Friday 7 February 2014

Day of mistakes, but some successes

First it was the 3rd overtone crystal oscillator that I was trying to make work without giving it any power!, then, wondering why no one was hearing me on 10m WSPR, I realised I was still switched to voice operation, not data!

So both those are now working how they should, and the 500mW WSPR is being received on the US east coast.

Success however, with the proof of concept oscillator/mixer - The 2955B has decided to play again, and feeding the mixer RF port with a signal at 28.060MHz, a kHz or so from the oscillator frequency, I can see audio on the oscilloscope! So it works on receive as well. I'll need to filter it and feed it to an audio amp before I can measure the sensitivity. I suspect an RF preamp will be needed ahead of it for receive.

Also successful was the removal by heat gun of the relays and transformers from the modem cards. The 32kHz crystals also came off ok, but none of the buzzers survived! After some hard work and leverage the USB-B socket is also off the old BT router board, the rest is in the bin!

I will order the fundamental mode crystals and some more MeSquares from club sales later.

The plug for Sams tablet charger has arrived (although Toms extra memory hasnt yet) so time to do a repair job.

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