They say a picture is worth 1000 words. Well A video must be worth 1000 pictures then. I have to admit, i really do not enjoy making videos for youtube. I do it reluctantly and only when I really have something worth showing off. I really do not care about building an audience and being famous, I just like to do what I want, when I want and not feel compelled to make anyone else happy other than myself. I am not entertainment, I am just a guy who is documenting his journey, nothing more. Even this blog, its not a how to, its not a guide, its often not even correct, does not work or is fundamentally flawed. That is what happens when you home brew. You make mistakes, things do not work and you have to trouble shoot and trouble shooting means learning something. A good day for me, is a day I learn something.
Well, this is the PCB. I have named this receiver OpAmpia. Because its just a bunch of op-amps. There are 3 high speed op-amps on this board, acting as RF Amp and IF Amps and then on the other board another 5 op-amps doing audio agc and preamp and audio filtering. So all up, we have 8 op-amps, hence the name.
This is a revision of what I actually built. I have redesigned the bandpass filter and will be using TOKO styled canned inductors. The higher Q of the inductors should see much less loss than the SMD inductors I used on the test board.
Same goes with the IF strip, the IF filter is now not plugin, but will use all SMD components, I have a bazillion SMD crystals and so its time to start using them. Actually in everything I am moving away from through hole components where I can. SMD is just so easy to use you can always find a useful part that is cheap. Take the Gainsil op-amps I used, they cost like 30 cents each. Try and find a highspeed op-amp in though hole for that price.
For alignment I used the function generator set to 7mhz and with both VFO’s showing no offsets tuned things until they sounded great. Having 2 VFO’s really helps here. Now i can just do some simple math and remove the offest and display the actual RX frequency. A little bit of coding and we will be in business.
That’s all from me. Another month and I might have this as a complete and working transceiver. LOL Who are we kidding 😉
