ID this please

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thewoodstarr
no manz can test innit
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Re: ID this please

Post by thewoodstarr » Sun Aug 13, 2017 5:34 am

regulaterz wrote: Thu Aug 03, 2017 11:50 pm oh dear i brought it thats the one i never got it off ebay ether lol payd more then that for it too :whistle :lol: i suppose if i want a hollyday i could run it direct in a caravan in my field .lesson learnt it was from a 3rd party of an ad on another site .actually have dealt with dude before few years back for I.T stuff .so not blaming him got to make a living some way .anything salveigable on it :geek: ...and woody stuff cant be that bad surely .
My stuff is fine. I have been doing it 25 Years. You bought from ebay. Your rig will be exactly as described in the Spec`s listed. Look at my feedback. Haters mate.

thewoodstarr
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Re: ID this please

Post by thewoodstarr » Sun Aug 13, 2017 11:30 am

Albert H wrote: Wed Aug 02, 2017 3:31 am It's probably good (actually "bad") for about 800mW. Frequency is set by writing code into the 8-pin PIC there. On power-up, the PIC squirts data into the PLL IC to load the frequency information into the registers in the PLL chip. Changing frequency requires that PIC to be re-programmed or replaced.

The construction of the thing is pretty messy. I don't see the need for the two LPF filter coils at the output - they're not going to do much of use, since they can "see" each other, so harmonic attenuation will be insignificant. There's also no screening between stages - this isn't always necessary, but if you're going to make your exciter on the smallest piece of copperclad you can get away with, there really should be some effort to prevent inter-stage coupling and instability.

It appears to be a messy copy of an old exciter design, with poor layout, dreadful soldering and no means of readily setting frequency. The constructor also appears to have received a glue-gun for Christmas!
You talk bollocks mate.

It's a bodge job!

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FM King
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Re: ID this please

Post by FM King » Sun Aug 13, 2017 11:42 am

Jesus Woody mate, not only do you need to learn how to build your first decent rig but you might want to try learning how to use a basic internet forum too.

Albert H
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Re: ID this please

Post by Albert H » Sun Aug 13, 2017 4:55 pm

If that's an example of "Woody's" work, you'd better steer clear. It's crap like that which gives good pirate engineers a bad reputation. It's sad that most rigs these days are bad copies of old designs.

I saw one of my simple pirate-use exciters (vintage 1992) in a box just the other day - BF961 dual-gate FET oscillator, BFR96 driver, 2SC1971 final. TSA5511 PLL IC, steered by a 16C84 PIC. 4 Watts out and completely cool, clean and stable, with no adjustments except the VCO coil core (with an aluminium slug), the solder blobs to the PIC pins that selected the frequency, and the output match coil that was slightly stretched for the upper end of the band, The whole thing fitted on a 4½" X 1½" board, including screening and output filter. We shipped hundreds of these boards, but the London pirates were too cheap to use them - they bought the "Dawson" board in their dozens.

I'll try to borrow the rig that the board's in and take a few photos. It might give today's solder-jockeys some kind of clue about how to do it properly.

The current exciter still uses the same dual-gate FET oscillator, still samples its frequency inductively, but now feeds a second dual-gate FET for gain-levelling by means of sampling the board output and using the rectified RF to control the gain of the stage after the oscillator. The final device these days is the RD06HVF1, and the board delivers 5 Watts at 12.5 Volts supply. There are no adjustments at all except for the VCO slug (as before) so that we don't ask for too much swing from the varicap diodes. The board is now smaller - through the use of surface-mounted components - and the whole thing is screened in its own little diecast box. We put resin in the box to eliminate any microphony these days. I'll put the whole circuit up here at some point - it might give some clue to the current crop of copiers!
"Why is my rig humming?"
"Because it doesn't know the words!"
;)

regulaterz
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Re: ID this please

Post by regulaterz » Sun Aug 13, 2017 6:52 pm

i got it from some one else who got it off e bay for me .it work OK for a weekend but solder melted all over board think its where i stored it some where not to cool lol .i would put one together my self if i had a good enough schematic and parts where easy to obtain i have some understanding of electronics and rf use to tweek cb radios and repair them .i know ther not the same and im def not an expert .a few decades ago i got a nrg kit pll 4w put it all together and used it for ages no problems i no its not as simple as that but just want a few reliable rigs to keep me occupied

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Analyser
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Re: ID this please

Post by Analyser » Mon Aug 14, 2017 9:57 am

Albert H wrote: Sun Aug 13, 2017 4:55 pm
I saw one of my simple pirate-use exciters (vintage 1992) in a box just the other day - BF961 dual-gate FET oscillator, BFR96 driver, 2SC1971 final. TSA5511 PLL IC, steered by a 16C84 PIC.
A design using the TSA5511 in 1992 would have been well ahead of its time- it only came out in late 1992. :clap

Personally, although the TSA5511/12 are quite useful little chips they're not my favourite; I found that noise from the I2c lines found its way in to the charge pump and (depending on the gain on the VCO) could be heard on the mod. If you need to poll the device for lock data or even used one of the IO pins as a spare output this meant quite a lot of activity on the bus and more noise. There are ways around it but they're not pretty.
IMO the best way to use these chips is to either send the frequency out once and then shut down the bus, or if you want to implement a "lock" check, then do it just once at the beginning and then shut down the bus, like RDVV and others do.
Albert H wrote: Sun Aug 13, 2017 4:55 pmWe shipped hundreds of these boards, but the London pirates were too cheap to use them - they bought the "Dawson" board in their dozens.
Where did they all go then, Europe and the USA?

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thewisepranker
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Re: ID this please

Post by thewisepranker » Mon Aug 14, 2017 10:43 am

Analyser wrote: Mon Aug 14, 2017 9:57 am
Albert H wrote: Sun Aug 13, 2017 4:55 pm
I saw one of my simple pirate-use exciters (vintage 1992) in a box just the other day - BF961 dual-gate FET oscillator, BFR96 driver, 2SC1971 final. TSA5511 PLL IC, steered by a 16C84 PIC.
A design using the TSA5511 in 1992 would have been well ahead of its time- it only came out in late 1992. :clap
From what I can find online, the 16C84 wasn't available until 1993. Most datasheets available are © 1996.

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Analyser
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Re: ID this please

Post by Analyser » Mon Aug 14, 2017 1:48 pm

thewisepranker wrote: Mon Aug 14, 2017 10:43 am
Analyser wrote: Mon Aug 14, 2017 9:57 am
Albert H wrote: Sun Aug 13, 2017 4:55 pm
I saw one of my simple pirate-use exciters (vintage 1992) in a box just the other day - BF961 dual-gate FET oscillator, BFR96 driver, 2SC1971 final. TSA5511 PLL IC, steered by a 16C84 PIC.
A design using the TSA5511 in 1992 would have been well ahead of its time- it only came out in late 1992. :clap
From what I can find online, the 16C84 wasn't available until 1993. Most datasheets available are © 1996.
The date codes from Albert's forthcoming photo will tell us otherwise, I'm sure.

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thewisepranker
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Re: ID this please

Post by thewisepranker » Mon Aug 14, 2017 1:54 pm

Image

:whistle :whistle :whistle :whistle :whistle

Albert H
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Re: ID this please

Post by Albert H » Mon Aug 14, 2017 8:03 pm

Analyser wrote: Mon Aug 14, 2017 9:57 am
A design using the TSA5511 in 1992 would have been well ahead of its time- it only came out in late 1992. :clap
Albert H wrote: Sun Aug 13, 2017 4:55 pmWe shipped hundreds of these boards, but the London pirates were too cheap to use them - they bought the "Dawson" board in their dozens.
Where did they all go then, Europe and the USA?
The TSA5511 was in TV tuner heads made by Philips from the very late 80s. Philips had their own microprocessor with baked-in firmware (effectively an ASIC) and they were very precious about the code (I'd done something similar for Panasonic KME a few years earlier, and understood why!). I got my first samples of the chip some time in 1990. I also had some of the I²C-tuned tuner heads to play with for UHF link receivers. The 35MHz IF was a complete pain, but a second mixer (using a crystal) got the second IF to 10.7MHz, so that we could use ordinary ceramic filters and standard FM IF strips.

I had no real problem with bus noise getting into the tuning voltage with the 5511 - there was an error in the original datasheet that made the filter time constants 10 times too small - if you corrected that, you're improving things. Then, if you do the RDVV trick of writing once then closing the I²C bus, there's no real noise issue at all. The 5511 has a nicely sensitive input, which I could use to sniff RF from the VCO coil without direct connection, and we used to get them for pennies each.

Looking back at the record, the first batch of 40 populated boards went to Wavemach in Canada, and the next few went to Leslie D Brewer in Florida. It was the first PLL board I ever saw with just two ICs - the Wavemach products had an 8-pin prescaler and one of the big Motorola PLLs with a really nifty active loop filter that used a couple of dual op-amp chips. They had the quietest carrier of anything at the time until Stephen delivered the PLL Pro II in 1997. Later Wavemach products made the mistake of trying to compete with the Ramsey junk - a silly thing to do - and they then compromised their product quality. They did shift a lot of our boards, though!

The rest of the boards ended up in rigs everywhere. A whole load went - with PA boards - to a dealer in Brazil. I found two fully populated boards when I was clearing out my old workshop a couple of months ago. I tested that they worked OK and then I gave them away to some enthusiastic youngsters in Belgium (just over the border from my new place!

PS: The first PICs I used were 16C54. I still have a tube of them here. A German guy gave me one programmed to drive the 145170. It worked OK, but the PLL IC was about £12 a time, and we were getting 5511s for pennies
"Why is my rig humming?"
"Because it doesn't know the words!"
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