Tayloe SWR indicator

I felt the urge to do some soldering, so I went looking for a simple project. I thought that having an SWR indicator would be nice to have, as I have all the requisite components on hand (including some high power/high precision resistors).  What this little contraption does is basically give a visual indicator (no-lit or minimally lit LED) when the SWR is as closely matched to 1:1 as possible. The idea is hopefully pair this with a magnetic loop antenna and that way I won't have to bother with an antenna tuner. For more information on the Tayloe SWR indicator, please check out qrpkits.com [1].

Here is my uber-high quality work:

It rang out correctly, with open circuits on the transceiver side and antenna side with the circuit removed, and 75 ohms and 50 ohms when the SWR circuit is inline.

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[1] - http://www.qrpkits.com/swrind_case.html

Blank GoodFET board

I just received Travis Goodspeed's GoodFET board [1] in the mail this week. I have ordered the requisite parts to populate it, have practiced some drag soldering for the SMT parts, and hopefully later on this week I can assemble it. Let's see how bad I butcher it...

Update: 
Pretty bad, as it turns out. I was sloppy with my solder braid and accidentally lifted several pads on the FTDI chip. However, I did place the MSP430 chip nicely in place. So a quasi-expensive lesson, but one that I definitely learned from. I feel pretty confident that I can handle TSSOP scaled SMT work now, even if it may not be pretty.

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[1] - http://goodfet.sourceforge.net/