Sienna Construction

Some views of a Sienna as it is assembled	These pictures were taken by our builder-for-hire, Alan Wilcox, and DZKit staff
	Here, seven of the eleven pieces of the chassis have been assembled. Note the small PC board attached to the back panel. This is an RS-232 interface board that connects to the internal controller. If you buy the internal PC, it mounts in this compartment instead, which adds Ethernet, USB, VGA, PS/2 and COM ports to the rig. When the PC is added, a special internal power supply kit is also provided, which mounts on the chassis bottom next to the speaker at the top of this picture. Also note the internal fan in the center compartment. This fan draws air in from the front panel/controller compartment, providing cooling air for the direct digital synthesis chips and vacuum fluorescent display. It exhausts through the center transmitter compartment, providing cooling for the 10W finals. Airflow in the Sienna has been engineered, not added as an afterthought. Also note the large openings on the bottom. The one in the PC compartment provides access to the PC's memory. The others, in the receiver compartment, provide bottom access to the snap-in IF filters. Finally, note the stereo 1.5W speakers, which provide plenty of volume. Photo courtesy of Alan Wilcox. [ assembly time: 2.5 hrs ]
	This board contains DC power conditioning and distribution, antenna tuner, A/B switch and SWR/power meter. Sienna has reverse polarity, overvoltage, undervoltage and overcurrent protection. Resettable fuses protect the main rig and PC. A back panel accessible fuse protects the 100W amplifier. 8-Amp Panasonic relays are used in the tuner and for antenna switching. Two relays are used for antenna switching, one for A and one for B, providing better isolation than some rigs. The SWR/power meter has two ranges, one for 0-10W and one for 0-100W operation. The tuner option has not been installed on this board. When purchased, the diagonal wire is removed and the additional parts are added to the board. Photo courtesy of Alan Wilcox. [ assembly time: 5.2 hrs ]
	This small board provides DC power for the optional embedded PC. As mentioned above, it installs on the chassis bottom next to the left speaker if the PC option is purchased. Power transistors and regulators attach to the bottom of the chassis, providing excellent heatsinking. [ assembly time: 0.5 hrs ]
	This is the front panel board. The unusual shape is needed to accommodate the vacuum fluorescent display, controller board, rotary pulse generators and meters that all attach inside the front panel compartment. Photo courtesy of Alan Wilcox. [ assembly time: 1.5 hrs ]
	Here's the front panel assembly. The front panel board that was built earlier has been attached to the steel front panel plate along with the vacuum fluorescent display, then the meters are attached with a Lucite spacer/light diffuser, then the pre-assembled controller board (bottom picture) is snapped on. Photos courtesy of Alan Wilcox [ assembly time: 2.5 hrs ]
	The receiver compartment has three stacked boards. This one is mounted on the bottom, and is the IF filter board. The filters, Inrad and/or Collins filters, snap in from the bottom. Four 50-ohm RF cables attach this board to the receiver. Filter isolation, passband flatness and skirts are excellent and very close to the ideal as shown in Inrad measurements of the filters at the Inrad web site. Inrad and Collins filters mount on Yaesu FT-1000 style "C" boards. Photo courtesy of Alan Wilcox [ assembly time: 4 hrs ]
	This is the receive bandpass filter, preamp and attenuator board, which is the middle board in the three-board receiver stack. Eleven pre-assembled snap-in bandpass filters are provided. These filters are switched in and out via the pre-loaded GaAsFET switches (in this photo, the small pre-loaded ICs located just above and below the filters). These filters can be bypassed via a menu selection to help extract the last dB of weak signal on a fading band. We call it PassiveSignalBoost^TM (PSB^TM). Note the switch on the left side. This is a calibration aid. During calibration, you feed the transmitter's BFO signal to the main antenna input on this board, and on on-board attenuator reduces the amplitude to 50uV to allow you to cal the S-meter. Two 10dB RF preamps and two 10dB RF attenuators are also present on this board. Photo courtesy of Alan Wilcox. [ assembly time: 4.4 hrs ]
	The top board in the receiver stack is the receiver itself: a triple conversion SSB/CW/AM receiver with an integrated mixer/FM receiver chip providing a separate path for FM receive and wideband 455kHz IF output. An Inrad 70.455MHz 4.5kHz roofing filter ($125 value) is included on this board standard. A high performance noise blanker with 3 pulse widths and variable threshold is also present. Finally, stereo audio, with a multi-input audio mixer rounds out this board. All surface-mount parts are pre-loaded, so don't let the density of this board scare you! There are about 100 non-SMT parts that you add. [ assembly time: 3.9 hrs ]
	The transmitter board is a single conversion SSB/CW/AM/FM transmitter with 10W finals. Also present here is a 4-level audio speech processor and a variable compression RF speech processor. A 7-element Chebyshev variable bandwidth SSB filter and a fixed 6kHz AM crystal filter are used in the IF. The transmitter's partially pre-assembled bandpass filters and heatsink for the finals are attached to the back of this board. This board operates completely independently of the receiver, allowing full duplex operation, very useful for satellite work. All small surface-mount parts are pre-loaded, so don't let the density of this board scare you! [ assembly time: 12 hrs ]
	Here, the DCD/Tuner board has been installed in the chassis. At this point, the Sienna is ready to be turned on and the internal power supply voltage regulators checked. Note the gas discharge tubes attached directly to the antenna connectors. These are one of many protective devices to keep your Sienna working fine in less than ideal circumstances. Photo courtesy of Alan Wilcox [ assembly/test time: 0.9 hr ]
	The next step is to attach cables to the front panel assembly, attach the front panel assembly to the chassis and turn it on. At this point, you can experiment with the controls, look at the menus and even communicate with an external PC via RS-232. Since the controller is preassembled and tested, and since the front panel board board is very simple, and since you have tested the power supplies, there's very little chance that anything will go wrong here. This step-by-step process helps you build confidence that you're doing it right! Photo courtesy of Alan Wilcox [ assembly time: 4.2 hr ]
	Now it's time to start putting some RF boards in the Sienna. The IF filter board mounts on the bottom of the stack, with IF filters snapped in from the bottom, as explained above. Photo courtesy of Alan Wilcox [ assembly time: 0.5 hr ]
	Once the IF filter board is mounted, the bandpass filter/preamp board stacks on top. Photo courtesy of Alan Wilcox [ assembly time: 0.5 hr ]
	The final step of receiver integration is to stack the receiver board on the other two and connect cables. You're now ready to turn on and calibrate the receiver using the transmitter's BFO as a calibrated frequency source. The S-meter is used as a relative signal strength meter during cal. Simple screwdriver adjustments are made according to a simple procedure, using just an external voltmeter. Since the speakers are now active, you can also experiment with the keyer. Note the use of high-quality MIL-SPEC M17/113-RG316 50-ohm cable to interconnect the RF and IF sections of the boards. These cables are pre-assembled and labeled for easy integration. Photo courtesy of Alan Wilcox [ assembly time: 2.2 hr ]
	Finally, the transmitter board is inserted into the center compartment and the cables connected. There are only two steps to transmitter calibration -- carrier null and RF power calibration, both very straightforward. Then just place the cover on the unit, attach the knobs and you're ready to operate! Photo courtesy of Alan Wilcox [ assembly time: 1.4 hr ] Total build time: 46.2 hours. We expect this go down to about 40 hours as we integrate Alan's suggestions into the manual. While Sienna is not intended for beginners, experienced kit-builders will enjoy the complexity of this kit. The venerable Heathkit SB-100/101/102 and HW-100/101 series of rigs also took about 40 hours to build, and there was a lot of tedious mechanical assembly, dial cord stringing, cable construction and point to point wiring that is not present in the Sienna.