QRP Labs QCX Transciever

Well,

I've been having lots of fun building the QRP Labs QXC QRP transceiver, I've had my first proper bash at a video detailing the construction:

Its a fantastic bit of kit!

The Ultimate 3

Well,

Quite some time ago, I built myself an Ultimate 3 QRSS/WSPR beacon kit from QRP Labs.

Now this is a fab and groovy kit from the infamous Mr Hans Summers.

The completed kit is currently sat atop of my FT-817 and is configured to send WSPR beacon and a QRSS beacon both on the 30M band.

The output of the unit looks like this:

and is 13.12V peak to peak.

That's a power output of 420.2 mW or 26.3 dBm.

So, I've left this running for 24 hours connected to a simple 30M dipole in the garden, and here's the WSPR map of the resultant reception of my signal:

Never fails to amaze.

And here is my very beautiful Bonnie Dog:

Local conditions.

Frequency Reference Completion

Well,

The project from last time is even in a box now:

Good egh?

You will see that we adhere to strict rules whereby the dogs are not allowed on the furnature:

Local conditions.

More Frequency Reference

So,

Following my musings last time over the QRP Labs GPS module, I've now also built two further kits from QRP Labs. The S5351A Module and the VFO.

When you combine all these together in the way I have you can create a GPS disciplined frequency reference with two outputs.

One of the outputs can be fixed in the firmware and I plan to put mine on 10MHz, I've made a low pass filter for this output to clean out the harmonics. The other output can be user set to any frequency up to about 290MHz or so.

Here's the LPF for the 10MHz output:

And here's the 10MHz output before the LPF:

and after:

All good, egh?

Frequency Reference

Well,

Been thinking for a while that my shack frequency reference is a bit old hat and could be a bit more useful. What I would really like is a GPS disciplined VFO so I can set the frequency for my needs rather than only having 10MHz, 5MHz and 1MHz outputs as I do from the old project here:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/frequency-reference-how-accurate.html

So I have started to look at the possibility of using a newer device like the Si351A from Silicon Labs.

The first part of the project will be a new GPS receiver to give us the 1pps signal we need for the frequency control. I found a really neat kit at QRP Labs

I've built the kit today and it looks like this:

Mine has been built to utilise an external active GPS antenna.

The output from the 1pps looks like this on the 'scope:

So all seems well with the first phase.

More to follow!

Here's our Pepper Cat who has been almost completely in the way most of today:

Local conditions. Good egh?