DDS this and DDS that

Well,

Its long overdue but finally I have a week off; I'm even going to be home alone for some of the time so there is a real opportunity to play in the shack.

I spent the whole of yesterday trying to install a PIC programming environment onto my Linux PC; no success. When I found myself editing other peoples c code to try and make it compatible with the latest versos of make and automake I decided enough was enough. Disappointing but that's just the way it goes.

The reason for more PIC programming was because I bought myself a DDS development board from some bloke in China. I've been making a PIC based interface; I wanted to be able to use the PC to control the DDS settings via a simple interface; what I have ended up with is a PIC (16F628) running some software communicating with the PC hyperterm via RS232. This alows me to enter the various configurable DDS parameters and then the PIC software blasts the control words down to the DDS. Just a shame I've got it working in windows!

This is the veroboard constructed PIC & RS232 interface with the DDS board soldered to the side:

And this is the output; current the DDS is scanning from 1MHZ up to 60MHZ in a kind of test so the frequency here is quite low, it's very clean though:

So, this is now the start of a very stable VFO project for the transceiver I am slowly but surely building.

Good egh?

Here's the obligatory cat picture: