Well I had an interesting couple of days. I approached, well bungled appropriately, three projects I have on the go.
The first, an upgraded frequency counter to replace the old one I made about a year ago, ended up blowing my Arduino based PIC programmer to bits because I wired up the programming voltage wrong.
The spectrum analyser project, I decided to try and check the calibration of the power meter and managed to blow up a rather expensive AD8307 log amplifier by overloading it due to knocking the load resistor off the input.
Now I decided that things weren't going particularly well and to walk away for a bit. This got me thinking about trying to get 13dBm out of an amp for a double balanced mixer in a receiver I've been working on for about 2 years. Brilliant, nice and easy I think. So I sat down, did the calculations, put it together and instantly forgot that I'd got the bench supply running in parallel so the 12v that went into it was actually 42v. This caused the transistor to explode instantly. After removing the charred remains of the transistor and replacing it, it did work as intended at least.
I have put all the equipment away and will have a couple of days off
Each failure is a lesson
