It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. I understand that things have been fairly quiet over here in the last few months, so I wanted to let you all know that I’m not dead yet. I’ve actually been working on Etherkit a fair amount in the background, and that has been eating up most of my free work time. I know that things have looked stagnant, but please understand that I have been putting in time to revamp the business and bring some exciting new things to Etherkit. I have a few different, parallel projects going on right now. Soon I will commit to one of them and move forward on that, depending on how things pan out. I suspect I’ll have more to say on the matter in less than a month on where Etherkit will be going in the future.

In related news, I’ve had a few people ask about what’s going on with the CC1. I apologize for the CC1 being a huge bit of vaporware. To be frank, it has been the most frustrating project I’ve ever worked on, but I believe in it strongly enough to attempt to finish it. At this point, as much as I have had fun with the BF998, I believe that in order to make the CC1 the radio that I want it to be, I will have to abandon using the BF998 as mixers and switch to a balanced mixer design, most likely the ADE-1. I’m also looking into adding a small OLED display to the radio, which will also necessitate a large redesign to the mechanical layout of the radio (I’ll probably end up doing the typical TFR design, such as the KX1, KX3, etc.). I’m also impressed enough with the Si5351A that I’m going to try using that as the new VFO and BFO. A brand new CC1 prototype is just getting started on the bench now, so it should be interesting to see how it works out. I’ll post some progress photos and videos to my Twitter feed and the blog, as appropriate.

Thanks for hanging in there with me. It has been a real challenge to try to run a business while also being a full-time caregiver to my two boys. I would say that I haven’t been very successful in doing both, so naturally, the business took the backseat. But now that my boys are getting older (Noah is 4 and Eli is 2.5, can you believe it?), I’m able to spend a bit more time during the day handing business. Things will be moving forward.