In 2004, a friend of mine and fellow Ham (Gary - KB3GUZ) suggested that I develop a product that would allow Hams to locate repeaters as they traveled. I had always been frustrated with the lack of a easy to use solution and his suggestion really struck a chord with me.
Now, I’m a software developer by profession, specializing mainly in embedded systems. What I wasn’t was a hardware developer... I do have a background in electronics and I’ve designed a lot of small little one-off doodads, but I certainly had never developed something as ambitious as this would be. I’m willing to try just about anything once, so I cobbled together something using a Zilog Ez80 evaluation board. It had the memory and I/O that I needed, so it seemed that it would fit the bill. I was able to get something working on this platform fairly quickly. I lashed up a 4x20 LCD, a few buttons and a rotary encoder and had at least a demonstrable prototype. My intention was to set forth the basic idea I had for the hardware and then enlist the help of one of my real Electrical Engineer colleagues.
Three different hardware Engineers agreed to help me design the hardware and lay out a PCB. For various reasons, all three ended up having to back out. I got busy on various other projects and left this one on the shelf for a while. In late Spring 2006, after a lot of queries from Hams wondering when the project would be finished, I decided to attempt to design the electronics and lay out a printed circuit board myself. What the heck.
The first thing that I decided once I committed to doing the rest of the project was to simplify my design as much as possible, so that I would have any chance of completing the thing. I selected an Atmel ATMega128 CPU and removed the notion of parallel FLASH for database storage. I reduced the CPU crystal frequency to try and limit board layout issues (this worked out really well, since the Atmel part executes more quickly per-clock than the Zilog part anyhow!).
By late Fall, I had a board laid out and the firmware well on the way to a first-pass release. The first kits should be available in late February 2007. Keep watching the site for updates.