23cm Tap, Tap, Tap

Well,

The other day on my travels I cam across a TS-2000X. Now, you may recall my declaration of No More! on a recent post. That didn't last long - did it?

Here's the radio:

As it's the X model it includes the 23cm board, the idea now is to add a tap into the IF at 23cm so we can have a panadaptor running on the 23cm band.

So, we take it to bits.....

The 23cm module is underneath this metal plate:

and looks like this....

Now, the buffer amplifier for the IF comes from HUPRF, and looks like this and is stuck to the screening can of the 23cm PA using a sticky pad:

In the image above you can see the input connection in place. The distructions for the board recommend only connecting the screen at the board end; I found a cable from a GPS receiver that fitted the connector so have done it that way.

Here's how I have routed the output coax for the IF tap to outside the radio:

and here seen from the top:

And here you can see where the power is being sourced from - this is about 7.2V on RX (no power on TX). I got in a real pickle with my big fat soldering iron here and you can see flux all over the shop - it's quite a mess:

There's an SDRPlay connected to the output of the tap board.

I've got a PCB log periodic antenna hanging off the front of my recent 30MHz to 4.4GHz signal generator:

So I can now set this to output it's 20dBM at various parts of the 23cm band and see the results on the panadaptor (SDR Radio).  Here we have a nice quiet band with a carrier from my Signal Generator at 1296 exactly:

 
Florrie the Ham Cat has been assisting throughout:

Local conditions.