What can I say, I like to trawl through parts catalogues and find somewhat obscure parts or ultra cheep parts to play with. So, when i found the MC3361, which is an FM Cordless phone IC, I thought why not. It costs 25 cents in one offs, and has some conversion gain and I assume its a gilbert cell in there, so its way cheaper than an SA612 and others.

LO in is on pin one, you can also add an xtal here for the LO. RF in is on pin 16 and the IF out is on pin 3. Now i did not try and match the impedance’s which are around 1800 ohms, i just fed in 50 ohms from my function generator into the LO and RF ports and then attached the spectrum analyzer to the IF port.

Other than some DC blocking caps and a 50 ohm termination resistor on the input there is not much to add to this. And as you can see from the plot below from the spectrum analyzer its working doubley balanced. RF in is suppressed and the sum and difference are the dominate signals. RF in was 7Mhz and the LO was 1Mhz for the sum and difference of 6 and 8mhz IF frequencies.

Is it as good as other mixers? I don’t know, but it works and its cheap, so i think its worth a go. Oh and it also has an FM de-modulator, AF amp and a op-amp for filtering in there also. I am yet to play with the other bits, i just setup the board for mixing only and well, mixing works.