Great designs may not always work
out, but they can usually be fixed!
Here's how I fixed the mistakes
I made!
After some thought, here's how I solved my problems.
First I moved the board all the way to the rear. That helped kill the birdies and woodpeckers.
Next, I made a brand spanking new copper shield. I used KS copper sheet. It was 6"x12"x .016" thick. Really nice stuff to work with. The stock number was 01218. They have a website at http://ksmetals.com I found it in a local hardware store. I had a huge pair of tin snips and it was really easy to work. This took care of the rest of the aviary.
.
It took a little thought about how to mount the shield without drilling any new holes in what was the front panel. Then I had a flash of inspiration. What really made this easy to do was I had a hand punch from Harbor Freight and the holes for the pots were 9/32". The punch set just happened to have the proper size and the .016" metal punches great. A Weller 325 watt soldering gun made quick work of soldering on the copper sheeting.
Then I added some ribbon cable and molex connectors. The only solder connection to the board is the FCC-1 connection to the top of R29. The board can be removed by unscrewing the 4 corner nuts, unsoldering the FCC-1 connection, and unplugging everything else.
I moved a few external connectors around and drilled a few more holes.
The finished front. Volume to the left and fine tune on the right.
The only 2 extra holes. Now to figure something to put over them. Speaker jack in the rear, coarse tune on the big knob and range switch in the middle. It ended up tuning from 14.160 to about 14.215 and then after switching, about 14.220 to 14.370. I have a 5 khz hole but with more playing, I should be able to get rid of it.
Everything here is pretty self-explanatory.
What would I do different? I'd definitely use a larger case. In fact, I'm about through shooting video's and the bitx board movie star is heading for a case of it's own. It's already selected and will soon appear on a web site near here. In fact, this one.