Sunday, 21 October 2012

A Bit of a Power Struggle

Well,

You may remember that I started a Power/SWR meter project back here:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/i-wonder-how-much-power-is-there.html

as I said then, I had ordered the circuit boards for the project from Far Circuits, and they have duly arrived.

Unfortunately, I am a few bits short of a full kit within my vast collection of components, and have had to order a couple of SMT components (52.3R resistors!) and a 2.5V reference plus a couple of other small parts.

I should be able to complete the project when those bits arrive; I'm also struggling to figure out if the display used is a HD4470 compatible device, or something else completely. I cant actually find a way to figure that out.

The boards look like this so far:

The two smaller boards underneath the meter are the A to D converters, these take the voltage out of the directional coupler I made in the last post and convert it to a digital data stream; the devices used are Analogue Devices 8307 and they are logarithmic. The main board is at the bottom of the photo on the left hand side and the PSU is at the bottom right.

The meter you can see is really neat; this was an eBay purchase, although it's bigger than I anticipated (it's actually exactly the size the seller said it was but I didn't bother reading it). So I may need to rummage for something suitable to enclose this project when its complete as I haven't got anything here bog enough to house the meter neatly - I do have a smaller meter of the correct value so I may end up using that.

Cats been helping again:


I'll post more when the missing pieces of the jigsaw arrive.

Good though, egh?

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