View attachment 127108
Assembly Tips
All of the components were chosen with an eye towards relatively easy assembly. The board can be assembled with just a fine tip soldering iron, some tweezers, a magnifing glass and a little patience in about 30 minutes.
Solder the voltage regulator and supervisor on the board first followed by the passive components (resistors, capacitors and LEDs). At this point, use a multimeter to check for shorts on the battery connections and between pins 1 and 10 on the XBee socket.
If you don't have any shorts, then power up the board and measure the voltage at pins 1 and 10 on the XBee socket. Even if you had a short, the voltage regulator's output is protected against shorts and won't destroy it. However the battery input is not protected against shorts.
You should read 3.2 V and the green power LED should be on. At this point it is safe to finish the assembly with the XBee and GPS modules. If you ever plan on removing the XBee module, then only solder pins 1 - 3, 10 and 15. If you solder all 20 pins, you will have an extremely difficult time removing the module, even with the right tools.
Version 1.1 of the transmitter adds a 6-pin header that allows a FTDI USB to serial cable to be used to configure the XBee radio. In normal operation, there are two solder jumpers that need to be closed so that the serial data lines between the GPS and the radio are connected. In order to use the USB serial cable, you will need to remove the solder from the jumpers and insert the header. The black ground wire (pin 1) on the USB serial cable is identified by the "BLK" silk screen on the board. The USB serial cable will not power the board - you will need to connect the battery to power the board. You must make sure that you only use the 3.3 V version of the USB serial cable otherwise you may damage the XBee radio.
I covered the transmitter with some clear 1" heat shrink tubing to protect the tracker. It is probably a good idea to wrap it with something to prevent accidental shorts.
Update 1 (6-5-13): Added version 1.1 info