My laptop died last weekend, screw had come loose in the cooling assembly and did dirty deeds while it rolled around the motherboard. Gutted as I had just got the system the way I wanted it and was enjoying the new lease of life it had under linux. Not a cheap machine either and now no budget to replace with one of the same quality.
So here we are again with new lappy Mark III. This time it's a DELL....OMGZ! INSPIRON 1545 2.2ghz Dual Pentium, 3 GB RAM, 350GB drive. It came with Windows7 (yuck) which I ditched within the hour for Ubuntu 9.10. I swapped out the dell WIFI card (which doesn't work under linux out of box) for the better one from the Lenevo.
Laptop seems quite nice so far but with two gripes... the max resolution is 1366x768 which is a kick in nutz when used to at 1600x1200 on other laptop. My other gripe is fixable, there is no built in bluetooth. I can sort that quite easily.
So long live new lappy mk3, or is it the 4th? in reality it's about the 8th but they not all new. My laptops have a hard live being on 24/7 pretty much year in year out - keyboards and power connectors and harddrives wear out and get replaced more than once during the life span.

Components arrived in mail today so I was able to finish off the External VFO project which will replace the limited VXO in the Brendon radio. Lucky hit I guess as all it need was a wee weak of the trimmer cap to bring the tuning range from 3.50 to 3.81Mhz! Smack in the 80mtr band allocation.
Nice tuning too using the geared 3:1 drive of the tuning capacitor. The circuit design used a 0-350Pf tuning cap with a 18mH inductor wound on a T50-2 torrid. My capacitor is a 0-600pF and my coil omits the torrid by being wound on former made from a 35mm film canister, it resulted in an inductance of 22mH. Rest of the components where to Steve Hartley's G0FUW's circuit in the document "An alternative Intermediate VFO aka a VFO for the Brendon TRx"

Steve's instructions to convert the Brendon to an external VFO:

• Remove L102, that isolates DC from existing VXO.
• Remove wire link D from near IC100, that isolates existing VXO from IC100.
• Solder a short piece of bare wire (e.g. scrap resistor lead) in the hole left by wire link D, nearest to IC 100
• Connect inner of mini coax from VFO output to to new 'pin' and braid to ground plane
• Job done.