The Sinclair QL Forum

A franken-QL! Is it wired to a lightning conductor in the back garden?

It's Fronkensteen!

Oh, the irony! Oh the cruel fate! The very thing that was meant to better the QL brought it to it's knees! The PicoPSU, being a dirty switcher that it is, oozes such unpleasant frequencies that the microdrives loose their reason. I tried it both ways - moving the picopsu away or moving the MDV (thanks to my new, longer cables) out. It immediately regains composition as soon as they're 3 cm apart...

WHY?!?

The inductors on the switching regulator produce a rather large stray field which is probably being induced directly into the head and electronics. Even on the original QL the left microdrive has a metal shield between it and the motherboard stuff and in that setup there is FAR less electromagnetic interference generated there.

Yes, it seems I’ve hit a wall here :/ I was thinking about vDriveQL, but that’s external only as I gather...

I think there was an internal version of vDrive. There is also QL-SD

But none of those are to be found anywhere ATM?

Tetroid storage expansion?

Well I just soldered together tetroids qbide

But it gives me black screen for now - I reall need to find an IDE device. Not so easy anymore

af0l wrote:Well I just soldered together tetroids qbide

But it gives me black screen for now - I reall need to find an IDE device. Not so easy anymore

If you get a black screen - are you sure none of the expansion pins in the QL bus are bent?