My new Syil X5 CNC mill is ready to ship from the factory. Might be here by New Year if I'm lucky. This is it, just completed QA testing
@g4dbn :O
Finally decided to join the 21st century and move away from 100% manual machining?
I'm excited to see what hardware you manage to make with it. Hope we still see some manual turning and such here and there though :)
@azonenberg The main driver was so I could machine elliptical and offset-parabolic reflectors, plus things like laterally-displaced ellipse Gregorian antenna systems at mmWave frequencies, and slot arrays with hundreds of elements. The stress of doing manual machining for even a 2 x 24 slot array at 10 GHz is way too high, so 100+ precision slot arrays are best done on machines. Same with making batch runs of waveguide parts
@jmorris @azonenberg Definitely, I'll mostly be building up a stock of popular parts for sale rather than doing a lot of custom work, but it's only a matter of scale. I can do gold/silver plating, anodizing, laser marking, electroforming and casting, so most things are possible other than precision dishes more than about 230 mm diameter. Once I get the lathe modified for one-axis CNC, I should be able to make large cast aluminium dishes up to 18 inch diameter, but 12 inches is easier
@jmorris @azonenberg of course what I REALLY need is a wire EDM machine and a die sinker
@g4dbn @jmorris Oooh, shiny (literally).
I've never done any waveguide or over-the-air stuff myself (I generally am working with baseband communications stuff, trying to keep my microwave signals ON the board) but have always wanted to fool around with it.
With my instrumentation I can at least somewhat operate from DC to Ku band so any "starter stuff" you might be able to make in the WR90/WR75 so I can play around with 3cm / X-band amateur stuff would be cool. SMA to waveguide transitions, horn antennas, etc.
@jmorris @azonenberg I'm going to try to get to Seattle next year when I'm giving a lecture at a Microwaves conference in Vancouver. I want to visit the Connections Museum in Seattle and meet some microwave folks in the area
@azonenberg @jmorris Sounds cool, I'll see if I can get something organised. I checked the date and it's later than I thought, Oct 3-5, somewhere near Tsawwassen.