MAc wrote:.
I have only 1 piece of
IC, it's surface mount, and I'm afraid, that if I use it in my test
board I will have nothing to use in my receiver.

Andy writes:

God how I hate surface mount.... It used to be that I could send
away for a freebee, or buy a chip from Digikey, and get normal,
civilized, 1/10 lead spacing pins that I could use in a socket, or
use the pins as tie point for "dead bug".....
I could build a circuit up as fast as I could go and the connecting
of the parts together was an insignificant part of the process...

NOW, for the last several years, all freebees I have received have
been surface mount. I have to work under a magnifying glass, with
a special thingy for my soldering iron, and use small pieces of copper
wire strand that I get out of lamp cord to expand the chip to the point
where I can actually attach resistors and capacitors.... it takes more
time
to expand the surface mount than to build the rest of the circuit... As
a
result, I lose enthusiasm a lot......

I have a few things that I have done with surface mount, but I long
for the good old days...... Fortunately, I have about 30 years of
accumulated freebees that I haven't gotten around to using, and can
usually come up with a way to build something.... However, the miracle
chips (as I call them) that Analog Dev, and others, are coming out with
are just too damn much trouble for me.......


If anyone here has some SIMPLE solutions for the surface mount thing,
that does NOT include making a custom PC board, I'd like to learn
about them.....

Andy in Eureka, Texas