The BA-11N expansion chassis arrived today. Managed to scrape my left thigh getting it out of the box, no permanent harm done. As promised, it looks brand newish. Figured out how to get the cover off, then powered it up with no cards and all looked ok. The +12V supply was more like +10V, but with no load it's hard to know what to really expect.

Drilled out the rivets holding the s-box front panel hardware to the KDJ11 board, and put it into the top slot. Extracted the little front panel board from the s-box hardware, snarfed an MMJ serial cable from the vax, and the board came up! Hitting ctrl/c on the console after the LED display started alternating between E and F gave me a console monitor interface. 9600N81

So... once we have an ethernet card, it might be possible to bootload something using mopd into RAM? To what end?

The backplane in this chassis should be set for 18-bit addresses. Will need to tear the chassis apart to get the backplane out and add jumpers to connect the other 4 address bits since the CPU should be emitting 22-bit addresses.