LT Spice For Radio Amateurs: PART 7

So what do you do when you need to make a complex transformer like a 10 turn trifilar winding with a center tap that you might find at the input and output of a diode ring mixer, like the double balanced mixer below? Well you use a Spice Directive. If you have not forgotten everything you have learned so far, you might recall that all the way back in part one of this literary travesty that the last button in our list was the Spice Directive button and like all good men everywhere, our purpose is to push buttons, and with the pushing of this button your entire existence is now complete.

So in the circuit above we have a double balanced mixer, from left to right you have the local oscillator, a 10 turn trifilar winding, the diode ring, another 10 turn trifilar winding and finally the RF input. The IF output is at R1. As well are all experts in the field, we know that a diode mixer likes to have 50 ohm terminations all all its ports. So the LO, RF and IF are all 50R.

So we have a 2MHz input signal, being mixed with a 7MHz local oscillator to give the sum and difference frequencies, 7 + 2 = 9, 7 -2 = 5 so when we run this, we should be able to see 5 and 9MHz peaks which we can then filter out the one we don’t want and keep the other as the IF.

But before we do that, a Spice Directive for transformers always follow the same rules, they are numbered k1, k2, k3 etc followed by the group of inductors you want to make up the transformer, L1 L2 L3 and the final number 1 sets the coupling to perfect, you can of course set this to a number less than one and have imperfect coupling between the windings if you wish to simulate a lower Q than perfection.

So we run a transient analysis on our mixer circuit and we get a bonkers output that looks like this. Now like all good and proper mad scientists you might conclude that something is wrong, that this circuit is a failure and should should be confined to the annals of electronics history where the smoke has escaped and the shmoo released. But you would be wrong of course, because the thinkers out there will have realized that diode mixers are NON LINEAR and that the output will be the Sum and the Difference of the inputs plus all the fart noises, aka Harmonics.

So if we pull up the FFT window we can see then that we have 2 main peaks, one at 5MHz=LO-RF and 9MHz=LO+RF. And you can also see the double balanced action where the LO and RF are attenuated in the output quite substantially, and then in the rest of the spectrum you see those + and – pairs with their harmonics attenuated. It is actually a rather cool way to come to understand what a Double Balanced Mixer does and kind of how its doing it, visually.

So anyway, you now know how to make complex transformers, how to set the turns ratios and all that jazz and do quite a lot now in LT Spice. Perhaps its time to find a circuit that you have used before in a project, lay it out in LT Spice and simulate it and see if it does what it says it does, to see if you can improve it and make it better, or perhaps even find a better solution altogether. And do not forget to have fun.