I have been slowly clearing things off my bench either to the its complete pile or the it does not work look at it another day pile. And not that that is done, it is time to start on a major project that will take sometime to complete. I really wish I had the time to knock out rig a week like Pete Juliano, but alas I am neither that skilled or that time free LOL. Anyway, so what am i going to build, well a receiver to start with that might eventually morph into a transceiver.
Starting initially as a direct conversion and later becoming a single conversion superhet, It will loosely follow the simple-ceiver, simple-ceiver plus builds by Pete, which can be read about on his blog HERE: and a few bits off the bitx hacks page which can be found HERE:
Mixers will be Mini Circuits ADE-1, oscillators will be SI5351a with an Arduino powering it, audio will have AGC and some kind of audio filtering for both CW and SSB, I am currently not sure if i will go passive or use a Teensyduino and DSP audio filtering, I have the bits for both so either or can be done quite easily, but filtering will not be part of the initial audio amp build, all the rf amps will be Pete’s J310 as dual gate mosfet amps, bandpass filters will probably be my own 3 band switched module.
So that is the rough details of what I am planning to do, now its a matter of starting to build it. With that in mind, I will be starting tonight on the audio amp stage, using the AGC from bitx hacks for the bitx 40, a 2n3904 preamp by Pete Juliano and a TDA2822m in bridge mode. I will be building each stage on its own scrap of board for testing in isolation using manhattan construction and Me Squares.
