Review of Ramsey TT7 DTMF Touch Tone Decoder Kit

Customer Ratings:

This is all it is advertised as plus more. Nicely done, gets you a working DTMF decoder quickly. Try it!

Click Here For Most Helpful Customer Reviews >>

The auto racing club I am a member of, and am the communication and timing hardware geek for, needed a replacement for a DTMF decoder used by our timing system to remotely detect, via our safety communication system, the Start of a vehicle. There arent many turnkey solutions, in fact searching the web I came up with just this one. There are a few chips that will do some or all of the job but I did not want to have to design and manufacture a one off PCB after building a proto board, and then testing and revising it until it worked. This kit seems to fit our needs very nicely. The PCB is of excellent quality, parts are suitable to the design and the price is very good. I built it in a short time and initial bench tests with the rest of the system suggest it will do the job quite nicely.

I didnt follow the assembly instructions though I did briefly look them over. They seem to be detailed enough that someone with minimal electronic experience could manage it. The PCB is not laid out as though it is for a first time kit builder and very good soldering skills are needed. The pads are closely spaced and adequately sized for thru-hole part assembly, and the heavy PTH etch is well adhered to the substrate, but I can see where a first time builder could have a few problems.

The only criticism I have is that the online manual I found at the Ramsey site lacks a schematic diagram which would have enabled me to more easily determine if the design would work for us. I ended up using the manual's included parts list, assembly instructions and PCB layout to determine the exact circuit design and if it was adequate, and what else I would need for our installation. If I hadnt been willing to "reverse engineer" to that level before hand I would have had to either buy it to see the schematic or look elsewhere for a solution. This is important to some of us because so many electronic kits are not well designed. They seem to be aimed at (or designed by) hobbyists or young experimenters and the work to make them robust enough is sometimes more involved than designing from scratch. That doesnt seem to be the case here although I am going to add an additional level of electrical protection for power and IO to the module before it is deployed by us at the races. If the schematic was removed to protect the design, I proved that is a false protection. Copyrighting is a better protection.