So these arrived in the mail yesterday and so I was super stoked to build one up and try installing it onto my test bed stock 7800 I use in the lab. If you saw my earlier blog post, you might have already figured it out, but yes... I designed some mount PCBs for slight ease on installing UAVs into 7800s. These mount boards have the chroma fix already on them in addition to the extra resistors and cap for audio mixing to external RCA jacks etc. However, this is a dual mono audio solution and not stereo... just something to keep in mind.

Not sure I will make these available to the public yet as the time to hand assemble and test them isn't something I can do large scale. But for my client installs going forward, this is likely how my UAV installs will pretty much look like.

This first board I put together is using single pin sockets so I could easily pop the UAV on/off the board as needed for testing etc. Actual installs will have the UAV soldered permanently onto the mount board and as a result the UAV will sit lower onto the mount board than you see here. 

The mount board is designed with board headers so that you solder it down near the resistor legs that the video signals are tapped from. 

I also have vias for power and ground that line up with the GND and +5 from the RF modulator pins. In this example install, I use a 90 right angle pin header that solders to the top of the pin headers from the RF modulator board and then can be soldered through the vias. But this isn't required as you could just solder wires to these vias instead if you wanted. Additionally, once the UAV is attached, you could also just run +5 and GND to the UAV pads and it would feed everything as well.

I also have included 2 more board headers that allow me to solder to the R5 and R6 resistors to get the audio signals we need for the POKEY and TIA. These are then mixed on the mount board and an audio out pad provided to simplify the audio portion of installs.

Here is the example setup I did last night. Again I used single pin sockets on this so I could remove the UAV easily but actual installs would have the UAV soldered onto header pins directly. As a result, the actual combo won't sit this tall on actual installs as the UAV will only at half the height you see here.

Here are two more boards I soldered up ready to go.

These are using the through hole pin headers. To align these, I actually set them into place and then set a UAV on top. So actual assembly is basically to solder on the SMD components first, then set the header pins for the UAV into place, place the UAV onto the pins to align everything up, flip the board over and solder the header pins for the UAV on the bottom of the PCB. Then I solder in the larger and thicker header pins for the mount boards resistor leg mounting. I then line it up and solder the mount board into place. I'm then able to do some initial testing without the UAV by power on the console to make sure I have power and ground connections where needed. I can also verify that some of the video signals (Especially chroma) are coming through using my o'scope. Everything else just needs continuity tested to be sure I have connections. I can then place the UAV onto the pins and power on again without soldering it to initially test that the UAV is working. Granted it is just sitting on the header pins at this point, but they make a good enough connection for these initial tests. Once confirmed everything is a go, I can then solder the UAV permanently into place and run my output wires where needed. Because of the orientation of the UAV (It was really the only way to keep it all self contained in this one spot), it does require running your AV out wires ahead of time or header pins etc.. as you won't be able to solder it into place very easily once the UAV is in place given how close the video outputs will be to the RF modulator's interconnect board.