Holophase Inc

After about a four year hiatus from electronics consulting I have become involved with some projects involving Time and Frequency.

I am working with a group that is developing GPSDO and other related projects to control Rubidium oscillators. I received schematics in DipTrace and downloaded the trial version to see what would be involved in modifying the schematic to agree with the prototype board done with Express PCB. I quickly became frustrated.

As most of you know, after you get relatively high on the learning curve, most of the time is in developing libraries. To make a long story much shorter I didn't like the many alternatives that I tried. Some limited the pin count, some are notorious for sloppy libraries, some force you to buy boards from their sources, etc.

When I last used Circad I had a licensed copy running on XP and Omniglyth was in beta release and it didn't work reliably on Vista. Yesterday I downloaded the Omniglyth 6 version demo. I found the look and feel were nearly identical to Circad, the muscle memory kicked in and in a very short time I had re-created most of the schematic I need to update (the original objective). This morning I ran in to the limit of the demo version and called Fred and found that I could update / upgrade my licence for a very reasonable amount of money, and was thrilled to pay to extend my investment in great CAD tools (CIRCAD).

One of the things that won me over was that the extensively modified libraries that I had created seemed to work without any problems. I ran into a problem with the 74393 part which is a dual but I could only access the first part. I brought up the library in the editor and in literately a few seconds was able to fix the problem, save the modified library and get on about doing what need to get done. This instead of struggling with a workaround or creating a new part from scratch.

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73

Cash Olsen
KD5SSJ
ARRL Technical Specialist