<> Making PCBs at home is a rediculous waste of time. I have a vacuum lightb No it's not. Right now I'm doing a design that requires two sided and design rules down to 10mils. There are three flat packs <64 pins and and daughter cards for more. The worst part was drilling the 2000 holes and a 3axis NC machine (home grown is not that hard). Most shops cost a fortune to drill and etch a 10x8 card with a quantity of 2. Wire wrap for this design is out of the question. <I've found that the typical 'cheap' hobbyist's setup (disk of FeCl(3), <modelmaker's drill, rub-down transfers or a pen as the resist) is a total <waste of time and energy. But the above stuff, which is easily possible <to consider for serious home use (remember the sort of tools and test <gear that I tend to own...) is certainly useable. I've done boards that way too. Even hand drawn simple RF layouts on the board with a SHARPIE pen (solvent based marker pens) for one ups. <After a bit of practice, we could easily make striplines for ECL and/or <RF stuff, SMD boards (no problem at all with SOICs, PQFPs, PLCCs, etc), <and of course conventional pin-through hole. The ECL stuff clocked at <200-300 MHz as well. The real trick is fine line stuff. <[As an aside, we found some PCB companies were remarkable _bad_ about <things like getting track widths right (!), which really messed up some of <the striplines. We even had boards come back with the layers in the wrong <order. We _very_ quickly learnt to (a) check everything and (b) do the <prototype ourselves if at all possible, to ensure the basic design was <sound...] There are plenty of things that can really mess up an otherwise good design and bad etchs are hell to trace in when bring up for the first time. Allison