Low Level Amplifiers - how low can you go?

Well there's not been a great deal of progress within the shack recently, chief technical assistant is of little or no use most of the time, and he does insist on sitting on the most sensitive bits of RF engineering. That plus the fact that my job has been getting rather badly in the way of play time means I've made little or no progress recently.

 

I've been trying to make the Low Level Amplifier as part of my ongoing attempt to replicate the SSB transceiver being built in the Homebrew articles in RadCom. This is the schematic of the LLA, published in Feb 2011:

My build of the circuit is here:

Now, if anyone is actually paying any attention to this blog of mine, or anyone happens to come across this post, I'd be grateful for any comments on my construction pictured above. All I am finding with this LLA is that it oscillates at the slightest whim. I've started to blame my RF signal generator (yes that's homebrew also), and various other aspects including the capacitance in my x10 scope probes. But I've just decided to find an alternative. Now the author of the fantastic homebrew column also has a website, Ed - EI9GQ has an alternative circuit on his site here:

http://homepage.eircom.net/~ei9gq/transmit.html

So I've built that one also:

I'm planning to apply power to this tomorrow so will keep my blog updated with progress.

I keep trying!