the gamma match - I think the beta match was the best for what ever reason.  The elements were purchased as 3ft rod from home depot and sawed down to size with a band saw.  Fun project, but it was extremely short lived... because I needed a REAL antenna.

So what is that antenna? Well, let's just say that it's the most expensive umbrella I've ever purchased... in orders of magnitude. 

I ordered two of these umbrellas from Paul from sub lunar https://sub-lunar.com/  He was able to get them out to me rather quickly, and they were packed extremely well. 

Super excited to open it up, I had a dilemma because I had difficulty determining how and where I was going to do this without damaging anything. 

So what's one to do? Put it on your hitch Mount of your truck of course!

Paul recommends Scotchgard on to protect the fabric, so I took the opportunity before I got too deep into this project to order some and get the antenna sprayed down. I used one can, but realistically probably should have used a second canned because I think my spray pattern was a little light. 

The other challenge was, how am I going to rotate this thing. Yes, we need to rotate it left and right on the azimuth plane as well as elevation. The Yaesu 5500 was my first choice, but when Eric saw what Paul had in his arsenal of possibilities, Eric and myself both ordered one for each of us.

The more adventurous one, Eric ended up replacing the motors and the encoders. He's got quite a stout operation going. I'm going to continue with the ones that came with the antenna rotator for now, but may do some upgrading in the future.

Hey you might be asking, how in the world am I going to program this rotator to do what it needs to do. There certainly are a lot of electronics on this rotator, and Paul did a really great job with these circuit boards that show some LED indications on what the rotator element is doing. 

Fast forward, and we ended up ordering some Arduino boards and downloaded the k3ng rotator program.

Because we are a professional operation here, Eric wound up whipping up a daughter board to pop onto the Arduino mega. This allowed us to have quick disconnects for anything onto the rotator, and also gave us the ability to connect in a couple of other accessories like a GPS clock source. 

The rotator project is taken on a life of its own, and there will be a separate post for this because... You know... Modifications!

EME - Power, Power, and More Power

Gear acquisition mode continues...

As you can imagine, trying to get a signal to the Moon is going to take some power. I can't remember what the distance is, but it's so far, that your classic 10w 1.2 GHz transmitter is probably not going to make a mark. 

Additionally, as we start to try to listen for signals, the reflected signals coming back from the Moon are going to be rather weak, so... Again, probably going to need a amplifier for that. 

So here we are, trying to figure out how much power we need on the transmit side, and also looking at options for low noise amplifiers, or pre-amplifiers on the receive side. 

The fact that we have to have both of these in line with the transmit and receive is going to add some complication and require some switching, which I will talk about in a later post....  Particularly, if we have a low noise amplifier in line with the transmit sequence, And we don't switch it out of line, it will more than likely burn it out. 

So, where do we go for amplification at the 1.2 GHz range?  Seems like the no-brainer approach might be to get one of those really cool, well made, finely machined amplifiers (and Low noise amplifier for the receive) from Kuhne. 

One of the challenges was to determine how much power on the transmit side we would need. I think that was easily calculated by the amount of money that would need to be spent, and how complicated things may need to be with a power supply to support very high power output - so both Eric and myself went with the 250 w power amplifier - the MKU PA 23CM-250: https://shop.kuhne-electronic.com/kuhne/en/shop/power-amplifiers/MKU+PA+23CM250W+CU++Power+Amplifier/?card=971

This amplifier gave us what I think will give us enough power to reach the moon, and at least allow some of the big gun stations that are already doing Moon bounce a chance to catch our signal.  It was also considerably cheaper than the next step up which was 1.5 KW. (Although, as you can tell it really was pretty expensive)

On the receive side, we chose the MKU LNA 132-ah: https://shop.kuhne-electronic.com/kuhne/en/shop/MKU+LNA+132+AH+SMA++Low+Noise+Amplifier/?card=316

Looks like this is the super low noise pre-amplifier that will go near the antenna feed point.

Eric is going to explore a little bit about building his own amplifier at some point in time, but this gives us a quick method to entry into the EME space.

We do have 12 volt power supplies available, but with this power amplifier using LDMOS technology, it's going to require about 50 volts.  We were able to jump on amazon.com and find plenty of options (like Meanwell) that will give us 48 volts DC, which should be plenty - and if luck has it, there are probably some adjustments we can make to get that 48 volts closer to 50 if we want.

EME - The beginning of going broke

 I have always held an interest in continuing to explore the edges of ham radio, and what better Edge to explore is one of bouncing radio waves off of the moon!

I've always had an interest in this, but I know that in order to do something really effective with a Suburban lot, I really needed to get on 1.2 GHz. While there is certainly a lot of activity on 2 m, the real estate I probably would need for something like this with a multi-yagi array, would be somewhat prohibitive, especially from a spousal standpoint, so an idea of getting on 1.2 GHz with either a couple of yagi antennas, or even a dish made a lot of sense to me. But this whole idea had taken a backseat for quite a few years.

I can't remember who really started to kick off this whole journey, but my partner in crime, Eric, KC9QLO was definitely a trigger for me, and maybe I was a trigger for him, because before I knew it, we both bought Icom 905 radios, and started to build our own 1.2 GHz yagi antennas.

So here we are, in gear acquisition mode... At this point purchasing the Icom 905 to at least start with capabilities in the 1.2 GHz range. 

I will say, we do have aspirations of playing around with 10 GHz at some point in time, and maybe even some of the intermediate frequencies like 2.4 and 5 GHz.  Maybe those might be terrestrial explorations, we will eventually see.

My Youtube Channel - Dedicated to Morse Code / CW

Partly because of my Instagram page I get a lot of questions about Morse Code - learning, operating and what to buy.

I started a YouTube Channel that explores this very subject and I will upload the lowest quality non-graphic-coolness videos you have ever seen in my effort to help those that are embarking on the journey of learning Morse Code, or looking to improve where they are at already.  Don't worry, I'm not trying to monetize here (By the way, see below on what you need to do to monetize on YouTube).

Since I have virtually no subscribers, I get a really crappy URL for my channel. I'm hoping to get some subscribers in order to get a better URL.  … but here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwBmOrGQHHCvA9htO7qROEw

Have fun and let me know what you think.

TJ - K9KJ

P.S. So - if you want to make money on YouTube --> According to YouTube, to qualify for monetization, you must have: 4,000 watch hours over the last 12 months. at least 1,000 subscribers on your channel.

Yaesu FT-891 Display Issue

About a month earlier, I purchased a Yaesu FT-891 for my new mobile rig.  The current radio was an FT-100D that was getting old and long in the tooth and while I was really happy with the radio, some things started happening that made me think its time to switch it out with something newer.

Being that I have been very happy with Yaesu mobile radio products, it only made sense to try out the FT-891.  I bought one used, and played with it on my work bench - it worked great and I really liked the interface, look and feel.  So... now its time to do the mobile install.

Since I already had the FT-100D mounted, it didn't seem like it was going to take much to do the install of the FT-891.  This whole installation process will be the subject of another post, but I wanted to share something that happened to me when doing the remote head installation.

The installation went generally well, but when I went to turn on the radio one evening after re-running one of the cables, the detachable face would not light up.

Hmm....  Ok, lets just put that detachable face back on the radio and see what happens...

Nothing.

More troubleshooting - Lets take it out of the truck and get this on a solid power supply - maybe something was odd with the power.  

Still Nothing.

My heart sank.  What the heck happened!?!?

A glimmer of hope?

After getting it on the bench, what I found was that when the power button was pushed, you could hear a couple of relays clicking, then there would be a faint beeping (6 beeps in rapid succession). So, the unit was getting power, but it wasn't happy about something.  See a quick video of what it sounded like: https://photos.app.goo.gl/vVa3cbGCcAt1Wcvt9

On some suggestions I found on the internet, I reseated the cable attaching the body to the detachable face, and tried some master reset routine - still nothing.  I even attached the USB cable to do the firmware update, and was able to see that the radio was responding -- so, at least it wasn't dead.

I even messaged my master troubleshooter buddy K9XR at 11pm to see if he can help in the search!

This is what I found

I will spare you all of the details of troubleshooting (I actually just miraculously stumbled across it), and go right to the details.

Watch what kind of extension cable you use for the remote head.  This needs to be a RJ-12 cable, and it has to be a straight through cable.  I accidentally bought a reverse cable or a "roll over" cable.  If you will notice in the snippet of the schematic of the FT-891 main board, the jack for the remote head carries 13v to the remote head.  If you use a "roll over" or reverse cable, pin 4  connects to pin 3 on the remote head (ground pin) - and will then blow the fuse (F1002).  What a major mistake on my part and has me kicking myself for not just buying the YSK-891... But I really didn't need anything from the kit except for the RJ12 cable.

Here it is on the board:

Let the fun begin

So, replacing this fuse is not for the faint of heart. First - Part availability. Looking it up at Digi Key, its only available by a roll of 5000.  I found a place called Radio Parts that has them by the piece for a whopping $0.36 (So, I ordered 10!!). Website here: https://www.radioparts.com/vertex-q0000109 

With that on order, I decided to pull the old fuse.  Unfortunately its a 0603 SMD component, and its tucked nicely (I'm being sarcastic) behind the big RJ12 jack:

A bit more of a close up here:

I really wouldn't recommend doing this with a soldering iron, and would cautiously use your master skills with your Hot Air SMD rework station.  This thing is small, and very fine tweezers are a must:

Replaced the fuse, and now I am a happy camper!